8. Worked Analyses

Three readings show a genre’s promise declined with a declaration, declined with half of one, and a series’ question declined across four volumes; a screen reading shows a series that declared its decline in its title sequence. The household case follows.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817): a mode declined on its first page

Austen’s novel invokes the gothic, the most widely read genre of its decade, and declines its core promise in its first sentence: No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. The narrator tells the reader at once that the book will use the gothic’s conventions and not pay its debts, and the reader is given a replacement in the same sentence, a comedy of a girl who reads too much, with the romance’s promise of union running beneath it.

The declaration lets Austen invoke the conventions at full strength. Catherine reads Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho at Bath and arrives at the Tilneys’ abbey expecting the gothic’s syntax: a locked cabinet, a hidden manuscript, a tyrannical father, a dead wife. Every sign is honoured and every payment refused. The manuscript in the cabinet is an inventory of linen; the late Mrs Tilney died of an illness, and Catherine’s suspicion that the General murdered or imprisoned her earns a rebuke from Henry Tilney, who asks her to remember the country and the age in which they live.

The variation comes afterwards. The General turns Catherine out of the house and sends her home alone, because he has learned she is not the heiress he had supposed, and Catherine concludes that in suspecting him she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty. The gothic’s exposure, the tyrant found out, is kept in a domestic key: the villain is real and his crime is money. The romance’s promise is kept too, and Henry marries her. A reader of the gothic was never cheated, because the first sentence told her what she was reading; the book’s distinction lies in the convention it varied after declining it.

Tana French, In the Woods (2007): a promise kept and a promise declined

French’s first novel, which won the Edgar Award for best first novel, is a police procedural with two questions. In 1984 three children went into the woods at Knocknaree outside Dublin and one came out, found clinging to a tree with blood in his shoes and no memory; the other two were never found. Twenty years later the survivor, Rob Ryan, is a detective, and with his partner Cassie Maddox he investigates the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, Katy Devlin, whose body is found on an archaeological dig beside the same woods.

The volume question, who killed Katy, is answered by the genre’s terms: a man working on the dig confesses, and the book shows that Katy’s elder sister manipulated him. The second question, what happened in 1984, is the one the book has made personal, since Rob narrates it as the wound of his life, and it is never answered. Readers divided over the ending, and many said they felt cheated.

The promise inventory shows why. The procedural’s core promise is made twice, once for each case, and kept once. The decline is half declared. Rob warns the reader at the start, I crave truth. And I lie, which tells her to doubt the narrator but not that the past will stay closed, and the two cases are linked by place and by evidence found near the body, which invites the reader to expect a single solution. A reader who reads the book as a novel of trauma has the replacement promise, and it is kept: the past is unrecoverable because Rob cannot recover it. A reader who reads it as a procedural has staked the whole book on the link. The series form then confirms the decline after the fact. French’s second novel, The Likeness (2008), is narrated by Cassie, and the Dublin Murder Squad became a relay series, so no later volume carries the 1984 question; the decline holds because nothing was deferred.

Elena Ferrante, the Neapolitan novels (2011–14; translated by Ann Goldstein, 2012–15): a serial with a declined frame

The four novels, My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child, are a serial, one story told by Elena Greco across sixty years of her friendship with Lila Cerullo. The first volume’s prologue sets the frame: Lila’s son telephones Elena, both women now in their sixties, to say his mother has gone, and Elena, angry, decides to write down everything she can remember. The series question is declared on the first pages, and so is the decline of its plainest form. Where Lila has gone is a question of fact the quartet never answers; what Lila was, the question the writing pursues, is the one the series keeps.

Each volume closes a stage rather than the story. My Brilliant Friend ends at Lila’s wedding feast, when Marcello Solara, the man she refused, walks in wearing the shoes she designed, a sign that her husband has made his peace, and his business, with the Solaras. The volume question, whether Lila’s marriage will free her from the neighbourhood’s terms, is answered there, no, so the volume closes; the last page also opens the next stage, which is what a serial’s volume ending must do. A reader who stops after the first volume has been given a whole book.

The final volume shows what a serial owes at its end. Lila’s daughter Tina vanishes in 1984 and is never found, a second question of fact declined, and the quartet ends with Elena receiving a package holding the two dolls the girls lost as children in the first volume. The dolls are a bridging object in Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture’s sense (Chapter 8) across four books, and whether they are an insult or a reassurance the book does not say. The serial keeps the promise it declared, a whole account of a friendship, and declines the two facts it never offered to supply.

A screen reading: The Leftovers (HBO, 2014–17)

Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s series, adapted from Perrotta’s novel of 2011, begins three years after two per cent of the world’s population vanished at once on 14 October. The premise invokes the mystery’s core promise at the largest scale available, and the series declined it from the start: it follows the people left behind and never explains the departure. In its second season it changed its title sequence to Iris DeMent’s song “Let the Mystery Be”, a declaration placed inside the work, in the series’ own paratext, at the head of every episode. The finale lets one character give an account of where the departed went, which nobody can check, and ends with the man she tells saying that he believes her. The series question, how people live beside an event that will not be explained, was advanced in every season, and the declined question was kept in view to the last scene.

The household revision case: a hook for a second book

The situation. The household novel’s present runs from about four months after the father’s death in March to the end of July. Elena learns in Dov’s doorway, at the first chapter break, that their mother changed the locks, and Dov will not say why. At a little under a quarter of the book, in the truck, she weighs ringing their mother and foresees the silence that meant she’d asked something true, and drives to the shop instead. At about 38 per cent she finds the register drawer empty and decides not to ask Dov who took the ledger, because she had asked him once. At the convergence she rings Nadia, not her mother, and the three read the ledger in the shop; Nadia goes up and puts on the coat. The locks are never explained.

Version A, the draft. The agent’s two additions from The Problem: a last page on which the mother rings and Elena answers, and jacket copy promising that one of the children will find out why the locks were changed.

Diagnosis. Test 1 (Shelf) fails at both ends: the jacket shelves the book as a mystery, the last page closes it as one, and everything between is a family novel in the mystery mode. Test 3 (Declared decline) is the decisive failure, and of an unusual kind. The book had declared its decline, and the draft takes the declaration back: a reader who accepted the doorway, the truck and the empty drawer as signs that the question would stay open is told on the last page that she was wrong to. Test 5 (Volume question) fails, since the hook spends the volume’s last page on a question, and the ending’s privileged position on a proposition. Test 6 (Series step) finds no series question to advance: a second volume could only answer the locks with the mother’s own account, which the book’s meaning, and its canon, forbid.

Version B, the revision. Cut the last page, so that the book ends where it did, with Nadia and the coat, and the mother’s silence stays in view. Replace the jacket’s question with a promise the book keeps: Four months after their father’s death, Elena finds that her key no longer fits the shop, and that someone else has been writing in his ledger. The promise inventory shows that the text needs nothing more:

The declined row has a sign at intervals from the first chapter break to the last page, and the replacement promise, what these three do with what they can reconstruct, is kept by the gathering in the last row. The book’s genre was declared by three decisions not to ask, and the revision removes the two additions that contradicted them.

What the revision has not solved. The declaration is cumulative, and the first sign, the truck, is legible as a decline only in retrospect, so a reader who arrives with a mystery’s horizon may still hold the question to the end and feel the locks as a debt. The jacket is not the writer’s to write, and the book’s genre cannot depend on it. A mystery’s horizon also makes a reader treat details as clues: the boy at the glass, the sign left at OPEN and the coat’s shoulders brushed every week by someone the book never names will be read as evidence, and the last of them is a second question of fact the book declines without a sign, an undeclared decline under the mode it has chosen. And the agent’s request for a second book is answered only negatively: the book has no series question that does not spend its own.

See also: the full treatment, with readings of Bring Up the Bodies, Beach Read, 61 Hours and Twin Peaks, and the household’s promise inventory and volume table in full.