New York, NY: Catapult, 2019. 272 pages. $16.95.
If you have ever taken a creative writing class or studied the craft of fiction, you’ve most likely been taught that stories should be structured as follows: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. Some practitioners will add complications to this familiar narrative arc, including points that represent the “inciting incident” or obstacles and even introducing alternate terminology (such as denouement instead of resolution). This structure has become so ubiquitous in fiction that there are now dozens of visual representations of it easily discoverable on Google. However, as novelist, memoirist, translator, and professor Jane Alison argues in her new book on the craft of writing, Meander, Spiral, Explode (Catapult), this isn’t the only structure available to writers of fiction, nor is it strictly necessary for the oft-wavelike “arc” of this structure to “swell” and “tauten” to climax, then collapse, spent. As Alison puts it: “Bit masculo-sexual, no?” Alison attempts to eschew this climax-heavy fiction by looking around her (in the lobes of leaves, in the eyes of hurricanes or the line of a boulevard bisecting a plaza) for alternative narrative structures. “So many other patterns run through nature,” Alison writes. “Why not draw on them, too?”
She first encountered one such pattern in the works of W. G. Sebald, who wrote about the contrivances of plot: “The business of having to have bits of dialogue to move the plot along, that’s fine for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel, but that becomes in our day a bit trying, where you always see the wheels of the novel grinding and going on.”
Sebald wrote instead in “a sort of bricolage,” where bricolage is defined by Merriam-Webster as something created or achieved by using whatever comes to hand. That could be, in Sebald’s case, “things that are found around the farmyard,” old photographs and bits of recollection that slowly made their way into his meandering brand of fiction. That is one of the patterns Alison identifies: meanders. There are eight patterns in all: 1. waves, 2. wavelets, 3. meanders, 4. spirals, 5. radials or explosions, 6. networks and cells, 7. fractals, 8. tsunami—the latter of which she appends with a question mark next to it in order to emphasize that it is a theoretical pattern, meaning in this case that she has but one example (Cloud Atlas). Each pattern is analyzed in its own chapter, and each chapter (with the exception of the one on tsunami) includes close-readings of anywhere between two to five primary works—the analyses of which are supported by numerous secondary works, including (but not limited to) craft books, short essays, and works of literary theory. Alison uses these works to demonstrate how and why authors are already using the eight story patterns listed. For some readers, the existence of these patterns will come as a revelation, so Alison’s book will serve as their first introduction to them. For others, the patterns will be familiar, perhaps even as the preferred pattern of a favorite writer (in my case, W. G. Sebald). Regardless of how familiar the reader is with these patterns going in, they will leave the essays with a deeper knowledge of the craft of fiction, as well as a heightened understanding of the natural rhythms and patterns of language itself.
Oftentimes, reading Meander, Spiral, Explode feels like sitting in on the most demanding graduate seminar on narrative structure ever taught. One imagines Jane Alison sitting at the head of the table, likening the structure of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold to an eye (where “the pupil = murder, and iris = all those who saw it coming and let it”), sometimes walking to the board to illustrate. At one point, she draws a pattern that ends like this:
__ __ – – __ – – – – •
– – • – – – – – – – – – – • • – –
And the reader knows, even without looking at the key provided, that the long underscores, short hyphens, and small dots refer to the rhythm and flow of the long story under discussion (Vikram Chandra’s “Shakti”). This is because Alison tempers her cerebral, scholarly analyses with simple and accessible observations that build on each other, allowing the student in every reader to keep up with her leaps of insight and ingenuity. Before even digging into the eight patterns previously mentioned, Alison frames the book with an introduction that traces the evolution of the narrative arc from Greek drama to contemporary literature, then provides additional context by pausing (in a section called Primary Elements) to “look at text close-up: how it feels to travel word-by-word as the narrative unfurls.” The end result is that readers reach the end of Meander, Spiral, Explode and feel as if they are better equipped to read both on the level of the line and from the overhead view of narrative patterns.
If there is one fault with this craft book, it is that it does not take into account the history of structural and formal experimentation found in works by women and writers of color. Though Alison does examine major works by Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, and Clarice Lispector, her analyses come without the added context of their sociocultural backgrounds or of the literary traditions that shape their work, and as a whole Alison’s book favors male writers. In the Works Mentioned list at the back of the book, there are thirty primary works and twenty-nine secondary works. Of the thirty primary works, only ten were written by women and only ten by people of color. Of the twenty-nine secondary works, only seven were written (or co-written) by women and only two by people of color. In a book where the author calls the narrative arc “masculo-sexual” and pushes for alternative forms of storytelling, the choice to then privilege white male voices is a strange one. Many readers will be drawn in by that phrase (“masculo-sexual”) and expect, if not a majority of works analyzed to be by female authors, then at the very least an equitable distribution. Had Alison spent more time examining works outside of the white male literary canon, her book would have felt stronger and more comprehensive. As a craft book, however, Meander, Spiral, Explode still has a great deal to offer readers looking to improve their writing.
