Where the Stress Falls Read Online Free PDF Page A

devise new, ingenious, giddy, ever more hyperbolic phrases to sum them up. They keep on being foolish, and he—the narrative voice—keeps on being inventive. His restlessness is lexical, or rhetorical, not psychological or ethical. Is there yet one more way to pin these follies down verbally? Forward!
     
     
    HOW TO CIRCUMSCRIBE and refine a story and how to open up a story are two sides of the same task.
    To explain, to inform, to amplify, to connect, to color in—think of the essayistic digressions in Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, The Egoist, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain. Such pursuit of completeness plumps out a novel. Is there a verb “to encyclopedize”? There has to be.
    To condense, to pare away, to speed up, pile up, to be ready to renounce, to distill, to leap ahead, to conclude (even if one intends to conclude again and again)—think of the aphoristic glitter of The Pilgrim Hawk, Pictures from an Institution, Sleepless Nights . Such pursuit of celerity brings a novel’s weight and length down drastically. Novels driven by the need to summarize, to intensify inexorably, tend to be single-voiced, short, and often not novels at all in the conventional sense. Occasionally, they will go after the deadpan, mock smoothness of an allegory or fable, as does Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father . Is there a verb “to angularize”? Or “to ellipsify”? There ought to be.
    Compressed first-person narrations don’t tell any kind of story; they tend to project a few distinctive moods. A surfeit of experiences that bring worldly wisdom (and, usually, disenchantment) is often intimated. It’s hard to imagine a naïve narrator with a penchant for trenchant summary. Such moods color the whole span of the narration, which can darken but does not, strictly speaking, develop. In fictions narrated by a resident observer the end lies much closer to the beginning than in fictions enhanced by digressions. Not just because the novel is shorter but because the look is retrospective and the tale one
whose end is known from the beginning. However straightforward the narration tries to be, it can’t help registering a few tremors of anticipated pathos: the pathos of the already known, and the not prevented. The beginning will be an early variant on the end, the end a late, somewhat deflating variant on the beginning.
    Stories kept lean by ellipsis and refined judgments rather than fattened by essayistic expansiveness may look like a quicker read. They’re not. Even with sentences that are fired like bullets, attention can wander. Every exquisite linguistic moment (or incisive insight) is a moment of stasis, a potential ending. Aphoristic finalities sap forward momentum, which thrives on more loosely woven sentences. Sleepless Nights —a novel of mental weather—enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash. It has no shape in the usual novelistic sense. It has no shape as the weather has no shape. Like the weather, it arrives and departs, rather than, in the usual structured way, begins and ends.
    A first-person voice devoted to looking and reflecting is likely to be drawn to reporting its displacements, as if that were mainly what a solitary consciousness does with its time. These fictions with melancholy or frankly superior narrators are often travelers’ tales, stories of a wandering of some sort, or a halt in that wandering. The Pilgrim Hawk takes place among the peripatetic rich. The staid academic village depicted in Pictures from an Institution is full of successful professionals coming from or on their way to somewhere else. Such well-oiled travels are about as dramatic as the story gets. Perhaps the fictions that condense have to be relatively plotless, large brawling events being better accommodated in fat books.
    Many displacements are recorded in Sleepless Nights, none