When and how should authors ask us to suspend disbelief?
Not long ago, I read the book Jacob's Folly
by Rebecca Miller. About half of the story takes place in 21st
century New York. The other half takes place in 18th century France.
Bringing this all together is the narrator, who is a fly. But he is no ordinary
fly. He lived as a man in France and now his soul has been brought back and
into the lives of two, modern-day people.
Yes, I know. You're already thinking "oy vey!" But I assure
you, this isn't as "oy vey" as you might think, however much it
should be.
Usually, when I read books like this, I recalled the incident of the creative writing class described
in author John Irving's Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. The class assignment
was to write about a meal. One student writes his story from the viewpoint of
the spoon. Only Irving and one other student don't like this. When Irving asks
that student why, he says "I am not a spoon." No, we are not spoons, and it seems absurd to think that readers can connect with a narrator that is so disconnected to our reality.
This was the same criticism
I had for Joanne Harris' book Blackberry Wine, in which she has a bottle of 1962
Fleurie talking to us in the opening chapter. Thankfully, she seldom came back to the wine narration after that first chapter. Mainly, she inserted this as a way to justify using the first person omnipresent POV (or in this case, first insect omnipresent).
Of course, both spoons and bottles of wine are inanimate objects. On the
other hand, a fly is a living thing, albeit an insect. And there are many books
(including ones not written for children) that use non-humans as their narrators. The two that
immediately come to mind are Watership Down and Animal Farm. These
are both worthy literary precedents for what Miller is trying to achieve here.
Ah, but there is a difference. In both those these classic cases, all
of the characters were animals. Here we have a fly mixing with homo-sapiens.
And what makes this all the more unusual is that this fly was once a human. This brings
us to the concepts of reincarnation and transmigration of souls, which are even
more difficult things to include in a novel.
This notion of taking the impossible (or improbable) and weaving it
with stark reality is what the genre of 'magical realism' is all about. We have
come to accept this in famous authors such as Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Toni Morrison and Joanne Harris. Why then, should we discount this in an
author who is less famous?
The point is, Miller takes us to the edge of reality and asks us to use
things we probably cannot (or are even unwilling to) believe in to keep us from falling into
the abyss of total disbelief. And she does it all for the sake of literally writing as a "fly
on the wall." That may seem to you to be a mechanic that's been used just to be clever, but I actually liked
it.
(Only after reading this book did I find out that Rebecca Miller is the daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller and is also married to actor Daniel Day-Lewis.)
