Test Driving Novels, In This Case “Purity”

I enjoy reading short stories in The New Yorker and then commenting on them – if and when I think I have anything to say. But some New Yorker stories are not really stand-alone fiction. Rather, they are excerpts from forthcoming novels.

For instance, back in March, I wrote about “Sweetness,” a story by Toni Morrison that was taken from her novel “God Help the Child,”  published soon thereafter. In that case, I wasn’t focused on sampling the book, but rather on the story's take on racial prejudice. 

 

Jonathan Fanzen, often hailed as the latest Great American Novelist, recently published “Purity,” a sweeping, 563-page tale of personal angst, inter-personal strife and great events. Reviews have been generally positive, but clearly, this isn’t a book for everyone.

“The Appearance of Real-Life Chaos”

What makes a good work of fiction? 

In the view of Richard Ridley, an author and contributor to Amazon's "CreateSpace," an important element is “the appearance of real-life chaos.”  Subplots, which give depth to characters, are also valuable in that they create familiar disorder, he maintained in a short advice-to-authors blog post entitled “The Resolution Matrix.”

In other words, human events rarely proceed in a predictable, straight-line fashion so to be credible, fiction shouldn’t either.

Ridley’s advice on that front is probably well taken, but his main message is somewhat curious.