Why are authors doing this?

HAVE WE LOST TRUST IN READERS?

There’s something strange I’m noticing about novels these days. Something in the way that current authors are writing that feels awkward to me. And I’m wondering if this strange thing is a trend, and if it is, why is it happening? 

Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash

I just finished reading Normal People by Sally Rooney. As the title suggests, it’s a literary story about two regular young people living their lives in and around Dublin, Ireland. It’s a story that can seem fairly pedantic, but it’s far from it. It’s layered with themes of identity and power dynamics in heterosexual relationships. 

How do I know these themes? 

Rooney tells me. In the book. Quite openly, actually. 

And that, my friends, is the strange thing I’m noticing in novels these days. 

Authors are just coming right out and telling you what the themes of their novels are directly from the narrator's mouth. They’re explaining and overexplaining themselves and their messages without restriction, without giving readers a chance to reflect and think critically. My assumption is that this is done intentionally. If that’s the case, I’m curious why authors have stopped trusting readers to figure out these themes on their own. 

I think this will make more sense if I give you some examples. Here are some excerpts from Normal People. This first one is from about a quarter of the way through the novel, so fairly early in the story. The narrator speaks in third person and is referring to the two main characters:  

“He pitied her in the end, but she also repulsed him. In a way she feels sorry for him now, because he has to live with the fact that he had sex with her, of his own free choice, and he liked it.” 

Okay…so you just literally explained the entire first part of the novel to the reader in plain language. Did Rooney really need to do that? As a reader, I may not have reached that point of realization yet. I’ve likely started to make some connections and some themes have started to emerge, but I certainly would not have been able to articulate my thoughts so clearly.

And that’s a good thing. It’s good that by that point in the book, I’m still figuring things out and making my own assumptions. That’s part of the beauty of reading; when things slowly come together the further along you read. Then the more you read, the more things start making sense and you flash back to earlier scenes to confirm your theories. 

That first excerpt was actually subtle. Here’s what Rooney does on the very next page:

“In just a few weeks time, Marianne will live with different people, and life will be different. But she herself will not be different. She’ll be the same person, trapped inside her own body. There’s nowhere she can go that would free her from this. A different place, different people, what does that matter?” 

So this time, instead of explaining the first quarter of the novel, Rooney tells me nearly exactly how the main character will fare for the rest of the story. 

And speaking of the rest of the story, here’s one more example from near the end of the novel:

“Ever since school he has understood his power over her. How she responds to his look or the touch of his hand. The way her face colors, and she goes still as if awaiting some spoken order. His effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, invulnerable. He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing this hold over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact he has cultivated it, and he knows he has.”

I don’t get it. 

Rooney’s writing reminds me of Jhumpa Lahiri’s. Both have a very simple, straight forward manner of expressing prose, though I believe Lahiri to be more poetic and slightly more sophisticated. I’m making this comparison because although Lahiri has a similar writing style, she doesn’t share this seeming need to overexplain. 

In Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Namesake, she tells what on the surface can be a mundane story but, like all of her novels, the themes are never blatantly expressed. Instead, readers must sit back and reflect on the entirety of The Namesake and determine what those themes can be. 

Rooney’s Normal People is just one example. I saw a similar pattern when reading Babel by R.F. Kuang. 

By now you know of my admiration for Kuang; Babel, in particular, is a brilliant piece of fiction. I’ve also enjoyed what I’ve thus far read of Rooney. But Kuang, like Rooney, is also not subtle about the messages in Babel. In fact, several times she has the narrator come right out and tell you. 

Here is one example that occurs in the latter third of the novel. This novel is also written in third person:  

“Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.”

Do you see what I mean? The narrator is literally telling you what they want you to take from this novel. No contemplation necessary. 

Here’s another example from closer to the end:

“He wanted to see how far he could take this. He wanted to see Oxford broken down to its foundations, wanted its fat, golden opulance to slough away…All those building assembled by slaves, paid for by slaves, and stuffed with artifacts stolen from conquered lands, those buildings which had no right to exist, whose ongoing existence demanded extraction and violence - destroyed, undone.”

When I started noticing this pattern, I went back and reread The Secret History by Donna Tartt. If you’re familiar with this novel, it is largely, if not entirely, responsible for the creation of the Dark Academia aesthetic. You can draw a straight line from Secret History to Babel without a single curve. 

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

When I was rereading  Secret History, I was doing so with the intent to find passages that were intentionally or unintentionally leading. Something that would disprove my thesis and maybe show me that I was overthinking and overreaching in this argument. But there was nothing. Zero. There’s not a scene I can quote that explicitly tells the reader what the themes could possibly be about. And The Secret History is written in first person, so it would’ve been easy for Tartt to over explain. But Tartt is a master of prose. Between Secret History and Goldfinch, it’s hard not to add her to the list of the top technically gifted authors in the western world. 

But let me step back for a minute. My question is why don’t authors trust readers anymore? Am I asking the wrong question? Maybe this is just a type of writing style, and like any other style, it has its intrigues and its issues. 

Or maybe it’s something else. I remember watching a Kuang interview and she addressed the question of being heavy handed. I don’t remember her precise, word for word, response, but I do remember the essence of what she said. Basically, she said she feels like sometimes it’s just necessary. That being subtle doesn’t always get the job done. 

I thought about that for some time. I watched this interview months ago, long before I thought about writing this article, but I must say that I don’t agree. 

I think authors should be subtle with their themes and messages. Readers should feel challenged in some way. They shouldn’t just be able to read what’s on the page and get it; not all of it. There’s a Toni Morrison interview that I can’t find for the life of me, but I remember clearly since I was in university. The interviewer was telling her that they sometimes need to flip back and reread passages from her novels for everything to make sense. Morrison, without flinching, stared at the interviewer and said, “That is called reading.” 

And that’s how I feel. There should be a surface story that readers can follow along and be engrossed, but then there should be parts of a novel that requires deeper examination. Everything should not be laid out, but inferred. 

It’s like reading a Jane Austen novel and thinking that they’re just love stories instead of deep feminist testaments. Austen would never include that phrase in her works, but when you step back and analyze her novels, you can peel layer after layer of significant feminist themes. 

But what do you think? Am I wrong here? Have you noticed this shift at all? Why do you think it is happening?