8. Worked Analyses

Three close readings show a family novel converging on one character’s want, a commercial novel braiding its threads towards a single night, and the classic convergence on a secret; a screen reading shows institutions converging on one boy; and the household case shows a thread being turned into a chain.

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001): convergence by a want

The Corrections has five threads: Alfred Lambert, retired and declining with Parkinson’s disease and dementia; his wife Enid; and their three adult children in the East. Gary is a depressive banker in Philadelphia whose wife resists every visit home; Chip, a dismissed academic, goes to Lithuania on an internet fraud; Denise, a chef, loses her job over an affair with her employer’s wife. The book is built in blocks. After an opening in St. Jude, the Lamberts’ Midwestern town, long sections follow one or two of the family at a time, under titles such as “The Failure” and “The More He Thought About It, the Angrier He Got”, before “One Last Christmas” brings everyone home and “The Corrections” disperses them.

By the bands in Definitions this is close to a multi-plot novel: no child’s thread is primary, and the relation between them is the subject. What keeps the blocks from becoming separate novellas is that the convergence is itself a chain. Enid wants one last Christmas in St. Jude with all three children, and her want runs through the other blocks as recurring pressure, telephone calls, guilt and persuasion, which each child’s own chain resists. The gathering is therefore not a meeting arranged by the author but the outcome of a goal, opposed by three others; when the family assembles it has been dragged there, and the gathering is a collision rather than a curtain call. This is the remedy for convergence by encounter carried out at the scale of a book: the meeting is someone’s want, and everyone else’s wants are against it.

The blocks pay their cost in dormancy. Each child is left for long stretches, and the novel survives the gaps by the means the frame research predicts: each thread is individuated in register, comic for Chip, paranoid for Gary, appetitive for Denise, and each is left with a question open, so that the reader returns knowing what is at stake. Alfred’s decline supplies temporal counterpoint, a slow clock against which the children’s crises move fast, and it turns the Christmas Enid wants as a reunion into the occasion on which the family must decide about him; after it he goes into a nursing home.

Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies (2014): braiding towards one night

Big Little Lies follows three mothers of children at a beachside primary school: Madeline, resentful of her ex-husband’s new family; Celeste, whose wealthy husband Perry beats her; and Jane, a young single mother new to the town. Each has her own chain, and they are braided chapter by chapter, a common arrangement in commercial fiction. Two devices organise the braid. The chapter headings count down to a school trivia night at which, the reader learns at the start, someone has died. And at the ends of chapters come short statements by other parents and staff, given after the trivia night: a chorus of gossip that is not a chain at all, and that justifies itself as the intercalary chapters of The Grapes of Wrath do, by supplying world, comedy and a running reminder of the clock at the cost of a few lines.

The convergence uses the revealed identity, the carrier most open to abuse. At the trivia night Jane recognises Perry as the man who raped her years before under another name, Saxon Banks; Perry strikes Celeste, and Bonnie, the new wife of Madeline’s ex-husband, pushes him from a balcony to his death. Two chains, Celeste’s marriage and Jane’s past, are joined by an identity, and the third by the person who acts. By the standard of coincidence the join is suspect, since one man connects two women’s secrets in one school. It holds for two reasons. It turns analogy into causality: the book has set two women’s experience of male violence side by side for hundreds of pages, and the identity reveals that the rhyme was a mechanism. And it is planted in a third chain. From the first day of school Jane’s son is accused of hurting a classmate, and the hurt is being done by one of Celeste’s sons, the child of the violence at home; the bullying thread has carried the convergence’s two halves together long before anyone in the book knows it. The countdown also settles the late-convergence problem in advance, since every chapter of every thread is, by its heading, paid into the night.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852–53): three systems and one secret

Bleak House runs three systems: the Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has consumed generations; the Dedlock marriage at Chesney Wold; and Esther Summerson’s story, told in her own first person in chapters that alternate with a present-tense third person. In the second chapter Lady Dedlock, shown a legal document, asks who copied it and is shaken by the hand. The reader does not yet know there is anything to recognise. The copyist is the law-writer called Nemo, once Captain Hawdon, and he is Esther’s father; Lady Dedlock is her mother. Every system runs towards that fact. Tulkinghorn, the Dedlocks’ lawyer, pursues the handwriting; Jo, the crossing-sweeper Nemo was kind to, carries the infection that scars Esther; the detective Bucket follows Lady Dedlock’s flight, and Esther finds her mother dead at the gate of the burial ground where Hawdon lies.

The threads converge in sequence rather than together, a convergent cascade in which each convergence raises the stakes of the next, and the structure is the novel’s argument. Dickens asks outright what connection there can be between Chesney Wold and Jo the outlaw with the broom, and the plot’s improbabilities are the answer: a society that believes itself divided into compartments is one system, through which infection, guilt and money travel freely. The coincidences that a present-day structural edit would cut are a claim about the world. For a writer the plant is the lesson: the convergence is a recognition, and it is strong because its object, a hand on a page, was set down before the reader knew to look at it.

A screen reading: The Wire, season 4 (HBO, 2006)

The fourth season of The Wire braids four systems in Baltimore: a middle school, where the former police officer Prez now teaches mathematics and the retired major Bunny Colvin runs a special class for disruptive pupils; a mayoral campaign, which Tommy Carcetti wins in the primary; a police department, where Lester Freamon finds the bodies Marlo Stanfield’s crew have sealed in vacant houses; and the street. Four boys, Namond, Michael, Randy and Dukie, are the season’s centre. The convergence works by passing one boy through every system. Threatened with expulsion by an assistant principal over a murder he knows about, Randy tells what he knows; the school hands him to the police; a detective mishandles him and lets slip that Randy talked; Marlo’s people spread the word that he is a snitch; and after a false call draws off the officers guarding his home, the house is firebombed, his foster mother is badly burned, and he ends in a group home. No system intends the outcome, and each passes him on by its own rules. It is direct linkage at its starkest, and it shows prose writers that convergence need not be a meeting or a revealed secret: it can be a person handed from chain to chain until chains that never share a room meet in one life.

The household revision case: Dov’s thread

The situation. The draft in The Problem keeps Dov’s money troubles as atmosphere across six appearances. It fails the engine test (Dov is in difficulty and has no specific goal), the kernel test (no moment could have gone another way), the analogy test (the thread says only that the family is also under financial pressure, which is information, not relation) and the convergence test (deleting it changes nothing). Its page-share is about 4 per cent, a runner’s, and its longest gap about 18 per cent. The patterns present are presence mistaken for plot, an occupational thread that gives Dov something to do between appearances, and convergence by encounter, since the siblings simply find themselves in one room at the end.

The revision. The same man, shop and money, arranged as a goal–conflict–disaster chain:

What the revision did. It turned a condition into a goal with an object and a deadline, which is the moment a thread acquires a chain. It supplied a branching point, the buyer’s demand, at which the thread could go two ways. It made the subplot’s clock the main plot’s, the supplied constraint of The Taxonomy: the deadline reaches Elena as an empty drawer, and Nadia as a request to clear the flat, which gives her a motive the book has lacked for putting her hand into the pocket of the coat, since a coat’s pockets are checked before it goes, while the coat itself stays on its hook. One man’s secret moves both sisters’ chains before either knows it exists. It made the disaster a betrayal in both systems. And it placed the convergence on an object already planted: the ledger is first seen in The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4), the looser hand is Elena’s discovery in The Chapter Break (Chapter 6), and Dov’s chapter in The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13) has shown the reader whose hand it is, so the reveal tells the sisters what the reader has carried for some time. The thread now serves thematic counterpoint (Dov protects by silence, as his father did, and the rhyme is produced by the reader holding two withholdings together), structural convergence (he supplies the evidence) and a character testing ground (nothing forces him to sign in secret). The object that converges the plots is the object the counterpoint is about, the ledger as both proof and parallel. Page-share rises to about 12 per cent, the longest gap falls to about 9 per cent with a crossing added in the middle stretch, and the structure becomes an accelerating repeated intersection with a late literal convergence.

What the revision has not solved. The convergence carries a great deal for one scene: it resolves Dov’s chain, delivers the evidence, tells the sisters whose hand it is and lands the rhyme with the father, and four discharges at once may let the reader feel the architecture, a risk The Ending (Chapter 16) treats. The rhyme risks the redundant mirror, since a son concealing a sale and a father concealing an illness may be too small a change of key; the correction is to motivate the two silences differently, the father keeping the record so that someone could check it, as Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7) gives in his own words, and Dov keeping the same ledger with only the date and the count, the form of his father’s honesty emptied of its content. The promotion test returns an uncomfortable answer: Dov has the most at stake, is the only sibling who acts irreversibly and the only one with a deadline, and on three of the test’s four questions his thread is stronger than the reconstruction it serves. The book has decided that it belongs to Nadia and Elena and that Dov’s opacity helps the ending work, but that is a decision, not a fact. And the empty drawer gives Elena a new question, who took the ledger, which the book must keep her from putting to Dov until the convergence, or the convergence comes early.

See also: the Reference analyses, with readings of Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Vanity Fair, Les Misérables, The Brothers Karamazov and King Lear.