What's Your Point of View on Point of View?

The universe wants me to think about about the first-person.

This is one of those weeks when it feels like the universe is telling me what to write about, and that thing is “point of view.”

The things that seem to be pushing me in this direction are a newsletter entry from

Brandon

Taylor, “Against Casting Tape Fiction: First-Person and Interiority,” and episode of the New Yorker Critics at Large podcast, “The Elusive Promise of the First Person,” and the answer that Adam Haslett, author of the just-released Mothers and Sons, gave to me for a Q&A that I’ll be publishing in full early next week, but which I’ll excerpt here:

JW: I was thinking about the overarching structure of Mothers and Sons in light of your previous novels, Union Atlantic and Imagine Me Gone. In all three books you make use of multiple points of view, including five different first-person perspectives in Imagine Me Gone. (Though Michael’s is quasi-epistolary.) In Mothers and Sons you pare back to two, Peter (the son) and Ann (the mother). Peter’s story is told in first person, while Ann’s is in close third-person. Do you have a process for thinking through these choices or is it instinctual, the situation and character suggesting the best mode for conveying their part of the story?

AH: It goes back to what I said above about finding the right music in the prose to capture their experience of the world. For me, sentences and paragraphs should always be telling you something beyond their explicit content. They should be suggesting the workings of a mind. In Mothers and Sons, Peter is in a sense trapped in an eternal present. He focuses on the hard stories of his clients to the exclusion of nearly all else, while avoiding his own memory. So first-person, present tense, however difficult it is to maneuver in for the writer, was really the only option for him. Ann, in contrast, is far calmer, her mind more settled, and her sense of her own life is much more consciously narrated. So the third person, past tense point of view is the one that for me best reproduced in the prose itself, the way she experienced herself and others. Ideally, these things go unnoticed by most readers. Often I can’t remember the tense or point of view a book I’ve read was written in. But it will have affected me nonetheless.

That bolded part hits the nail on the head for me. I’m not sure what the point of using a first-person narrator is if you’re not going to use it in the service of suggesting the inter workings of the mind. It’s not like first-person fiction creates some kind of Vulcan Mind Meld between author and reader, but when handled well, it can create a real sense of intimacy between yourself and someone that doesn’t (really) exist.¹

Brandon Taylor is, to put it mildly, not a fan of writing in the first person, “I have no desire or intention to ever write fiction in the first person. I do not know what it is like to sit down and try to write ten or fifteen or two-hundred pages of fictional narration in the voice of I. Writing first-person fiction is as alien to me as attempting to do a Simone Biles floor or beam exercise in front of a panel of Olympic judges…To me, writing fiction in first-person constitutes weirdo behavior.”

Taylor goes on to observe what he sees as a trend in approaches to first-person a “first-person narrator without interiority, subtext, and indeed the very capacity for thought or judgement.” This attitude toward first person is related toward what Taylor views as a “passivity” of life, where experience and consciousness is entirely mediated through the visual. He says, “I have read pages and pages of scenes narrated from the first person in which an unnamed narrator sits in a room looking at light on a wall or at a cell phone, describing without affect a whole range of physical expressions—gestures, faces they pull—and yet nowhere on those pages does a single thought appear. Not even glancingly.”

These narrators are missing Hassett’s “workings of a mind” and result in a first-person perspective that is de-personified, which should be impossible, given that speaking in our own voices should be able to immediately establish who we are as a person.

Taylor’s provocations put to mind of an earlier newsletter by

Lincoln Michel

, “Turning Off the TV in Your Mind,” in which he makes similar observations to, that immersion in visual narratives have warped how first-person narration is executed, becoming more like the description from a first-person “camera” view (like you might get in a video game), without any of the interiority we can and should be experiencing from a first-person narrator telling a story.

The New Yorker critics use the new film adaptation of Colton Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys as the jumping off point for their discussion of the first person in narrative storytelling. The Nickel Boys the novel uses a conventional third-person narration (Brandon Taylor would approve!) that allows full access to the character’s interiors from jump street. These are the first two sentences of the novel following an opening prologue:

Elwood received the best gift of his life on Christmas Day 1962, even if the ideas it put in his head were his undoing. Martin Luther King at Zion Hill was the only album he owned and it never left the turntable.

Whitehead is using third-person to its full capacity in one sentence. We learn about Elwood’s internal self (best gift), we are situated in time (Christmas Day 1962), we are given a sense of his material reality (only album), and because of the narrator’s omniscience we are given access to something Elwood would not know at the time of the gift being received that also establishes a sense of anticipation (his undoing).

First-person would not work here for a number of reasons. A first-person past tense narrator would suggest Elwood is telling his own story retrospectively in a way that allows him the time and distance to make these determinations. A first-person narrator choosing the words “undoing” for what’s to come would be deliberately coy and withholding in a way that does not come across in third-person.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that these choices matter.

Nickel Boys the film makes use of a first-person perspective that has the audience seeing through the eyes of the character. You can get a flavor for the technique from the trailer.

The New Yorker critics, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz, had varying reactions to the approach. Based on the trailer, I am not a fan. Seeing through a character’s eyes in film is not the same thing as the interiority of a first-person narrator. In fact, it’s the opposite, as it’s the performance of an actor observed by a camera allows us to infer interiority.

As sensitive as I am as a reader to wanting the point of view to be “correct,” I also have to admit that off the top of my head I have very few specific memories of which books have first or third person narrators beyond obvious classic examples like Lolita, which forces us to spend time with Humbert Humbert’s interiority.

I tested myself with this row of books on a shelf in my home office to see if I could guess the narrative POV.

Off the top of my head, I was confident that Black Swan Green, Barney’s Version, Giovanni’s Room, and Journey to the End of Night are first-person. They are all directly told stories of the central character’s lives. I thought At Last, as a Patrick Melrose novel was first-person, but I was wrong. The three Percival Everett novels are first-person, which again, I guess I knew if I thought about it, but I don’t think about it that much.

Maybe there’s more first-person narrators among that group. I didn’t look at all of them.

I’m actually kind of enthused by the idea that I can’t remember this stuff off the top of my head because, paradoxically, it suggests how important a skilled deployment of the proper point of view is. For each of these books, I can clearly conjure the experience of reading them, but that experience overrides anything I can specifically recall about the technical matters of their construction.

This stuff isn’t magic. If I wanted I could go dive in and explain how I think all of these POV choices are working, but a lot of the time, I’m happy to just revel in the fact that great writers make the mechanisms of story invisible.

What’s your point of view on point of view?

Links

As mentioned above, this week at the Chicago Tribune I reviewed Adam Haslett’s very welcome first novel in nearly a decade, Mothers and Sons.

At Inside Higher Ed, I looked at the turbulence facing higher education and tried to remind myself and others that there’s always going to be a next, and what we do now can have a big impact on that future.

I really appreciated this personal roundup by

Naomi Kanakia

on “Which Publisher Has the Best Classics Line?” I’m an NYRB person myself.

I also found this new to me newsletter

Looking at Picture Books

exploration of Goonight Moon super fun.

Abebooks shared the most expensive sales on the platform in 2024. Can you guess what book sold for the most?

Discovering the

A Book Designer's Notebook

newsletter was another instant subscribe. This Q&A with the creator of a truly disturbing book cover (“A Cover People Might Love to Hate”) is fantastically interesting and insightful.

Via my friends

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

this week, a special piece authored by yours truly along with my frequent collaborator,

Kevin Guilfoile

. Kevin and I first started writing humorous little things together over 25 years ago, so it was nice to dust the tools off for “Mark Zuckerberg Makes Meta More Masculine.”

Recommendations

1. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
2. Middlemarch by George Eliot
3. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
4. On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) by Solvej Balle
5. Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

Jonna T. - Gothenburg, Sweden

Several of these reads are quite challenging, so I’m going to zag to that zig and recommend a book that is simple on the surface, but contains depths, Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym.

1. The Flower Sisters by Michelle Collins Anderson
2. Blood Sisters by Vanessa Lillie
3. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
4. Safe and Sound by Laura McHugh
5. A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France by Janet Hulstrand

Elizabeth E. - Columbia, MO

For Elizabeth, I’m recommending the first novel by one of my favorite writers, The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard.

Just over t-minus two weeks to the release of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. I laid my eyes on the finished copy for the first time this week.

Pre-orders are very helpful for all books, and also, please know that I’m more than willing to do any interviews, talks, interpretive dance that may help spread the word about the book’s existence. I sometimes wonder if we’re exiting an era where books are genuinely culturally important. More Than Words becoming a best seller would be a great way to show that this isn’t happening.

I’m on the road next weekend, but I’ve already arranged my work flow so that I can come to you in this space as always. Also, keep an eye out for my Q&A with Adam Haslett coming early this week.

Take care of yourself and others,

JW
The Biblioracle

1. I suppose we could interrogate this further if we’re talking about “auto fiction” (e.g. Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, et al) where the first person narrator is presented as essentially the author, but as long as we’re going to call auto fiction, fiction, those narrators, even if they share the same name and lives as the people creating them, don’t truly exist either.