Reading Retrospective

Navid Tajkhorshid

Over the past year, I have written a few book reviews, so I think for my last post this year I will look back on past readings and reviews and see what I have learned about what it takes to make an effective story.

Taking a look back on Extra Credit and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the common theme seems to be about character. Neither of these books had, to be honest, very good plots: one was a half-baked mystery / friend reunion and the other was mediocre romance with pretty on-the-nose world building. The thing that made my stomach not churn when recommending these stories was because of the characters. Alison Bergeson in Extra Credit had a quippy and witty personality, and it showed, not just in her interactions with other characters, although those were great, but in her narration. As soon as I got to page 10, I felt like she was a real person, mainly attributable to her snarky remarks in her narration that, storywise, served absolutely no purpose.

In MPHPC, (if we ignore the prologue for now), Jacob Portman is a keeps-to-himself, sometimes insensitive, but kind at his heart character who is very easy to sympathize with as a protagonist. He is not perfect, he has a personality, and he is relatable. Now, I glossed over the prologue of MPHPC at the beginning of this paragraph, but I think that also provides an interesting lesson. In the prologue, he is a sad, angry kid who curses on every page. When I was reading this, I thought, “well, he now has all the room in the world for development.” But as soon as the prologue ends he turns into the person I described above, which was jarring. For these characters to feel real, they must be consistent. Have you ever seen your friend come back after one mundane weekend and then becoming a completely different person? I don’t think so.

The next two books I reviewed, The House We Grew Up In and Listen to the Lambs, shed light on a different aspect of storytelling: emotion. While I believe having compelling characters will get a book 60% of the way to connecting to the reader (even more if the reader happens to be similar to the main character), having powerful emotion is a way to actually make the reader feel something. In THWGUP, the author splits the story into many threads, each of which follows one character, and while the threads sometimes cross, they are mostly on their own until the end of the story. The only way for the author to make the story flow was to have some cohesion with each of the characters. In this case, they had emotional cohesion and a theme of dealing with their past, and this made the story feel less jagged. Whenever one of the characters had a moment, whether positive or negative, it was much more powerful in the context of all the other struggles the others were going through. You can feel every one of the beats (except for Cory’s, but that’s a different discussion), and it elevates the book from a grab bag of threads to a resonant and consistent story.

Listen to the Lambs takes a different approach to conveying emotion to the reader. Instead of drawing parallels between its characters, it focuses on the bonds in between them and how each character looks at it. When two people look at their relationship in different ways, this creates a conflict to be resolved. <SPOILER> When Lazarus realizes that he and his son had different ideas of what a father should be, and because of this both of their lives have been ruined, it got to me, and actually made me put down the book for a few seconds. </SPOILER> I could feel Lazarus’s regret in the text. The only reason this works is because Lazarus is a nicely fleshed out character. If he was not, we would not be able to empathize with him. 

Wait? A fully fleshed out character? Empathy? Didn’t we just discuss this at the beginning of this analysis? Well, it might be obvious now that these qualities of a story build on each other. You cannot have emotional resonance without empathy, which you cannot have without strong characters. But there is one more level that I encountered in this tower of storytelling. Let’s talk about Fences.

The final element to this (IMO) is ambiguity. In Fences, Troy Maxon is hard working and loving, but has very deep flaws. He is, I would say, as complicated as Papa in Purple Hibiscus. I liked him and he was treated unfairly, but he made many large mistakes. He acts like life keeps score, and that for his work he should be able to do something maybe less than moral, and this really hurts his life. The thing to keep in mind here is that in order to have an ambiguous character, you have to work for it. Wilson put in the work to get me to like the character, and then put in the work for me to empathize with him, and then put in the work to get me to feel his frustration with the system, and only then could he reveal Troy’s flaw and have me not hate him.

Overall, I have been very impressed by the books I have read over the past year, and I hope this analysis of this selection got you to think differently about how these aspects of storytelling can influence your reading experience. ‘Till next year, cheers.