Six Books of Fiction (or Semi-Fiction!) with Wild and Wonderful Structures

Can a book turn to a vibrating orb in your hand, a shifting shaft of light, an endless echo? I would have said no, but then I read this inimitable diptych by Geoff Dyer. Part 1, which follows journalist Jeff through the bacchanal of the Venice Biennale, is bound by near-invisible filaments to part 2, which maybe-jettisons Jeff for an unnamed first-person narrator on a life-changing—or is it life-ending!?—visit to Varanasi. It’s amazing how Dyer manages not just to ask deep questions (should we live lives of spirituality or passionate corporeality? self-abnegation or ambition?), but to build a structure that enacts their insolubility.

Fellow form nerds, rejoice! You can tell this book about a troubled couple in 1920s Harlem is going to move like no other from its breathtaking opening, in which Morrison ticks off the major events—infidelity, murder, assault, flight—in one swift paragraph. “The plot is just the melody,” she’s explained, “then you begin to play off of it, and to hear it afresh from somebody else’s point of view.” The ensuing concert of narrative solos forces the reader to rethink their priors re: the value of authorial control, which events and perspectives demand dramatic attention, and American literature’s dependence on conflict.

The label “story collection” doesn’t quite capture this book’s complex coherence. Better to call it a “collage,” maybe, in the hopes of invoking not just its visual logic, but also the way Scodellaro reframes found material, building brief bright word-spaces around family recipes or art by the likes of Deana Lawson and Lorna Simpson. The book’s 36-part structure is of a piece with its sliced details: cognizant hands, grains of sand, earring backs. Scodellaro’s attention to each minute component of image, sound, story, and book makes fracture visceral but not central, and exalts what a more derivative or timorous vision might discard.

Hilary’s writing is always full of fiery rigor, but this is the Plum-tome I return to for formal surprise. After juxtaposing the Boston Marathon bombers and a woman waiting for her partner to emerge from cancer surgery, Watchfires goes on to probe the shared language of our physical and political afflictions, and to sneak a wild plot into its own shifting diction. Careful attention to the open pronouns and fluctuating referents might have prepared a keener reader, but I admit I gasped 161 pages in, when (structural spoiler alert!) the 3rd-person subject ceded to a fictional “I,” and memoir-argument turned to scenic pseudo-noir.

When I learned that each of this stunner’s sections would culminate in a different death of the same protagonist, I thought it sounded a little gimmicky—but I was wrong. Jenny Erpenbeck does not mess around! As she turns her unsparing eye from Hapsburg Galicia to Vienna in the wake of WWI to a Soviet gulag to Berlin before the fall of the wall to a near-contemporary assisted living facility, her ordered form works in devastating, relentless counterpoint to the chaotic brutality of the century she depicts. And, as objects recur and language and structure repeat, the blunt ineluctability of historical contingency becomes ever more palpable.

Framed by a Supreme Court trial, and featuring a narrator who reintroduces slavery and segregation to his disappearing city, this NBCC and Booker winner can’t be said to shy away from action! So why is the narrator always diverting from the drama in favor of sneaky poems, riotous riffs, and compressed essays on topics ranging from surfing to societal inertia? What might read as slack construction in a conventional novel reveals itself as a brilliant tactic here: written at the height of Obama-era optimism, The Sellout "whispers racism in a post-racial world" by arresting its own easy progress with these formal feints and prose pirouettes.