Long-time readers of my EWAs will remember the time when I was a bit late to a literary luncheon, and, as a result, was horrified to be seated at the fantasy-adventure table because there was no room at the literary-fiction table.
On that occasion I bravely wrapped myself in the cloak of a vampire yearning for a blood-fix, and discovered for myself the illicit joys of genre, which at the time I would have told you was akin to an upper-crust intellectual (like me) being arrested for literary dumpster diving.
I believe there is much to be learned about telling a story by dwelling in the land of genre which, by the way, is just East of Eden.
Hell, I spent years living a dystopian story; why shouldn't I spend hours reading one?
Really now, time-traveling back and forth between the U.S. in the 1950s and Scotland in the 1740s can get kind of boring, or, from a story-telling point of view much too easy to turn into a gimmick. That's a reference to The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon, by the way.
As I often say, "All fiction is about family—either the formation of a family or its disillusion, or both." It's all about love, in other words, that urge many of us have to spend our lives in company of some special person.
You'll never go wrong if each time you open a novel to page one—regardless of what genre it is—you ask yourself, "What is the family that is being formed or destroyed in this story—or the family that is being formed and then destroyed."
This time, instead of lateness to a literary luncheon, it was a book club I belong to that caused me take a literary sojourn into YA, i.e., young-adult fiction, by reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and to open it to page one.
There we see a family, such as it is, being described. A young girl named Katnisss writing in the "first-person-I," , describing waking up in her bed to find that her younger sister, Prim, with whom she usually sleeps, has crawled in with their mother during the night. The fact that both the mother and her two children all sleep in one room—that's just the first of many hardships Katniss and her family endure. Food insecurity is another.
Later on in Chapter One we will once again see Prim protected, shielded if you will, only this time by her sister, Katniss.
We soon realize Katniss' family is floundering, barely getting by. The father was killed in a mining accident and this same mother, whose bed Pym has crawled into, recently returned to her two children after a considerable absence (she abandoned her family—no reason given). Now she's back. Katniss isn't very trusting her mother will remain with her and her sister.
Readers of the wonderful, weird, unsettling, and gripping short story by Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" published in The New Yorker in 1948 will recognize the basic conceit of The Hunger Games. The day that's being described on page one of the novel is known as "the day of the reaping" when a boy and a girl from each District of the fictional and highly repressive police state, a country called Pym is selected to partake in a fight-to-the finish. There are 12 districts; thus, 24 young people fight until a single victor is left alive.
Without giving away any spoilers, let me set forth a few thoughts I had as I read the opening chapters:
The author, Suzanne Collins, wrote children's TV shows for many years; it shows in her writing, which is highly visual.
The book reads almost as though a movie is being described. The words we read are what the "camera" would see if it were a movie. It's possible the novel was written after the screenplay was written; not the other way around.
The story moves extremely fast. Collins has a marvelous way of having the point-of-view character quickly become the trusted narrator, as she describes her world. That kind of writing is called "exposition." If a writer gets bogged down in it—explaining too many details—it's a killer. It kills the story. It kills creativity. A novel burdened by exposition quickly turns deadly dull.
Collins escapes those drawbacks by telling her story fast using extremely easy-to-read language. She starts building narrative momentum on page one. Beginning writers have a terrible time doing this and also moving their characters around on a dramatic stage that is, after all, composed entirely of words. Collins is brilliant in both departments. One example: "I swing my legs off the bed and slide into my hunting boots. Supple leather that has molded to my feet." You immediately trust her. She's done this a million times. Another example: "I flatten out on my belly and slide under a two-foot stretch [of fence] that's been loose for years." She's a pro.
Katniss describes her family: Prim, the essence of young, untouched beauty, her "face as a raindrop, as lovely as a primrose for which she was named." And her mother: "In sleep my mother looks younger, still warn, but not so beaten-down," an extremely effective description. And notice—there's not even a trace of sentimentalism. Collins is using Katniss to build her character and earn your trust as your narrator at the same time. You sense Katniss is a reliable narrator; she's holding nothing back.
Next month: More about The Hunger Games: Its strengths and weaknesses.
