8. Worked Analyses

Three close readings, a short reading of a film, and the household revision case. Each reading names the arc, finds the hinge if there is one, and reads the theme from the answers the book sets beside it.

Emma: a staged arc and its mirror

Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) has fifty-five chapters in three volumes, and its heroine chooses for most of them by one rule: her own judgement of what other people should want, exercised for her amusement. She persuades Harriet Smith to refuse a farmer who loves her and to hope for Mr Elton, who wants Emma; she imagines Jane Fairfax in an intrigue with a married man. The seed of the new rule is in the book from its first chapters, held by Mr Knightley, who tells her plainly that her management of Harriet will do harm. And the book gives her a mirror in Mrs Elton, the vicar’s new wife, who patronises Jane Fairfax as Emma has patronised Harriet, and whom Emma finds intolerable for it.

The first hinge comes at Box Hill, in the forty-third chapter, 43 ÷ 55 or about 78 per cent of the way through. Frank Churchill’s game asks each of the party for one very clever thing or three very dull ones, and when Miss Bates, poor and garrulous, says she will be sure to manage three dull things, Emma answers: “Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me—but you will be limited as to number—only three at once.” Knightley takes her aside afterwards: “It was badly done, indeed!” Emma cries most of the way home. The recognition is not the hinge, since tears change nothing; the hinge is the next decision, when she resolves to call on Miss Bates “the very next morning”, and to make it “the beginning, on her side, of a regular, equal, kindly intercourse”. The visit costs her what her old rule valued, her command of a room, and Jane Fairfax will not come out to see her.

A second stage follows. When Harriet confides that she hopes for Mr Knightley, “it darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” and the recognition changes a second set of choices, about Harriet and about her own heart. The constant is Emma’s energy of imagination, which the last chapters still show working, now on her own errors. The theme, put as a question, is what a person with social power owes others in the way of attention, and the answer map is full: Knightley’s responsible regard, Frank Churchill’s play and concealment, Mrs Elton’s patronage, Miss Bates’s undiscriminating goodwill. Emma’s new rule is close to Knightley’s, which is why the marriage reads as the book’s verdict rather than its reward.

Gilead: a hinge made by blessing

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005, is a letter written in 1956 by the Reverend John Ames, an elderly Congregationalist minister in a small Iowa town, to the young son he will not see grow up, since his heart is failing. The letter is full of blessing, the minister’s habit of seeing the world as given, and the book’s arc concerns the one person Ames cannot bless. Jack Boughton, the prodigal son of Ames’s oldest friend and Ames’s own namesake and godson, has come home. Ames has judged him for years as cruel, since as a young man Jack fathered a child with a poor girl and abandoned them, and Ames fears his attention to his own young wife and son. His criterion towards Jack is judgement and guard: give him nothing, and watch.

The seed is Ames’s own theology. He has preached grace for decades, and the letter keeps returning to it; the reader holds the new rule before Ames applies it to the man in front of him, and old Boughton’s helpless love for his son is the variation that makes Ames’s guardedness visible as a choice. Late in the book Jack visits Ames at the church and shows him a photograph: he has a wife, Della, a Black woman, and a young son, and the laws of Missouri and her father’s disapproval keep them apart. The knowledge changes Ames’s understanding of Jack. It does not require him to do anything, and the hinge is the act that follows. When Jack leaves Gilead, Ames walks him to the bus stop, asks if he may bless him, and puts his hand on his head. The blessing costs Ames his judgement and his last word on the man he feared, and it is made by the gesture the whole book has been practising for someone else, the old minister’s hand on a son’s head.

The constant is the voice, unhurried and attentive to light, which is the same before and after. The theme is the question of what grace can extend to, and the answer map runs through three generations: Ames’s grandfather’s fierce abolitionism, his father’s pacifism, Boughton’s love and Ames’s own long withholding. The book’s verdict is given by where Ames’s hand rests, and its letter form allows Ames to state what he means without the statement doing the work, since the reader has seen the act.

A Man Called Ove: the constant that carries the change

Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove (2012), translated from the Swedish by Henning Koch (2014), is a commercial novel whose arc shows how far a constant can carry. Ove, a fifty-nine-year-old widower, patrols his housing association every morning to check that no one has parked in the wrong place, visits his wife Sonja’s grave, and has decided to join her. He ties a rope to the ceiling; he runs the car in the closed garage. Each attempt is interrupted by a neighbour’s need, most often Parvaneh’s, the pregnant Iranian woman who has moved in nearby and who will not leave him alone, and each time Ove resolves the dilemma, die now or deal with this, by his old rule: a thing badly done must be put right.

The arc is staged, and the criterion log shows something the hinge test alone would miss. Ove’s rule never changes. What changes is what it serves: the same insistence on doing things properly that makes him intolerable in the first chapters makes him indispensable in the last, as he teaches, repairs, takes in a stray cat he says he does not want, and defends the people he despised. The rule that is outranked is his loyalty to the dead, and it is outranked by accumulation, each interruption a small decision on the old rule that leaves him further from the rope. The hinge test finds no single turn, which places the book among the arcs of erosion that the ruling in The Taxonomy concedes. The constant is so strong that the change can hardly be missed, which is why one reviewer called the book predictable and why it is easy to follow. Years later Ove dies in his sleep of the heart condition the book has carried, in a house that the people he once kept at a distance have filled. The theme, what the living owe each other set against what is owed to the dead, is argued by the neighbours’ claims winning one at a time.

On screen: The Godfather

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), from Mario Puzo’s novel, is the falling arc in its classic form. Michael Corleone, a war veteran and the youngest son, wants no part of his family’s business, and says so to Kay at his sister’s wedding. Every step of his descent is taken by one rule, protect the family. At the hospital he finds his wounded father’s guards removed, moves him to another room and stands guard outside. Then he offers to kill Sollozzo and the corrupt police captain McCluskey at a restaurant meeting, and does: this is the hinge, the first act his old rule forbade, made in the name of the new one. The constant is his calm, which the film shows unaltered from the wedding to the end. The last scenes enact the fall in a repeated situation: at the wedding he told Kay the truth about his family’s methods, and now, when she asks whether he had his sister’s husband killed, he lies; the door closes on her while his captains kiss his hand. The theme, what a person owes his family against what he owes himself, is answered by every brother differently, Sonny by temper, Fredo by weakness, Tom Hagen by counsel, and Michael’s answer consumes the self that first refused it.

The household revision case: Elena’s arc

The situation. The draft in The Problem ends with a paragraph of Elena’s understanding and Nadia’s line We protect each other by not saying. The criterion log for Elena, built from the decisions earlier chapters have fixed, shows why the reader does not believe the paragraph. Positions are estimates.

The tests find the fault quickly. Test 1 (Criterion) fails in the way the draft did not intend: the rule at the last decision is the rule at the first, and the change is in a paragraph rather than a decision, so test 2 (Hinge) fails as the announced arc. Test 3 (Price) fails, since understanding costs Elena nothing. Test 4 (Seed) finds no seed: no one in the book holds the rule Elena is said to reach. And Nadia’s line fails test 8 (Answers) from the other side: it states one answer, protection by silence, at the ending’s privileged position, and the book has not shown it to be true of the mother, whose silence is the household’s largest.

The revision. It deletes both paragraphs and adds two passages, about two hundred words in all. The first is a mirror moment at about 54 per cent of the book, after the midpoint at which Dov’s messages ask both sisters to clear the flat, and before he signs at 58. Elena helps Nadia begin:

“Do you know why he wants it cleared?” Nadia was folding the tea towels into thirds and counting them as she went.

Elena had a box of receipts on her knees and the empty drawer in her head. “No,” she said, which was true.

“You’d tell me, though. If you knew anything.”

“I’d tell you.”

She would remember, later, how easily it had come.

The second is the hinge, at the convergence after Dov’s chapter, when Dov brings the ledger to the shop, where Elena is, before the reading that the ending drafted in The Ending (Chapter 16) begins with They read it together, in the end:

Dov put the ledger on the counter and took his hand off it. “It’s all there,” he said. “From March, it’s mine.” She had wanted it since the drawer. She laid her palm on the cover, and the leather was warm from his arm, and she did not open it.

“Ring Nadia,” she said.

“She doesn’t answer me.”

“She’ll answer me.” She rang, and Nadia answered, and Elena told her to come to the shop, and why.

What the revision did. It gave the arc its four conditions. The seed is Nadia’s: You’d tell me, though is the new rule, spoken by another character and set aside by the protagonist. The price is visible at the middle, where Elena’s rule makes her do to her sister what Dov and their mother did to her, and the narration’s small retrospective gap, She would remember, later, lets the reader see the cost before Elena admits it. The hinge is an act under the greatest pressure the book can supply: the ledger she has wanted since a quarter of the way through is under her hand, and she declines it until the three of them are in the room. And the enactment is a repeated situation answered differently. Elena declined to telephone her mother in the truck, and at the empty drawer she declined to ask Dov; here she telephones, and she tells Nadia why, which is the word Dov’s thirteen-word message to Nadia left out. The constant is her want, her palm on the cover. The theme is now argued by the answer map rather than stated:

The book’s answer is given by the ending’s arrangement, three people reading one record together, and Nadia’s line is no longer needed, since the reader can weigh protection by not saying against the father’s, Dov’s and the mother’s practice of it without being told. The convergence now completes two arcs in successive decisions a page apart, Elena’s at the counter and Nadia’s at the coat, so the last decision in the book is still Nadia’s.

What the revision has not solved. The hinge adds a fifth discharge to a convergence that The Subplot (Chapter 14) already found crowded with four, and Nadia’s answering at once, after a book in which she lets Dov’s calls ring out, may read as arranged. Elena’s new rule stops at the three siblings: she does not telephone her mother, and the book does not say whether the rule would reach her, which keeps the mother’s silence open as the canon requires but leaves Elena’s change visibly partial. The mirror moment depends on a retrospective sentence that some readers will take as the narration underlining. And the warm leather is the third time the ledger has been warm, which may tip an echo into a tic.

See also: the full treatment, with criterion logs for all three siblings, further readings of Project Hail Mary, The Kite Runner and Paddington 2, and the household case in full.