Review by Booklist Review
In this wholly original analysis of style, novelist Alison (Nine Island, 2016) explores the forms and shapes that narrative can take, pushing the bounds of storytelling beyond the infamous pyramid of climax. She focuses on a few specific patterns: the ribbon, the spiral, the sunburst, and the honeycomb. The ribbon represents stories languid and satisfying in their slow bending toward the end. The spiral conveys the centripetal strengthening of a story as action repeats and worsens toward the eye of the storm. To explain the sunburst, Alison presents Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), wherein readers learn of the protagonist's murder in the first few lines. The honeycomb describes stories with a webbed and repeating backbone. Alison dissects each concept and then gives a range of examples of how these trends manifest in literature, showcasing the work of authors including Tobias Wolff, Stuart Dybek, Joyce Carol Oates, and Philip Roth. Her observations of the sensory aspects of literature are indulgent and delectable, and sure to elevate the experience of readers and writers alike.--Courtney Eathorne Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
