In this month's EWA I honor the genius of novelist and short story writer Anthony Doerr.
If you haven't heard of him, his novel All the Light We Cannot See (2014) won The Pulitzer Prize in 2015 and also the Carnegie Medal. He's won five O. Henry prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize.
His second novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021), widely and enthusiastically praised by critics and readers alike, has five characters living in three distinct time periods:
1. An elderly male character named Zeno who loves education, teaching children, and reading stories and books and who happens to live in Boise, ID.
2. A confused young adult (early 20s) named Seymour, who is confronted with multiple challenges to growing up; he also lives in Boise.
3. Thirteen-year-old Anna who lives in Constantinople in the 15th century.
4. A young boy named Omeir who is part of the marauding troops who—after more than a century of the walls around Constantinople being impregnable—lay siege to break through them and sack the riches of Constantinople.
5. A young woman named Konstance who is a passenger on the interstellar ship, Argos. She is alone, in the middle of a very long journey.
Why combine all these separate stories between the covers of a single novel? In Doerr's latest, many of the characters are connected in so far as they read a single fictional work called Cloud Cuckoo Land
Quoting from the book's dust jacket copy: "Doerr's dazzling imagination transports us to worlds so dramatic and immersive we forget for a time our own. Dedicated to 'the librarians then, now, and in the years to come,' Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship—of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart."
The experience of reading Cloud Cuckoo Land is jumpy and disjointed. With the turn of the page you jump from historical fiction in the mid 1400s taking place in Constantinople, to the spaceship Konstance is riding on, and from there to a world we recognize as our own (taking place in 2014; that part of the story plays out in Boise, Idaho.)
Why am I telling you all this?
The jumpy experience of reading Cloud Cockoo Land is the direct opposite of what I have long believed is the quintessential definition of a great novel… And yet there is no question that Cloud Cockoo Land is not only a great novel, but a brilliant one.
Brilliant refers to the novel's originality, combining those three stories from three different times into one story. That's highly original--brilliant.
Where did I get the impression that the definition of a great novel is a single story that takes place in a single time in a single location written from a single point of view?
I got it from the novelist John Gardner.
Background: In my view, it's the first rule of life: There are no rules. Or, let's put it the way I have most often heard it expressed: Rules are meant to be broken.
Back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, John Gardner was a very popular literary novelist who wrote sad, lonely, and affecting novels largely about forgotten people.
In 1984, John Gardner wrote a short textbook called The Art of Fiction:Notes on Craft for Young Writers.
I would recommend The Art of Fiction to anyone contemplating becoming a fiction writer.
One rule Gardner emphasized, or as online author Barry Donaldson wrote in a piece he released on the web on June 12, 2020: "Gardner's most talked about bit of advice is that if the writing is to be any good, it must create a "vivid and continuous fictional dream," that remains uninterrupted in the reader's mind.
I remember that little book being a sensation when it came out. I read it again in 2002 when I took up writing fiction after a lay-off of many years. I always took that "vivid, continuous fictional dream" stricture as a sacrosanct rule both of films and novels. I've never had any reason to question its validity until now, since I began reading Doerr's Cloud Cockoo Land, which one would most fairly describe as a vivid, discontinuous fictional dream.
It looks to me as though Doerr has decisively broken Gardner's "continuous fictional dream" rule. But to what end? Did it lead Doerr to creating a better fiction?
More next month. By then I will have likely finished reading Doerr's latest.
