But it’s not all about short chapters. A skilled writer can make long chapters an asset, too. Eleanor Catton’s bestseller “Birnam Wood” is a bigger book than those mentioned above, at 432 densely packed pages, but it has only three chapters. It’s almost the exact opposite of what Connelly and Erdrich do. With no chapters to tell you when to quit reading, you (OK, I) keep going long past the time you’d usually quit. What Catton puts on the page is so riveting that she knows she’ll make us stretch our bedtimes.
Catton is a screenwriter as well as a novelist, so it makes sense to keep going with cinematic comparisons. Her headlong “Birnam Wood,” about a group of environmental anarchists who run afoul of a soulless billionaire, has the feel of movies, like “Dog Day Afternoon” or “1917,″ that create the illusion of being one long scene so compelling that you can’t stop watching/reading.
Stephen King, who knows a thing or two about creating suspense on the page, may have influenced Catton. Most of his books have chapters, but at least two don’t. King said he didn’t divide his dog-as-monster “Cujo” into chapters because he wanted it to feel as if it came at readers in a rush, like “a brick through a window.” There are breaks provided by spacing in “Cujo,” but King’s “Dolores Claiborne” lacks any kind of respite for readers, presumably because it’s meant to be one long outpouring, the title character confessing crimes to the police. (Virginia Woolf’s chapter-less “Mrs. Dalloway,” is also a stream-of-consciousness book.)
I think of chapters as a clue to readers. Writers use them to give us a hint of how much information we’ll need to take in at once and also how quickly they plan to proceed, something that’s especially important in the first few chapters, which can serve as a roadmap to reading the rest of the book.
That’s probably why Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” messes around not just with chapter length but with how much he puts in each chapter. Many pages are crammed with so much information (some of it literally sideways) that they’re difficult to process; other chapters contain just a couple words. In both cases, that’s meant to convey something about the story, telling us when to race ahead and when to spend some time with a chapter.
So many of us readers hope to get lost in books, of course, but chapter divisions are a way for the author to intervene, to remind us of their presence.
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Publish date : 2024-08-26 02:00:00
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