Monday, May 19, 2008
Writing style
The novel is written in an unusual style: changing point-of-view right and left, jumping back and forth in chronology, including elaborate back stories for the characters, as well as their future fates. Did you enjoy this style? Or find it hard to follow? Could you keep the characters straight? And what did you think of all the fake "historical" data that Jones included about Manchester County? Did that help the story?
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2 comments:
The style took some getting used to. (I think the reason I didn't finish this book before was because I had long intervals between reading and when I would pick the book up again I was utterly lost.) But I think it works well; you get a sense of the big picture and the details emerge along the way.
I was wondering whether the data was fake. I suppose as a writer you'd have to rely on actual data of that kind or make up your own, just as a way of believably relating your characters to a setting. (I am not a fan of contemporary story-telling that has a lot of deliberate vagueness — like unnamed characters, uncertain locales, etc. — that's meant to lend a kind of "universality" to the story.)
Yeah, I got lost a little bit. Usually when I picked the book back up after a break, I went back and read the last page of the previous chapter to get my bearings.
There were a couple of times when he mentioned a character briefly and then didn't come back and tell the character's full story until 100 pages later. By that time I had pretty much forgotten what he said about that character earlier. That made it kind of hard to maintain a minor character's storyline from start to finish.
I liked the fake data. Some reviewers said it felt forced and disrupted the story, etc. But I thought it really added a sense of realism.
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