Maurice Stoker On Writing a Prize Winning Best Seller - 3

2) Happiness is getting it in the end

Tell a simple, easily assimilated, preferably mundane tale hidden behind a façade of words. Lots of words. Don't let the story out early but hint at some impending horror too dreadful to imagine; blurt it out in a single chapter late in the book as an embedded fragment of what could be a short story. Be careful that the horrid event does not end as miserably as the reader is led to believe.

This is accomplished admirably herein (The God of Small Things referent of herein) with the arrest and beating of a low caste individual (untouchable), a small thing in many parts of the world had it been applied to such a miscreant (US police or FBI with blacks or Haitians or Amerindians or white supremacists or others; Hutu Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi with Tutsis; Janjaweed militia in the Darfur region of Sudan versus the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit; Serbs and Albanians; Shiite and Sunni; Hindu and Muslim; etc.). After all, readers don't want reality. No Pere Lebrun (Haitian necklace) which Aristide termed "a beautiful device," which "smells good and everywhere you go you want to breathe it."

But not in fiction. Not to depress.

3) Use disjointed, repetitive narrative that meanders pointlessly

This is important because it is so fashionable it has a name: nonlinear narrative. However, this fashion need not be invariant across prizes, as it is not necessarily helpful with the Pulitzer, nor is it likely to be time-invariant either.

I find the word nonlinear a bad choice. Granted it lends the prestige of scientific and mathematical language to literary criticism which might lead to the same successful ceremonial magic that economics has enjoyed in recent decades with its apery of mathematical and scientific language, casting a world view similar to that of the ancient Romans regarding augury by sheep intestines or its less messy modern replacement with scrying via shiny things or poorly applied, unverified mathematical ideas. So overwhelming has been this mythological worldview that it has led to a change in language, important according to the ideas of Benjamin Whorf, with i.e. the word impact (once signifying the action of an inelastic solid such as a billiard ball upon the impingement of another inelastic solid imparted with momentum; unfortunately these days it seems closer in real meaning to the medical usage of the word: impacted prose) now substituted for the noun effect or the muddy verb affect to impart an illusion of chains of causality. (Reading the economic literature of past decades, one will find there the Origin of Said bogus usage.)

Instead of nonlinear, the better word would be non-serial, since that is the how the narration actually precedes; however, non-serial does not equate to nonlinearity in mathematics or physics. Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow imposes nonlinearity in events, having the future affect the past, as does José Saramago in História do Cerco de Lisboa, both of which proceed in serial chronology, unlike the approach of Machaco de Assis in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas which is both nonlinear and non-serial. One could also claim Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Voyage au Bout de la Nuit is nonlinear in a spatial sense not like any of the works above, yet narrated serially in time. Of course the "avant-garde" technique called "nonlinear" alluded to above is not at all new, having been used frequently over the centuries since the invention of the Novel. In the 20th century Aldous Huxley used it with great purpose in Eyeless in Gaza, but he is not by any means unique or alone (except his intent other than obfuscation).

For a masterful, current implementation of this technique see Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing; though unless Powers learns not to show so much and tell so little in his writing, he is likely not to win any meaningful prizes other than the suspect National Book Award or Nobel Prize, both awarded by terrorist sympathizers. (See how few paragraphs he uses to sketch the music school's founder and master János Reményi while simultaneously laying bare the parental protective paranoia in the single story of an audition. With such writing, it is unlikely this author can hope to win fame and fortune with the masses, who hunger after words spilled like blood and guts (of Others, not their own).) His use of musical form and of some (misunderstood and mistaken) notions from physics (but Block Time) in his narration are highly imaginative and nonlinear in a mathematical sense.

Besides, Powers reminds the reader the US is a nation of racists, a topic not welcome and best forgotten. After all, how many remember a US Navy destroyer in Iranian territorial waters shooting down an Iranian commercial jet loaded with civilian passengers? Of course it was it the fault of the damned Iranians for flying. How dare they use modern technology, as Bush Senior, then VP of the US, implied in his statement to the UN.

The real purpose of meandering through the narration with misplaced bits and pieces of fragments not of any consequence to the story except as hints (certainly not of relevance in revealing the characters except for a few quirks that will play a psychological foil (to be discussed (somewhat later (as a Precondition? for (whatever))))) is to give an impression (Illusion?) of deep thought. (You would be amazed how many people confuse boredom with thinking.) Judges desire to award prizes to works of depth and complexity and powerful insights; readers out to impress their colleagues and associates at cocktail parties and work will Need to mention the titles of such works. The author succeeds admirably, filling more than three hundred pages with such scraps (while simultaneously making certain the reader is not shown any thing about any character or event or anything else that might mislead) so that the reader comes away having gotten every little piece of the story by blunt trauma when and only when the author is ready for said points to be hammered in. This leads to the next important (crucial?) technique.

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