Cut the Multiple Personality Syndrome

G. Xavier Robillard, Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute

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When writers are getting up the nerve to start their first novel, many, and I include myself in this list, fall into the Multiple Personality Trap. They choose to frame their narrative through a variety of different voices. Maybe it's a mother and daughter, as in my first unpublished novel, telling both their own sides of a story, maybe it's an entire town acting as a chorus, interspersed with several other major characters.

 

There are many reasons to do this, and a very good one is that our favorite authors do it all the time. Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad pulls this off, as does Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. We read these books and they inspire us, and we want to write in a similar style with narratives weaving in and out through space and time. Your hunger and ambition are to be commended.

 

For this discussion I'm not thinking about the omniscient third person  voice, which has its own attractions and distractions. The type of narration I'm thinking of is the story told in the round, with the conch moving from character A to character B to character C and back again, a chapter at a time. There are wildly successful executions of this, such as Nicole Krauss' History of Love.

 

I would like to suggest that when you set out to write your first novel, consider limiting the narrative to one character's point of view and following that character/POV all the way through until the end. At the very least, when embarking on this ambitious project, the first novel, you should question your intent: to what purpose am I writing from multiple voices? Am I making an important point from the outside of the text?

 

In Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, the story is told in a round, with narration from animals, inanimate objects, and because it is a murder mystery, the dead guy. The setting was the sultan's palace in Istanbul, where several of the murder suspects worked together in the same shop, illustrating the margins of the Koran like the little Sergio Aragonés characters that inhabited the interstitial spaces in Mad Magazine. Each voice narrating Pamuk's novel had an equal impact on the story and mirrored the illustrations that commented on and added potential heresy to the religious text.

 

There are a few reasons to consider restraint. One is the notion of allegiance. If you pose two or more separate narrators telling different stories, they need to draw your readers' sympathy. Not every reader is going to be equally engaged with every character. In Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver's follow-up to The Poisonwood Bible, there were three different characters telling this story and I couldn't care less about two of them. My apathy caused me to rush through those sections to get to the narrator I liked.

 

This is not to say that Kingsolver did a bad job writing the two lesser characters, but they didn't grab me in the same way as each of the five narrators in Poisonwood did. For whatever reason, I didn't relate to these characters and the book was a lesser experience for it.

 

In a recent review in The Times, Cristina García writes that some of the narrators in Diana Abu-Jaber's Birds of Paradise "feel stilted, forced into a stale life." Writing about her preferred narrator, Garcia notes that "an interminable 61 pages separates Felice's first chapter from her second." Constraining your narration prevents us from picking favorites.

 

Aside from a desire to imitate writers we love, there are a few places where this Multiple Personality impulse comes from, particularly a lack of confidence in one's own writing. I might have a character who feels a little less compelling as I move through her narrative. She feels shaky by page one hundred so I'll add a second narrator. Or I might feel a little stuck: there's this incredible back story that my narrator has no way of knowing so I need to introduce a second character's POV to facilitate that reveal.

 

Or a math equation: If I write one character's POV in my novel I'm stuck with that for 300 pages. But if I split it up between three narrators there'll be some sort of savings: each will be as third as much work as the depth and intimacy of one narrator.

 

Sorry to say, writing math doesn't work that way. You'll still have to know as much back story about your three characters, you'll have to work equally hard to polish their dialogue, making sure it's genuine and appropriate for each character, and you'll have to work three times harder to breath life into those three narrators to give your readers a chance to love them equally.

 

One of my Attic students last year set his novel in a small town in Louisiana, and there were multiple narratives that moved around a central conflict between two brothers: one a homophobic Christian preacher; the other his estranged gay brother. Multiple narratives served the novel because they mirrored the oppressive nature of small towns: that everyone knows too much about their neighbors.

 

Limiting the narrative to one of the brothers could have worked equally well. We wouldn't ever exactly know what was going through the other brother's head, but this would add narrative tension, a guessing game for the narrator to incorrectly project what was going on in his sibling's brain. 

 

Of course you can and should tell me I'm wrong. Rules are meant to be broken! Tell don't show. ¡Viva la Revolución! Go ahead. Some new authors can execute this, they can write equally inventive narrators and bounce around time lines with the ease of a quantum particle.

 

For the rest of us, a lot can go wrong with a first novel. What's the appropriate amount of exposition? Where do you enter the story? How much research do you have to do? How do you keep track of the car that was blue on page thirty so that it doesn't turn red on page 105? Do you really know what story you're trying to tell? Limiting your narrators might just let you spend more time addressing the rest of the hard work.