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mysterydissertation[originally posted on tumblr.]
I am obsessed with Tana French. I recently finished The Witch Elm, her latest mystery novel. As I read, I covered it in sticky notes, trying to figure out how French constructed it–what phrases and sentences piqued my interest? When did I feel the stakes getting higher? When did I suspect whom? What thematic questions and patterns of language was I noticing weaving it all together? I decided I wanted to write a little bit about what reading The Witch Elm reminded and revealed to me about what I love and want to emulate in my own mystery novel. These are those reminders:
1. Early on, introduce the idea that something is going to get really messed up, but do it by dropping hints that connect a vague looming catastrophe with a location, person, or event, not by starting off with an excerpt from later in the novel (as some mysteries do). It takes The Witch Elm FOREVER to get to the murder mystery, but very early on, the novel trains readers to think of Ivy House, the eventual location of the murder, as a place associated with tragedy and nostalgia. In the second paragraph of chapter one, the narrator says, I don’t think anyone could convince me, even now, that I was anything other than lucky to have the Ivy House. It’s that little aside–even now–that feels prophetic and mysterious and doom-laden and makes me want to read more.
2. Use the mystery genre to address thematic questions that it is ideally suited to consider. French is always asking big unanswerable questions in her mysteries–about memory, or home, or family, or madness–and she knows how the genre’s most basic elements (like violent acts, defamiliarizing the familiar, and not really knowing the people we think we know) work really really well to investigate these hugely complex and urgent questions. She also weaves issues of class, colonialism, heteronormativity, and the like so deeply into the mystery plots that if you tried to take them out, they would completely fray apart. In The Witch Elm, she’s asking questions about privilege and power by getting into the mind of a man who’s a classic “nice guy”: white, straight, oblivious, well-meaning. His encounters with violence and murder throw his confident, privileged sense of self into chaos. There are no easy answers about how much he learns and why he does what he does and what we think and feel about him in the end. The mystery plot wraps up, but, as always, French leaves us with the sense of larger questions unresolved. As in all her novels, the world never goes back to being a safe, knowable place.
3. Be interesting. Bizarre scenarios. Puzzling clues. Plenty of reveals. Lots of atmosphere. Let a skull fall out of the hole in a tree. Let the protagonist have to rethink his entire adolescence. Don’t get too hung up on being “realistic”–but do make sure the mystery plot comes together in cohesive and satisfying ways. French gets away with a lot of weird stuff because she makes it work, plot-wise (and because her prose is so ridiculously good).
4. Make us care about the characters. But let them do terrible things. We care about them more, not less, if they hurt us. Sometimes I hesitate to make characters I like do things that might make readers not like them anymore. But the mystery genre requires it–and these things raise the stakes, give us character insights, and break our hearts in satisfying ways. I want to avoid spoilers for French’s novel here, so I’ll just say that I was compelled, not simply repelled, by the characters who do bad things, because they are complex and fascinating and because, in complicated difficult ways, sometimes I found that I was still on their side.
5. Include those long, detail-rich descriptions of places and memories and people and feelings that you really want to write. Jasmine creepers swinging dizzily outside the window, back and forth. A watercolor off-kilter on the wall, swallows in a heart-stopping nosedive. Crazy slants of light across the table. Sensory descriptions can create atmosphere, add to the sense of urgency, guide readers to feel certain ways. They’re not boring–and they don’t just hold up the action. Don’t sacrifice prose style, description, reflection, or character building for the mystery plot.
I am obsessed with Tana French. I recently finished The Witch Elm, her latest mystery novel. As I read, I covered it in sticky notes, trying to figure out how French constructed it–what phrases and sentences piqued my interest? When did I feel the stakes getting higher? When did I suspect whom? What thematic questions and patterns of language was I noticing weaving it all together? I decided I wanted to write a little bit about what reading The Witch Elm reminded and revealed to me about what I love and want to emulate in my own mystery novel. These are those reminders:
1. Early on, introduce the idea that something is going to get really messed up, but do it by dropping hints that connect a vague looming catastrophe with a location, person, or event, not by starting off with an excerpt from later in the novel (as some mysteries do). It takes The Witch Elm FOREVER to get to the murder mystery, but very early on, the novel trains readers to think of Ivy House, the eventual location of the murder, as a place associated with tragedy and nostalgia. In the second paragraph of chapter one, the narrator says, I don’t think anyone could convince me, even now, that I was anything other than lucky to have the Ivy House. It’s that little aside–even now–that feels prophetic and mysterious and doom-laden and makes me want to read more.
2. Use the mystery genre to address thematic questions that it is ideally suited to consider. French is always asking big unanswerable questions in her mysteries–about memory, or home, or family, or madness–and she knows how the genre’s most basic elements (like violent acts, defamiliarizing the familiar, and not really knowing the people we think we know) work really really well to investigate these hugely complex and urgent questions. She also weaves issues of class, colonialism, heteronormativity, and the like so deeply into the mystery plots that if you tried to take them out, they would completely fray apart. In The Witch Elm, she’s asking questions about privilege and power by getting into the mind of a man who’s a classic “nice guy”: white, straight, oblivious, well-meaning. His encounters with violence and murder throw his confident, privileged sense of self into chaos. There are no easy answers about how much he learns and why he does what he does and what we think and feel about him in the end. The mystery plot wraps up, but, as always, French leaves us with the sense of larger questions unresolved. As in all her novels, the world never goes back to being a safe, knowable place.
3. Be interesting. Bizarre scenarios. Puzzling clues. Plenty of reveals. Lots of atmosphere. Let a skull fall out of the hole in a tree. Let the protagonist have to rethink his entire adolescence. Don’t get too hung up on being “realistic”–but do make sure the mystery plot comes together in cohesive and satisfying ways. French gets away with a lot of weird stuff because she makes it work, plot-wise (and because her prose is so ridiculously good).
4. Make us care about the characters. But let them do terrible things. We care about them more, not less, if they hurt us. Sometimes I hesitate to make characters I like do things that might make readers not like them anymore. But the mystery genre requires it–and these things raise the stakes, give us character insights, and break our hearts in satisfying ways. I want to avoid spoilers for French’s novel here, so I’ll just say that I was compelled, not simply repelled, by the characters who do bad things, because they are complex and fascinating and because, in complicated difficult ways, sometimes I found that I was still on their side.
5. Include those long, detail-rich descriptions of places and memories and people and feelings that you really want to write. Jasmine creepers swinging dizzily outside the window, back and forth. A watercolor off-kilter on the wall, swallows in a heart-stopping nosedive. Crazy slants of light across the table. Sensory descriptions can create atmosphere, add to the sense of urgency, guide readers to feel certain ways. They’re not boring–and they don’t just hold up the action. Don’t sacrifice prose style, description, reflection, or character building for the mystery plot.
Re: Tana French and your dissertation
Date: 2018-12-23 01:42 am (UTC)Oh my god, he was. Sherlock specifically! A red setter!! And the way French talks about mystery solving, like it's comparable to romance ("your dream girl").
The Likeness is actually one of my, like, three favorite books on earth. I love Cassie and I love her voice. I love the way she gets drawn into Lexie's life and home because it sounds just like things I've fantasized about: “It was like being one of those kids in books who find a magic spyglass that lets them into the secret life of some old painting, enthralling and risky” (75).
And I'm so so seduced by Whitethorn House myself. The renovating, and the way they all touch each other casually, and the cooking and shared meals and clothes. It's like--god, the way the four of them make this queer family:
“They probably had no more clue about real-life families than I did. I should have spotted from the beginning that this was one of the things they had in common…Consciously or subconsciously, they had collected every paper-thin scrap they could find and built their own patchwork, makeshift image of what a family was, and then they had made themselves into that.” (158)
And their whole thing is "no pasts." BUT it doesn't work because (1) Daniel is authoritarian about it and (2) they forgot that "no pasts" is not possible when you live in a house built by British colonizers in Ireland! So, like, the queer family falls apart, but I think for really good reasons--French is critiquing that mode of living when it's not attentive to historical violence and when it's not really egalitarian.
And the book does such a spectacular job of taking apart the female detective/female victim doubling that happens in a lot of mystery novels. Cassie really gets to wallow in that connection--the particularly feminized mode of being both vulnerable to violence and brazenly defiant of it. And they blur into each other, the two of them, in this heartbreaking and fascinating way.
And Lexie's mode of a sort of radical refusal of all ties, all "normal" life paths--another sort of queer mode of living:
"She had held her whole life, everything she was, as lightly as a wildflower tucked in her hair, to be tossed away at any second as she took off burning streaks down the highway. What I hadn’t managed to do even once, she had done easily as brushing her teeth. No one, not my friends, not my relatives, not Sam or any guy, had ever hit me like this. I wanted to feel that fire rip through my bones, I wanted that gale sanding my skin clean, I wanted to know if that kind of freedom smelled like ozone or thunderstorms or gunpowder.” (186)
THE LANGUAGE AHHHH
Okay, I could keep going but I won't; I wrote a seminar paper on The Likeness awhile back and I will not rehash any more of it here. But. Those are my feelings.
Interesting! I actually didn't love Faithful Place--I like it, but it's not my favorite. I think I don't like Frank as much as the others, maybe? And maybe it's the dead ex-girlfriend thing and the delicate daughter whom he keeps disappointing because of work? I just get tired of those tropes. But that's so true about the dialogue; it is incredible. And I love In the Woods, and Broken Harbor. I don't know if I think The Secret Place totally works for me, structurally, but it's beautifully written.
Re: Tana French and your dissertation
Date: 2018-12-27 05:59 pm (UTC)Likewise, I agree with you about Faithful Place; the things you didn't like about it are dead-on right. The tropes you mention are really overdone, and French didn't do anything new with them, and that's boring. And... while I was reading it, that didn't bother me at all. I didn't even think about it. The characters were so well-rendered that they just crowded out everything else in my mind.
I suppose what that boils down to is that different readers make a (sometimes unconscious) agreement with the author to suspend their disbelief in different ways, and those ways have more to do with the psyche of the reader than with any objective truth about the writer, or about Fiction in general.
Some critic, I forget who, said that French's books are all actually about architecture. I agree with that. Architecture as a means to explore class, for one. And houses as signifiers of family and its rupture.
I have finished The Secret Place now, and agree that structurally it's a little wobbly. I also didn't care about the characters the way I cared about Adam and Frank and Cassie. I didn't care about Scorcher that way either, but I loved Broken Harbor anyway. If there's a definition of a modern take on the gothic novel, Broken Harbor is IT.
In the Woods and Faithful Place and The Likeness are all love stories, I think (in Faithful Place the pairing is Frank/family of origin) and I do love a good love story. The love story in Secret Place--between the four girls--never quite took off for me, though I ADORED the way she casually rendered their casual magical abilities. That felt so true, and an example of how a writer can call something into being and make it embodied.
Re: Tana French and your dissertation
Date: 2018-12-27 06:03 pm (UTC)