A writer revising the household novel has been told by an early reader that the father is a ghost in his own book. The reader has a point. The novel’s present is the July after his death, when his three adult children reconstruct what he left: Elena, who learns in Dov’s doorway that their mother changed the shop’s locks in March; Nadia, who counts things and will not touch the coat that still hangs in the flat above the shop; Dov, who gave Elena the new key and kept the reason. The father appears alive only in the prologue, his last ordinary day, and in Nadia’s memory of the second time he lost his good pen. Everything else the reader knows of him comes through objects: the coat, the pen, and the ledger he kept for eleven years in a careful slanting hand, whose entries stop on 9 March.
The writer’s answer is a second timeline. The draft now braids six chapters set in the father’s last five weeks, each headed with a date, through the first three-quarters of the book, alternating with the sisters’ July, so that his strand reaches the evening of 9 March just before Dov’s chapter of the same evening. The first of them reads, in part:
February. He wrote the week’s figures into the ledger with the good pen, and Nadia, doing the stock count at the end of the counter, asked why it had to be that pen. Someone should write it down properly, he told her. He did not mention the letter in his inside pocket, or Thursday’s appointment. There would be time for that.
The prose is clear, and every chapter of the strand is dated, so no reader is lost. The trouble is in the arrangement. The strand’s end is known from the opening pages, which tell the reader that the father died in March, so the only question it can run on is the one the book has saved for its last chapter: what he knew. The draft can answer that question in its own chapters, which spends the book’s largest truth at a tenth of its length, to the reader alone; or it can keep the answer out of a mind that knows it, which is what He did not mention the letter does, and which tells the reader both that there is a secret and roughly what it is. The strand also spends, in its first chapter, the line Nadia is meant to remember at two-thirds of the book. And its arrival at 9 March changes nothing, because the reader already holds every fact it delivers. The draft has a second timeline without a second question.
The case is not an argument against telling a book in more than one time. It is an instance of a confusion that the chapter separates into its parts: the difference between material that belongs to another time and a strand, a recurring line of the book’s telling set in another time and running on a question of its own. Material from another time can be delivered as a cutaway, a single departure that ends where it began, which Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7) treats; a book whose order of telling is organised around such departures is this chapter’s subject.
The chapter’s claim is that an arrangement of times is justified by the work it does, and that the work can be named.
A book told out of chronological order earns the departure when the order does work that chronology could not: each strand runs on a question of its own, the reader always knows which time she is in and how far it stands from the others, and the point at which the strands meet changes what at least one of them meant. An arrangement that fails these is chronology made harder to read.
The claim has a consequence for revision. A draft whose readers are lost needs better marking of its times, which is cheap. A draft whose readers skim one timeline needs a question for that timeline, which is not; and a draft whose timelines meet without consequence needs its meeting moved or remade, which means rethinking what each strand is for. None is mended by adding chapters to a strand. The revision in Worked Analyses removes the father’s strand and finds that the book already has a second time, in two instalments and an object, and gives it one heading.
The chapter also rules on four proposals that earlier chapters left to it, since time at the scale of a book is its material: The Descriptive Detail’s temporal domain (Chapter 4), The Transition’s bridging object (Chapter 5), Backstory and Flashback’s structural domain (Chapter 7) and The Subplot’s temporal counterpoint (Chapter 14).
See also: the full treatment, section 7, with the draft strand charted chapter by chapter; The Reveal (Chapter 15), on the withholding viewpoint, the failure the draft’s father commits.