In an early draft of the household novel, the brother’s money troubles run through the book as atmosphere. Elena notices unopened envelopes from the bank on the shop counter. A neighbour asks Nadia whether the family is selling. Dov is short with Nadia on the telephone about “sorting things out”, misses a visit because he is “seeing someone about the lease”, and at the end, when the three of them are in the shop together, says he has been dealing with an offer. This is the neighbour’s scene:
The woman from the hardware place two doors down asked her, in the tone people used for asking about illnesses, whether they’d decided anything about the shop. Nadia said they hadn’t decided anything about anything. The woman nodded as though that were an answer, and went back in, and Nadia stood on the pavement a while and counted the shutters that were down along the row. Four, out of eleven. It had been two, in March.
The paragraph does several things well. It places the shop in a declining row, gives Nadia something to count, which is how she manages grief, and sets a private loss against an economic one. Nothing in the draft’s six appearances is badly written, and the writer, asked what the material is, calls it the subplot: Dov’s story running beside the sisters’ reconstruction of what their father withheld.
It is not a subplot. Each appearance tells the reader that the shop is in trouble, and the sixth tells her nothing the first did not. Dov has no specific goal; he is in difficulty, which is a condition and not a goal. No moment in the six could have gone another way. Delete all of them and the sisters still find the ledger, and the ledger still says what it says. A reader finishing the draft could say what Dov’s situation was and could not say what Dov did. The draft has the information a subplot would need and none of its structure, and the fault is hard to see in a read-through because the material is short, well written and never conspicuously idle.
Two adjacent chapters
The difficulty is clearest in two adjacent chapters of any novel. The first belongs to the main plot. A reader arriving at it has two hundred pages of investment behind her, a question she wants answered and a character she has followed since page one, and the chapter can be slow or oblique and she will stay, because staying is what she was already doing. The second belongs to a secondary thread, and asks four things the first did not: that she suspend the question just raised, recall people and stakes last seen forty pages back, re-establish why they matter, and do all this while the live question waits behind her. The two chapters are held to different standards, and the difference is structural rather than a matter of the second being less well written. The first spends trust that already exists; the second must raise its own.
Two further features make the subplot hard to revise. It is large, measured in chapters rather than paragraphs, so an error in it cannot be corrected at the level of the sentence. And it is optional in a way no other unit is: every novel has an opening, an ending and scenes, but The Remains of the Day and Things Fall Apart each run a single line, and many admired novels have no second chain at all. The subplot is the one large unit whose presence has to be argued for, and the chapter’s claim is the standard the argument must meet:
Every scene spent on a subplot is a scene not spent on the story that carries the reader’s primary investment. A subplot earns that cost only by supplying something the main plot cannot supply by its own nature.
The claim is deliberately harsh, and it carries an assumption that should be stated at once: that the book has one primary investment. That is true of most commercial fiction and of most manuscripts in revision, and false of Middlemarch and Bleak House, in which no thread is the plot and the relation between threads is the subject. For a book with one investment the claim is the right standard; for a book without one it is the wrong instrument, and How It Works and the Coda say what replaces it. The household novel has one investment, the sisters’ reconstruction, and the draft’s thread fails the standard.
See also: the Reference introduction, on the asymmetry between the two chapters; Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2), whose goal–conflict–disaster engine supplies this chapter’s definition of a chain.