Listening to "Time After Time" sung by Cindy Lauper with brilliant lyrics by Robert Hyman, I'm aware that time in fiction can go all stretchy on you, and, if you're not careful, go off in many directions at once—backwards, forwards, even sideways. In addition, the stories that take place over time can, like a hamster yearning to be free, make a run for it. In the end, you might sit back and let them run because watching free-range stories play themselves out is way more fun than keeping them caged up. What good could come from trying to control them?
So witness the passage of time in Abraham Verghese's novel Cutting for Stone. The prologue looks back over a fifty-four-year-old life with the perspective of Marion born just yesterday, insisting, as a naïve surgeon he operate on a patient who's chances of living through the surgery are infinitesimally small. Marion's father Dr. Stone is present. "My father put his hand on my shoulder. He spoke to me gently, as if to a junior colleague rather than to his son. 'Marion, remember the Eleventh Commandment," he said. "Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient's death."
And then the author continues, as if chanting a poem, "I remember his [Dr. Stone's] words on full-moon nights in Addis Ababa when knives are flashing and rocks and bullets are flying, and when I feel as if I am standing in an abattoir and not in Operating Theater 3, my skin flecked with the grist and blood of strangers. I remember. But you don't always know the answers before you operate. One operates in the now… Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel."
So, in chapter one, Marion, whose voice narrates the entire work starts by recounting his mother's arduous voyage aboard a typhoid-plagued boat to Aden, then telescopes the next twenty years of his mother's life to a single paragraph. Notice how much is compressed in just a few words: "For the longest time all I knew was this: after an unknown period of time that could have been months or even a year, my mother, aged nineteen, somehow escaped Yemen, then crossed the Gulf of Aden, then went overland perhaps to a walled and ancient city of Harrar in Ethiopia, or perhaps to Djibouti, then from there by train she entered Ethiopia via Dire Dawa and then on to Addis Ababa."
Then, a few paragraphs later, Verghese skips over many additional years, and then picks up with, "In the ensuing seven years…Sister Mary Joseph Praise rarely spoke about her voyage, and never about her time in Aden." The next paragraph begins with, "Sister Mary Joseph Praise began the task of the rest of her days when she entered Operating Theater 3." At that moment neither Nun Sister Mary Joseph Praise, nor we, the readers, know that the Nun is seven month's pregnant and that in the next hour or so a horrible tragedy will unfold:
Dr. Stone, the surgeon who is acting obstetrician that day, will botch the delivery of his own twin children, Marion and Shiva, leading directly to the death of their mother, Nun Sister Mary Joseph Praise.
Hema, Missing Hospital's actual obstetrician, delayed returning from a trip home to visit her family in India, will return just in time to save the life of the second-born child, Shiva, but not in time to save Sister Mary Joseph Praise.
Meanwhile, everyone in the tight medical community of Missing Hospital will have no doubt who got the Sister pregnant. Missing is a mis-translation of the institution's actual name, Mission Hospital.
Finally, after Hema arrives back at Missing and relieves Dr. Stone of his obstetrician duties. Dr. Stone, the culprit, disappears without a word. During the course of the novel his name is mentioned from time to time, but he never makes an appearance. He's a totally absent father who, by virtue of not being there, has a strong presence throughout the rest of the novel.
Now Part Two of the novel begins. We're up to page one hundred-thirty-five. All those pages—the first ten chapters—have been used to describe the passage of a handful of hours, admittedly a day with extraordinary operatic drama on a level with Der Ring des Nibelungen. Time is seen—and we experience it—as if under a microscope.
Time in the remainder of the novel Cutting for Stone, from Chapter Eleven all the way up to Chapter Forty-two, which takes us from page 135 all the way to the final page, 657, is treated in a radically different manner. The way the final 500+ pages tell the story remind me of great fictional biographies from the past such as David Copperfield or Great Expectations. We see two newborn twins as they attract a mother and father (Hema becomes the adoptive mother and Dr. Abhi Ghosh, another Missing surgeon, becomes the boys' adoptive father.) Suddenly, time goes from being seen under a microscope to being seen more through a telescope.
I'm writing about the malleability of time in fiction, especially in Cutting for Stone, to point out how a writer can tell a single story while switching back and forth between a microscope and a telescope to serve the needs of a story, focusing on the most important parts, without wasting a word. I'm very familiar with this because I let time go "all stretchy" in my novel, Charging the Jaguar. The first number of chapters of my novel cover a few hours' time. After that opening, time passes more conventionally. But more about that later.
As with the song, "Time After Time," and it's most famous lyrical couplet, "If you fall, I will catch you," we learn to trust a narrator, such as Marion in "Cutting for Stone" when that narrator is always there for us, the readers, supporting us just as the author, Verghese, does as he zooms through decades in a single sentence and then takes ten chapters to tell what happens in the next few hours. In fiction,if you can convince your reader you'll always be there for her and never leave her confused about what's going on, you can have that reader following you avidly for more than six hundred pages.
