Playing with Point of View
Who’s Telling Your Story?
This group of Joshua trees in the California Botanic Garden may not look like any you’ve seen before. From their name, you know that they are supposed to have their arms raised to the heavens. Not these. Stand back far enough and the branches seem to scoop and swirl like sea serpents. Like dragons turning their necks back to have a good look at you.
I’ve often wondered if they grew this way because of where they’re planted. Maybe the environment isn’t quite right. Afterall, it is hot at the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, but it’s no Mojave Desert. Despite their challenges, in many visits over a decade, I always find them continuing to grow and bloom. Wherever you’ve been planted, I hope you’re doing the same.
Writing Prompt
What do we really mean when we say, “Bloom where you are planted?” What does this look like for your characters?
Describe a plant as an animal. Using the photo, why does it have a central claw?
Related Book Quote Prompt
“… my methods of navigation have their advantage. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
— Douglas Adams from The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, Ch. 13 (1988)
Craft Essay
When the pandemic entered our lives, I spent a lot of time confined with my dying parents in their assisted living facility. (A story for another time!) In the earliest days, we were not allowed to go out into the hallway to take a breather in case we caught COVID. During that confinement, while my father hallucinated and my mother, who had dementia, asked the same questions over and over, I thought a lot about point of view. I was revising my YA novel about a 14-year-old girl living in a polygamist cult. I wanted immediacy in the dangers of her situation. I’d started with a dual third-person close POV (the girl and her twin brother) in the past tense. Was that close enough? I rewrote the novel in first-person present tense. My workshop group didn’t like the change. Bad things happen to the characters, and this was too close for a teen read.
While I was in process, I read books with fluid POVs to see how great writers work in an unconventional space. I wrote an essay about what I found in two books: Trust Exercise by Susan Choi and Night of Fire by Colin Thubron. (Isn’t this what you would do if you were confined in a room with dying parents during a pandemic?)
The essay is long for a Substack post, so I’m breaking it in two, starting with Trust Exercise. Part I follows. I’ll post Part 2 next week. I added some inline citations in case you want to look through the books yourself.
Narrating an Unreliable Reality
While mulling over whether I should write a traumatized character in both the first-person past and third-person present, I experienced the happy coincidence of concurrently reading two novels which play with both time and point of view. I’d been listening to the audiobook Night of Fire by Colin Thubron, as I took my daily walks. The second novel, Trust Exercise by Susan Choi, is a book I’d had for months--a Christmas present that had landed somewhere in the middle of the tumble of books I receive each December, and was now at the top of the stack. Though I began Night of Fire first, listening distractedly while on the move made it hard for me to understand why both the POV and tense were shifting. I realized that I needed a print copy. While I waited for its arrival, I started reading Trust Exercise and found similar movement in POV and tense. Seeing the way masters of the craft create the shifting ground of unstable story encouraged me to try it myself.
Night of Fire’s epigraph (from Adam Phillips’ On Balance) would serve well for both books: “Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities and compelling nostalgias.” (np) Both novels concern the nature of memory, its influence on how we shape the present, and what happens when phantom histories are pulled from the discard pile. While Night of Fire is more deeply philosophical and expands to look outward at the vast world and many of its major religions, Trust Exercise homes in on students at a Southern high school, the City-wide Academy for the Performing Arts (CAPA). “Their own school was special, intended to cream off the most talented at selected pursuits from the regular places all over the city and even beyond, to the outlying desolate towns.” (2) Despite the school’s mission to nurture creativity, precocious students fall under the spell of amoral, narcissistic, and voyeuristic mentors, resulting in trauma and lifelong damage.
The title Trust Exercise has multiple layers: there is the class entitled Trust Exercise that the students are required to take; there is their own trust of each other and the trust of the students for their teachers; and there is the trust of the individual’s memory. As readers we are also engaged with characters, narrators, and the author in a sort of trust exercise. We expect someone to have control of the story. And that, Choi wishes us to know, is our mistake.
The first trust exercise detailed is a grope-in-the-dark, which takes place in The Black Box—the school theater with its large platform stage, risers and curtains, all black—under the direction of Mr. Kingsley, the self-satisfied drama teacher. Kingsley demands self-control, touting it as the virtue that leads to success while practicing none of his own. “His gaze was cast somewhere beyond them. His very way of gazing told them plainly how far they fell short . . . They felt their deficit all the more sharply because the unit of measure was wholly unknown.” (20)
Crawling through darkness, Sarah has her breasts squeezed and has to kick the offender away. But this trust exercise is also where she and David have the opportunity to physically explore one another. So begins their connection, one the novel will investigate and that is evident to all. “In repose, even when they both stared straight ahead, the wire ran between them, and their peers changed their paths to avoid tripping on it.” (9)
The long first section of the novel is entitled “Trust Exercise” as are the following two sections. It explores why the relationship between Sarah and David, one that is the heart of the story, fails early. Unlike a YA romance or a dystopia filled with romance, David and Sarah quickly pull apart and stay part, understanding love in separate ways. “To David, love meant declaration. Wasn’t that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn’t that the whole point?” (17) Yet the potency of their yearning and desire remain. All other relationships detailed in this section are subordinate to it.
Even before the reader learns that Sarah is a pseudonym for the woman who has written a novel about her high school experience with David, (in the first section, we are reading her as the protagonist of her own novel), her language indicates a writer at work. Long rolling waves of sentences, adroit imagery and metaphor show a literary presence, placing her unreliable memories at the center.
The narration in this section is largely intimate third-person, detailing the hearts’ desires of both Sarah and David. There are times when Sarah’s understanding of David and others will pull their thoughts into her narrative, even mid-paragraph, making them an extension of herself.
She tells [Mr. Kingsley]. Not all that same day; they’re already out of time. But now she is a regular. Their meetings wholly evident, and wholly unacknowledged, as is any exclusive liaison, by those it makes complicit, yet excludes. David sees, and grinds his molars together by day and night . . . David, God help him, has no consciousness of discarding Sarah, but of being discarded. (47)
Another rule-breaking pattern in Choi’s work is combining past and present tense in the same scene. An example is the Ego Deconstruction/Reconstruction exercise the students participate in as sophomores. One student stands in the center of a circle of students and becomes the hub of a wheel. In turn, she must select someone at the end of a single spoke to engage with. Mr. Kingsley selects Joelle, Sarah’s former best friend, to be the hub. Joelle selects Sarah to engage with and tells her how hurt she is over the dissolution of their friendship. The exercise begins in the past tense, but ends in the present:
“Joelle,” Mr. Kingsley murmured, in a tone of regretful admonishment . . . “Please stand at the circle’s exact center.’’
“Okay,'' Joelle said, blushing fiercely . . .
“Stand up for your feelings, Joelle!” Mr. Kingsley barks out . . .
Sarah is frozen, a statue, she’s staring blindly at the opposite wall . . . (20-21)
This change indicates that we can’t trust the past to remain so. Whenever we look back at formative relationships, we relive them, revise them in each reliving. One version drifts into the past, replaced by the version we are living now. Sarah, as our first narrator, is unreliable precisely because she is trying to create a coherent story of her experience, one that disguises individuals and reveals motives. She is making something public and useful out of her experience, the way a novelist might. “This is also self-control, Sarah thinks. This brute willing of the self to take action. Until now, Sarah thought self-control was only restraint: not putting the chair through the glass.” (23)
The emotional pitch of adolescence is brilliantly sustained in Trust Exercise as the second section begins. We learn that the first section of the book was the first half of a novel that Sarah has written about her CAPA experience. Karen (another pseudonym), one of the novel's characters, has read it. Unhappy that she has been relegated to minor status (her personality has been broken up among several characters including that of Joelle), Karen wants to confront Sarah and to tell the story as it really happened. The language of literature fades. Metaphor is far less important than precision, the need to remember exactly. She yearns for a truth that coheres with her experience and personality. In her telling, the point of view alternates from third to first person, often within the same paragraph. This rule breaking works because in Karen’s telling, she is both the character in Sarah’s novel and herself.
One more thing, before Karen and Sarah’s reunion. In her story, Sarah takes the actual friendship between Sarah and Karen, and turns it into a friendship between Sarah and Joelle. She also takes the actual end of that friendship, and turns it into a show that was watched by their classmates, a Trust Exercise. But it wasn’t. The death of our friendship was private. (138)
Later Karen will speak of standing outside and peering into a bookstore while Sarah reads from her novel. “‘I hadn’t broken the fourth wall for my own satisfaction, but the line [to have books signed by Sarah the author] was a different arrangement. It promised each person a private encounter, but under the rules of encounters in public.’” (144) That same evening, Karen imagines that the most unexpected thing Sarah could have encountered on her book tour is having a character from her novel show up in the flesh to invalidate all her memories.
But while Karen tells us that her memory is the proverbial steel trap, she occasionally inserts a reminder that certain details are lost to time. We want to trust her because we’re fully invested in the story, not just of teen emotionality and the universal trials of sexual awakenings, but of kids who are badly misused by their teachers, their trusted adults.
Karen's need to be precise is sometimes illuminating, sometimes irritating. Her persistence in stopping the narrative to define the words she chooses reminds us of a seventh grader who is learning to write the five-paragraph essay, one who has learned ‘A definition is a good way to hook the reader’ and off he goes. Pity the poor teacher who has to read a hundred of these. Pity the poor reader who just wants Karen to lay out her version of the story.
What is achieved by having the narrators move in and out of themselves is an understanding not simply that memory is slippery, but that individuals would like their experience to be transferable. That is, they want it to be the truth.
All novels are about controlling the uncontrollable. Whether the author allows the characters to pretend to be able to do so is an artistic choice. In Trust Exercise, Susan Choi not only won’t allow it, her use of shifting POV and alterations in time show that control of the self, in the sense of control over one’s own story, is the thing no one is able to let go of, no matter how many times the effort has failed.
Reading Trust Exercise, I thought of John Irving’s way of having the first sentence of a novel summarize its story. “Neither can drive,” (1) the first sentence of Trust Exercise, accurately meets this challenge. Cars figure as a presence and symbol in Trust Exercise as significantly as they do in The Great Gatsby, the difference being that in Gatsby, the reader is warned to beware of those who are lousy drivers. In Trust Exercise, no one controls the wheel. Characters are themselves and outside themselves; they are of their own minds and of others’ minds; they are acting in the past and in the present at once. We, who are the passengers on the journey, are kept in a panicked uncertainty, hoping for the safe arrival that refuses to come.
Choi, Susan. Trust Exercise. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019.
Thubron, Colin. Night of Fire: A Novel. New York: Harper, 2017.