Thursday, July 05, 2012

Kurt Andersen on why he wrote "True Believers" in the first person


How a Pronoun Shaped a Novel - In writing a novel, choosing a point of view may be the single most consequential choice

image For a novelist beginning a book, choosing a point of view may be the single most consequential choice. My first two novels were third-person, stories told by a disembodied narrator who doesn't interact with the characters and refers to them using the personal pronouns she, he and they, never I.

Oliver Munday

Third-person narrators have implicit personalities, focusing more on some characters, making judgments of what they think and say and do.
The distinctions between third- and first-person narration aren't absolute, of course. Third-person narrators have implicit personalities, focusing more on some characters, making judgments of what they think and say and do—or channeling certain characters, as when Jane Austen describes Emma scheming to seduce Mr. Knightley: "She thought it was time to make up. Making-up indeed would not do. She certainly had not been in the wrong, and he would never own that he had." Most third-person narrators are less like omniscient gods than exceedingly snoopy, well-informed ghosts.

Given the germ of my new novel, "True Believers"—how the childhood espionage games of a group of friends in the early '60s become the real thing in the late '60s—I could have gone either way, third person or first. But I wanted the characters to walk away from their conspiracy scot-free and keep the secret for decades. In order to convey the unnerving impact of living such a lie, I decided that one of the co-conspirators had to tell the tale. In the first chapter, I have her get straight to it: "So, anyhow, here's my point: I am a reliable narrator. Unusually reliable. Trust me."
Writing in the first person was thrilling at first. No scene started as a blank slate—my heroine was always there. I was not obliged to do any complicated bobbing and weaving between the narrator's perceptions and those of other characters. And writing from a single character's point of view sped up the Frankenstein-like authorial process of making her seem alive.
But it's not really easier than third-person narration, just hard in different ways. A first-person narrator's likability is a huge issue, and my narrator admits at the very beginning that she "once set out to commit a spectacular murder, and people died." Stream-of-consciousness also makes self-indulgent tangents more tempting. Kazuo Ishiguro's butler telling the story of "The Remains of the Day" served as an extreme but exemplary model, a first-person narrator we come to know deeply even though he never rants or jabbers or shows off.

Writing in the first person shaped my novel in all kinds of unanticipated ways. In the 1960s scenes, I wanted to convey with immediacy the feelings of an 18-year-old—but not to violate my premise that those moments are being recalled decades later. Which led me to tell the story in chapters that alternate between eras, keeping the rueful retrospection separate by alternating chapters from the 1960s and 2010s. 

I'm not a big fan of novels that make a point of archly highlighting their own fictional tricks—metafiction. But three-quarters of the way through "True Believers" I arrived at an inevitable metafictional moment despite myself. My protagonist vows to control her overactive literary imagination: "I am not a character in fiction, I told myself. This is not a story by Poe or Sartre or Flaubert or Ian Fleming or anybody else. This is real life."
I became somewhat extravagantly invested in my own fictional conceit that my narrator was writing nonfiction. For instance, she's a lawyer but also an experienced author—in order to make it credible that she could write such a complicated time-shifting memoir. She refers to her lawyer's and editor's comments on the memoir-in-progress and anticipates the critical reaction.
I'm happy to report that I've snapped out of my zealotry for literalism. As I prepare to write the next novel, I'm agnostic and undecided whether my narrator will use the word I.

—Mr. Andersen's "True Believers" will be published on July 10, Random House US. His previous novels are "Heyday" and "Turn of the Century."
A version of this article appeared June 30, 2012, on page C12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: How a Pronoun Shaped a Novel.

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