Finding Patterns
Writers’ Gimmicks & Readers’ Expectations
Re-reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s Words & Other Violence, his New York Review of Books review of Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces by Jenny Erpenbeck from April 2021, I realized Erpenbeck’s lauded 2012 novel, The End of Days, is a touchstone for her readers. Its brilliance is in the structure. The protagonist dies at the end of each chapter only to take up one thread of all her possible/potential lives in the next. This innovation bedazzled readers and critics. Just like it did again when Kate Atkinson performed a similar trick a year later in her 2013 novel Life After Life. Or when Natasha Lyonne died and returned, repeating the same day and moving incrementally through the timeline before dying again, in the 2019 Netflix series Russian Doll.
In contrast, Erpenbeck’s follow-up, the more traditionally structured Go, Went, Gone, focused on the migrant crisis in Germany and is treated as a dimming of her prior brilliance. Mendelsohn gives Go, Went, Gone only three terse paragraphs in his long form review. And, yet, by any matrix, it is a very good book. Though perhaps not Erpenbeck’s best, it is a novel most writers would be proud of. It is the first (and only) book by Erpenbeck I’ve read, and, to butcher the old adage, – A good writer’s worst book isn’t a bad book comparatively.
But we are a species that loves patterns, both visual and philosophical, micro and macro. When a writer does a thing we like, some twist that tricks and surprises us, they have a reader for life. But at some level, we expect the writer to continue performing the same trick, just like we expect a musician to always play our favorite songs in concert. Some writers manage to adapt, like a jazz musician performing variations on old standards. Stephen King comes to mind. So does Cormac McCarthy. Ishiguro Kazuo, who I affectionately think of as the M. Night Shyamalan of contemporary literature, revisits the same theme (albeit in ebbs and flows of brilliance) in every book – the past and our relationship to it. Even Shakespeare’s plays, though they cover a wide range of subject matter, are bound together by consistency of language and form, which makes them easily identifiable as his.
Most artists become defined by and celebrated for the consistency of their oeuvre. It is true for film directors. Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, Greta Gerwig – we walk into the theater anticipating an experience and are disappointed if it isn’t delivered. This burden of expectations crosses mediums. It applies to artists, filmmakers and playwrights, musicians, and, apparently writers. And, for better or worse, it is the raison de’etre of critics.
There are always exceptions, of course. The French writer Georges Simenon, for example, is an outlier. Which, considering the volume of his output – in the range of five hundred novels, plus short stories & a multi-volume memoir – is hardly shocking. Not to say that I don’t have expectations picking up a Simenon book, but what they are is difficult to articulate—nothing so specific as say, the formula of an Inspector Montalbano installment or a Golden Age locked room mystery. Simenon is more of a mood.
Which is why I enjoy reading Georges Simenon’s stories over the holidays . It’s become something of a tradition. Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook from A Maigret Christmas and Other Stories, translated pleasantly by David Coward, is a Christmas standout. Inspector Maigret doesn’t appear in this particular short story (the second of three in the collection). Still, it is set in the same universe, and people Maigret knows (Janvier and Dr. Paul) show up. The main character is too junior to consort much with “the Chief” himself. Andre Lecoeur operates the police switchboard and has been doing so for fifteen years. Allowing Simenon to bring in a very nice set piece:
“A huge street map of Paris had been painted on the wall facing him and the small bulbs which lit up on it each represented a police station. As soon as a station received an alert for any reason, its light flashed on. Lecoeur pushed in the corresponding jack”.
An unassuming and unambitious man who prefers the night shift and frequently fills in for his colleagues, Lecoeur sits in the center of a vast communication network . “He knew most of the uniformed men in Paris by name, or at any rate, the ones on the night shift.” He knows about their wives and families because “they chatted over the airwaves” when crime was slow. He knows most of the police stations and hospitals, too. Yet he’s never visited them, nor has he met those men he talks to face-to-face. And few of them can imagine Lecoeur outside of work. It is doubtful they would recognize him on the street.
Lecoeur has a very particular habit of marking crosses in a little notebook, tracking the various types of crimes that occur during his shifts. This isn’t required by his superiors but is something he does to pass the time. “Those crosses in narrow columns represented years of the life of Paris by night.”
I’m reluctant to say more and risk spoiling the mystery, which begins with someone breaking the emergency glass of Police Boxes on the streets of Paris. Simenon plays it perfectly – giving readers a brilliantly constructed Christmas story about an unassuming man & his “moment of glory” – laying down plot points like cards on a table until we realize he’s been sitting on a royal flush the entire game. And he does it all without his hero ever leaving the interior of the precinct station. In the end, it all comes down to patterns.
Books I Mention:
The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions, 2014. 249 pages.
Go Went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions, 2015. 339 pages.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. New York: Reagan Arthur Books/Little Brown and Company, 2013. 529 pages.
A Maigret Christmas & Other Stories by Georges Simenon, translated by David Coward. New York: Penguin Books, 2018. 224 pages.