Middles differ less in what happens in them than in what carries their pressure, and the six shapes below are named for that engine. Each narrows the book by a different means, and each has a characteristic way of failing, given at the end of its entry. Most books combine two, a braided middle with an accumulating one or a contained middle with a turn at its centre, and the useful diagnosis names the shape that carries the pressure in each half rather than assigning the book to a single type.
The escalating chain
In an escalating chain, one line of action carries the middle, and the outcome of each sequence is the cause of the next and costs more than the last. The engine is price: each step is required by the one before it, and each makes going back harder. Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) is the pure case. Once Tom Ripley has killed Dickie Greenleaf and taken his identity, every later act is demanded by an earlier one, the forged letters by the impersonation and a second killing by Freddie Miles’s suspicion, and each closes a road back to the life Tom had before. The shape suits the thriller, the quest and the crime novel told from the criminal’s side. Its characteristic failure is the escalation treadmill of Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2), in which the price rises in size but never in kind, and the reader, recalibrating, stops feeling it.
The turned middle
A turned middle is organised around a single turn near its centre, so that its first half asks one question and its second half another. The engine is a change of goal or of knowledge. Suzanne Collins’s Catching Fire (2009), the second novel of the Hunger Games trilogy, spends its first part, “The Spark”, on whether Katniss Everdeen can placate a regime she defied at the end of the first book’s Games, by staging an engagement for the cameras and by keeping her head down. In chapter 12 of 27 the president announces that the tributes for the coming Quarter Quell will be reaped from the existing pool of victors. Every move she has tried is closed at once, since she is the only female victor her district has, and the novel’s second half is a return to the arena. The announcement falls 12 ÷ 27, about 44 per cent, of the way through the chapters. Pride and Prejudice, read in Worked Analyses, turns its middle on a proposal and a letter. The characteristic failure is the broken back of Failure Patterns, a turn so large that the second half reads as a different book.
The stations middle
A stations middle is a sequence of encounters joined by a constant rather than by cause: a road, a voyage, a series of trials, a list, a frame that sends the protagonist out and brings them back. The picaresque novel, from Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) to Don Quixote, is built this way, and so are many quests and novels of trials. Because the stations are not linked by cause, the engine has to come from elsewhere: from a rule that removes a possibility at each station, from a destination and a limit that make each station cost time or strength, or from a change in how the protagonist meets them. Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library (2020), read in Worked Analyses, uses all three. The characteristic failure is the episodic middle, whose stations could change places without loss.
The braided middle
In a braided middle, two or more lines of action alternate, and the pressure comes from their crossings: an event in one thread closes an option or sets a clock in another. The Subplot (Chapter 14) treats the braid as a structure, and calls the crossing that a subplot imposes on the main plot a supplied constraint; this chapter’s interest is narrower, in what the braid does to the middle’s pace. A braid divides the middle among its threads, so each thread’s middle is shorter than the book’s and each thread is absent for long stretches. Threads that cross keep each other moving. Threads that alternate without touching give the reader two plateaus (stretches in which nothing narrows) instead of one, which is the characteristic failure, and the household draft’s.
The accumulating middle
An accumulating middle gathers knowledge. Its protagonist is an investigator in the broad sense, a detective, a biographer, a child working out what the adults are hiding, and its pressure comes from what How It Works calls Barthes’s delays: partial answers that change the question, and snares that send the inquiry the wrong way. Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) hands the investigation from one witness’s written account to the next, and each account closes some explanations of the theft and opens another, so that the question the reader carries at the end of each narrative is narrower than at its start. The characteristic failure is the plateau of interviews, in which the investigator asks one witness after another and each answer leaves the question where it was, as Elena’s visits do in the household draft.
The contained middle
A contained middle holds its protagonist in a fixed situation, confinement or waiting or illness, from which the plot does not let them leave. Nothing can be achieved by going somewhere, so the engine is time and the arrivals it brings: the situation stays and the people in it change. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), translated by John E. Woods (1995), a visit of three weeks to a sanatorium becomes seven years, and the book’s middle is the slow loss of the life Hans Castorp came from. Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), read in Worked Analyses, gives the contained middle a designed shape in time and a turn at its centre. The characteristic failure is the holding pattern, a middle that waits for an event scheduled at its end.
Reading a middle’s shape
The shapes combine, and the combination says where to look when a middle sags. The household novel’s middle is braided, among Elena, Nadia and Dov’s thread, and accumulating, since Elena is reconstructing what her family has hidden. In the draft neither engine runs: the threads never cross before the end, and Elena’s inquiries return no partial answers, only refusals. The revision in Worked Analyses keeps the braid and makes it cross, and puts a turn at the centre, so that the middle becomes braided and turned. No proposal for a further shape is made here.
See also: the full treatment, with three further shapes (the mirrored middle, the interval middle and the retold middle) and a table of shapes, engines and failures.