Publishers Weekly
★ 01/07/2019
“How curious that a single shape has governed our stories for years,” ponders Alison (Nine Island), a novelist and University of Virginia creative writing teacher, in her boundlessly inventive look at narrative form. The shape in question is the “dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides.” Alison would have readers conceive of other dramatic shapes, which she finds by closely examining particular texts. She begins by urging the reader to “look at text close-up” and examine “the tiniest particles a reader encounters: letters, phonemes.” She then assesses how “different types or lengths of words, sentences, and speeds lets you design a narrative as variegated as a garden.” As full texts come under examination, Alison reveals recurring shapes that “coincide with fundamental patterns in nature,” rather than “the plotted arc,” including waves in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus; meandering paths, like rivers or snail trails, that allow the reader to “wander a bit, look about, pause,” in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and spirals, akin to both DNA and the Milky Way, in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. It would do a disservice to this work to pigeonhole it as “literary criticism”; the study is filled with clarity and wit, underlain with formidable erudition. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 | A Poets & Writers Best Books for Writers
"Alison’s close readings can be exhilarating. One of her more seductive ideas is the notion of possible 'correlations between kinds of stories and certain patterns,' as when reflective first-person novels adopt the spiral . . . Alison’s prose is potent and lush, her enthusiasm infectious . . . The fecundity of Alison’s writing is of a piece with her larger mission: to turn narrative theory into a supersaturated mindfuck of hedonistic extravaganza. It is a special kind of literary criticism." ―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
"A playful, insightful taxonomy of narratives that while seeming to defy categorization, in fact take their innovative structures from patterns found in nature: fractals, cells, wavelets, and more . . . A thought-provoking manual for writers, critics, and casual readers alike." —The Atlantic, One of the Best Books of the Year
"You don’t have to be a professional writer to enjoy novelist Jane Alison’s brilliant new craft guide Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, published by Catapult Press. Anyone who reads stands to appreciate her argument that the primary way most of us are taught that fiction ought to be structured―Freytag’s famous triangle―is neither the best nor the only method." ―Kathleen Rooney, Chicago Tribune
"Transformative . . . This book will introduce you to works you’ve never heard of, and also change your interpretation of better-known stories; Alison’s reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, for instance, pushes the novel’s symmetrical structure beyond gimmick and into something sublime. The questions many of these texts ask, Alison points out, are not 'what happens next?' but 'why did this happen?' and 'what grows in my mind as I read?'" ―Maddie Oatman, Mother Jones
"How lovely to discover a book on the craft of writing that is also fun to read. Australian author Jane Alison has written a great one in which she urges us to abandon―or at least improve upon―the traditional story arc that has dominated fiction since the age of Aristotle. Alison asserts that the best stories follow patterns in nature, and by defining these new styles she offers writers the freedom to explore but with enough guidance to thrive." ―Maris Kreizman, Vulture
"If you’d like permission to write something that doesn’t fit into a traditional sense of what constitutes a story, this book is very affirming." —Rachel Krantz, BuzzFeed
"Jane Alison’s book on craft calls into question the dramatic arc many writers have been taught to follow in their work . . . Alison presents a 'museum of specimens' including writing by Anne Carson, Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, and Mary Robison, to illustrate some of the possibilities for nonlinear storytelling―and she invites her readers to follow these examples to 'keep making our novels novel.'" ―Poets & Writers, One of the Best Book for Writers
“Meander, Spiral, Explode is the best craft book I’ve read in years; it questions the primacy of the arc-shaped narrative and presents a series of alternative ones, using for examples―and this is no accident―some of the best books in modern literature . . . It’ll blow your mind.” ―Emily Temple, Literary Hub
Kirkus Reviews
2018-12-30
A novelist tries her hand at literary theory.
Venturing into the world of narrative theory, Alison (Creative Writing/Univ. of Virginia; Nine Island, 2016, etc.) takes a personal and idiosyncratic approach. As with many books on the subject, she begins with Aristotle and his famous beginning/middle/end arc of causality. But Alison grew "restless with the arc and plot," and W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants "was the first book to show me a way beyond the causal arc to create powerful forward motion in narrative" with patterns. Since then, she has sought "narratives that hint at structures inside them other than an arc, structures that create an inner sensation of traveling toward something and leave a sense of shape behind." These structures in texts "coincide with fundamental patterns in nature." Alison calls them waves, wavelets, spirals, networks, cells, and fractals. After her lengthy theoretical introduction, she explores the ways that writers have used these structural patterns in more than 20 diverse short stories, novellas, and novels: her "museum of specimens." Readers should perk up as Alison "dissect[s]" these texts, demonstrating how "we travel not just through places conjured in the story, but through the narrative itself." Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine "meanders in the shape of an elevator." Its "digressions "mean to get us to pause and look around." Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy is like a "Doppler radar screen, the bar scanning around and around." Alison devotes an entire chapter to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which is "deeply designed and patterned, with repeating shapes, webs of connection, visual images and phrases that repeat like dots of color on a canvas." Others coming under Alison's scrutiny include Philip Roth, Marguerite Duras, Raymond Carver, Stuart Dybek, Clarice Lispector, Anne Carson, Vikram Chandra, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tobias Wolff.
For readers interested in literary theory, Alison does a great job making it palatable; for casual readers, it may be too much.
