8. Worked Analyses

Three close readings, a short reading of a film, and the household revision case. Each reading names the middle’s shape and runs the option list across it.

Pride and Prejudice: the midpoint as recognition

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) was published in three volumes of 23, 19 and 19 chapters. On one reasonable reading its middle runs from Elizabeth Bennet’s refusal of Mr Collins in chapter 19, which commits her to marrying for regard or not at all, to the visit to Pemberley that opens the third volume, and its first half is an accumulating middle built of snares. Wickham’s account of Darcy’s cruelty, given just before the middle begins, is confirmed by Bingley’s sudden departure from Netherfield and by Colonel Fitzwilliam’s remark that Darcy had lately saved a friend from an imprudent marriage. Each looks like a partial answer to the question what kind of man is Darcy?, and each confirms an answer that is wrong. The reader, sharing Elizabeth’s vantage, is led by the same snares.

The turn comes in chapter 34, the eleventh of the second volume’s nineteen. Darcy proposes at Hunsford and Elizabeth refuses him, accusing him over Jane and over Wickham; in chapter 35 he gives her a letter, and in chapter 36 she rereads it and says, of herself, “Till this moment I never knew myself.” The midpoint does two of the four things a midpoint can do. It changes Elizabeth’s knowledge, since the letter reverses her account of both men, and it reverses fortune, since she has closed by her own act the one move the second half will make her want. Before chapter 34 her option list towards Darcy costs nothing: she can dislike him freely. After chapter 36 the move she wants has been refused, and the second half’s question is whether a closed move can be reopened.

Austen then prices it. Lydia’s elopement with Wickham in chapter 46 disgraces the family and makes Darcy’s renewed attachment improbable, and the move is reopened only by an act Elizabeth does not know of until a letter from her aunt in chapter 52: Darcy has found the couple and paid for the marriage. The turn does not break the book’s back, because it answers the first half’s question instead of abandoning it, and the second half’s question grows out of the answer. It falls at 34 ÷ 61, about 56 per cent of the chapters, at the centre of the centre volume.

A Gentleman in Moscow: a contained middle shaped in time

Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) opens in 1922, when a Bolshevik tribunal sentences Count Alexander Rostov to spend the rest of his life in the Metropol hotel, to be shot if he leaves. The situation cannot change, so the middle cannot narrow by place, and Towles gives it a shape in time instead. In his own account, the chapters advance by a doubling principle, one day after the arrest, then two days, five, ten, three weeks, six weeks, three months, six months, a year, two, four, eight and sixteen years, and after that point a halving principle brings the intervals back down. The book ends in 1954, 32 years after the arrest, so the turn of the chronology at sixteen years, in 1938, is the centre of its span: 16 × 2 = 32.

The design makes the clock the engine of a contained middle. In the first chapters days pass slowly and the hotel is explored; in the middle, years pass between chapters and the Count’s world changes around a fixed point; in the last part the intervals shorten, so that the reader feels time running out without any deadline being named, which is test 6 (Clock) answered by the chapter dates themselves. At the centre Towles puts a turn. In 1938 Nina Kulikova, whom the Count knew as a child in the hotel, leaves her young daughter Sofia with him in order to follow her husband to a labour camp. The arrival changes the Count’s goal, from living with grace inside a sentence to raising a child, and the second half’s narrowing is all on her account: what the Count can risk becomes what Sofia can lose, and the plan that ends the book, by which she leaves the country and he leaves the hotel, is a move only Sofia makes necessary. The contained middle supplies the duration and the turn supplies the direction.

The Midnight Library: stations that narrow

Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library (2020) is a stations middle with its rule in plain view. After trying to end her life, Nora Seed finds herself in a library between life and death, kept by Mrs Elm, her school librarian, where every book is a life she might have lived; she may enter any of them and stays until she is disappointed, when she returns to the library. The structure invites the episodic middle, since one life could follow another in any order, and parts of the sequence would pass the reorder test badly.

The book narrows it in three ways. The lives are ordered by kind: the first undo regrets listed in the library’s Book of Regrets, the pub she might have run with her former fiancé, the friend she did not follow to Australia, the swimming career her father wanted, and later lives are chosen for what she wishes rather than what she regrets, a glaciologist’s work in the Arctic, a rock star’s fame. Partway through, in the glaciologist’s life, she meets Hugo Lefèvre, another traveller who has passed through many lives of his own, and he is the plateau made into a character: he shows her the version of her journey that never ends. When the sequence threatens to become that version, Haig moves into summary, and many lives pass in a few pages. And the last life, married to a man named Ash with a daughter, is the most fully lived and the most wanted, so leaving it, when she learns that a boy she once taught the piano has gone wrong in a life without her, costs the most. Each station costs more to leave than the one before, and the middle ends when one move remains.

On screen: Groundhog Day

Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (1993), written with Danny Rubin, is the purest plateau in mainstream film: a weatherman, Phil Connors, wakes to the same 2 February in Punxsutawney, again and again. It holds because the day stays the same and Phil’s response does not. He exploits the loop, uses it to try to seduce his producer, Rita, despairs and tries repeatedly to die, and then spends the days learning the piano, ice sculpture and French and helping the town. The middle’s turn is the despair. When even death returns him to the same morning, his option list holds no exit, and the one move left is to change how he spends the day, which is the second half. The old homeless man he cannot save, however he tries, keeps that move from becoming a victory over the loop.

The household revision case: the middle

The situation. The draft middle in The Problem runs from the drawer at about 25 per cent to Dov’s chapter at about 78. The tests find it quickly. Test 1 (Value-shift log) fails, since Elena’s three inquiries share one shift, a question put and not answered, at one stake, and Nadia’s two sequences share a refusal kept. Test 2 (Option list) fails: Elena’s option list after the drawer is to ask Dov, ask her mother, ask someone outside the family, or read the ledger, and at two-thirds it is the same except for the ledger. The locksmith, Dov’s door and the mother’s street pass the reorder test in any order, and the locksmith fails the cut test outright. Dov’s sale, in two sentences of summary, fails the opposition test, and no clock is felt by anyone.

The revision. The middle is rebuilt as a braid that crosses, with a turn at the centre. Positions are estimates.

The first turn of the middle, Elena’s, reads:

She had left the ledger where it lived, meaning to come back for the rest. The drawer stuck on the K and came free on the third try, and there was nothing in it: no ledger, no pens, not even the rubber bands. Behind her someone knocked on the glass. A boy had tried the door and was pointing at the sign, which said OPEN, and must have said it since March. She shook her head at him and he went. Then she reached up and turned the sign round to CLOSED.

Two people had keys besides her, and one of them had given her hers. On the way home she passed the end of Dov’s road and did not take it, and by the time she was indoors she had decided not to ask him, because she had asked him once.

The midpoint, Nadia’s, reads:

There were six messages from Dov. She played the last one standing at the sink. “Clear the flat by the end of the month. All of it. Please.” She played it again and counted the words, thirteen, and none of them was why.

What the revision did. It cut the locksmith, Dov’s second doorway and the mother’s street, and promoted the sale from summary to a thread with a deadline. It turned the calls Nadia lets ring out in the opening, which in The Opening Pages (Chapter 9) are about the coat, into the carrier of the midpoint, so that the unanswered calls acquire content. It made the empty drawer a decision rather than a puzzle: Elena stops asking, which closes Dov as a witness by her own act, rhymes with the doorway, where he gave her a key and withheld the reason, and supplies what The Subplot (Chapter 14) recorded as unsolved, a reason for her not to put her question to Dov until he produces the ledger himself. Her option list now shrinks from four moves after the drawer to waiting at the midpoint, since she declined to telephone her mother in Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2), to none of her own at Dov’s chapter: the ledger must come to her, and at the convergence it does. Nadia’s moves shrink from leaving the coat untouched to having to clear the flat. And the scene at the drawer gives the prologue’s two open details their second appearance: Elena waves a boy away from the glass, as her father did on his last ordinary day, without knowing it, and turns at last the sign he never turned. Only the reader can see the rhyme.

What the revision has not solved. A decision not to ask is hard to dramatise, and two sentences may not persuade a reader that an investigator would stop; the book probably needs a scene in which Elena keeps her suspicion from Nadia and it costs her something, which Arc and Theme (Chapter 12) proposes at about 54 per cent. Paying both of the prologue’s open details in one scene may read as arranged, and a reader who has forgotten the prologue meets a stray boy. Turning the sign gives Elena an act in the middle, which may answer The Ending’s complaint (Chapter 16) that her arc completes by presence rather than by act, or may only move the act away from the ending where it was wanted. The stretch from the pen to Dov’s chapter, twelve per cent of the book, is held by the clock alone. And the order of the request and the signing, which The Subplot (Chapter 14) left open, is settled here as a proposal.

See also: the full treatment, with the option lists for each sibling at four points and further readings of Catching Fire, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Great Expectations and Squid Game.