Secret Letter #2: What Do You Read When You Read a Novel?

Do you care about the plot? Do you care about the story? Do you care about the language? Do you care about sentence length? Do you care about imagery?

When I was younger, I would love stories with last line twists. To me, there was nobody more imaginative than a writer who could stump a reader with an ending that one didn’t anticipate. Guy de Maupassant, Saki, O’ Henry were the masters of the trade and I absolutely adored them. As I grew older, I started writing fiction myself and as you’d expect, I tried to emulate my heroes. I’d not begin writing a story until I could weave an expected twist as I reached the end. The most enjoyable were stories with double or triple twists. It naturally veered me towards reading fast paced fiction, thrillers or pop fiction with cliff-hangers on every page. Dan Brown, Jeffrey Archer, James Patterson, even Chetan Bhagat’s debut book Five Point Someone, they worked for me because they’d keep me on my toes as to what happens next.

In college, I transitioned from reading popular fiction to something that’s called literary fiction. And it changed how I saw writing and reading. It no more was about the mind-blowing twist in the tail, but it became more about how rich the language was, how imaginative the description was. From the mind-boggling ends of Maupassant, I transitioned to the subtlety of Chekhov. From the immersive thrill of Dan Brown, I moved on to the existential thrill of Kafka. Words and thought took over the ups and downs of a storyline. For instance, when I was reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, I was stumped by the sentences she wrote instead of the plot. Consider the line:

In the old house on the hill, Baby Kochamma sat at the dining table rubbing the thick, frothy bitterness out of an elderly cucumber.

Who could have imagined describing an old soggy cucumber as elderly? It cracked up a smile on my face, the surprise no less than encountering the perfect last line twist. In a well-written novel such as Roy’s, the cliff-hangers aren’t in the plot as much as they are in every other sentence. Consider another such sentence:

Laughter curled around the edges of Rahel’s voice.

The verb curl is so apt. It is not technical, it is not forced. It is simple, and at the same time, human. You can almost hear the laughter. This is pure skill on the part of the author, and as a reader, it is no less than witnessing a neat magic trick.

The journey of most readers that read fiction go through the same trajectory. We start with books that are light and breezy, where the plot takes the center stage, and as we grow and our reading grows, we start noticing the language. From the obsession for what-happens-next, our motivation to read further transitions to how-it-is-described-next. Consider this excerpt from Manu Joseph’s Serious Men:

Ayyan Mani's thick black hair was combed sideways and parted by a careless broken line, like the borders the British used to draw between two hostile neighbours.

Who’d have thought a careless broken hair parting could be thought of as a line of control. The book, which was also adapted into a Netflix film with the same name, is peppered with clever similes and allegories. Here’s another one:

Furtive lovers were beginning to arrive. They sat on the parapet and faced the sea, their hands straying or eyes filling depending on what stage the relationship was in. And their new jeans were so low that their meagre Indian buttocks peeped out as commas.

The simile of comma to describe the butt-crack is utterly unexpected and so visual that one feels slightly scandalised. It makes one chuckle sheepishly. Whoa, commas out of all things?! One is tempted to exclaim. It makes you read on, eager to see what else could be thought of differently. Good writing holds surprise and originality not just in the meandering of plots, but in every sentence. This joy of finding a good sentence makes reading so pleasurable.

Many times, the lines that work for us aren’t because of their inventiveness but their insight. Be it Roy writing: If you're happy in a dream, does that count? or Rushdie’s Most of what matters in our life takes place in our absence in his masterpiece, Midnight’s Children, or Manu Joseph’s clever take on relationships in Serious Men:

The fate of every love story, he knew very well, is in the rot of togetherness, or in the misery of separation. Lovers often choose the first with the same illusory wisdom that makes people choose to die later than now.

There are so many things that hold us on to a book. It ranges from its plot to its language, from inventiveness to insight, and there’s no one thing fits all. Great books check all the boxes, or at times, are so different that they devise their own boxes for us to check. All of us readers are on different journeys, and we’d love to know what about a book makes you turn the page. Write back and tell us. :)

Counting letters,
Harsh
Co-curator, Cubbon Reads

P. S. If you’re a writer, we have something for you. Here’s a beautiful interview of the Indian-American writer Akhil Sharma, where he shares the craft of writing fiction and the attention to detail that is required from a writer. The interview below begins at 1:27, our favourite portion from this interaction.