The protagonist of Alan Furst’s most recent novel “Under Occupation”, set in occupied Europe in 1942, is a mystery writer and he offers how to go about constructing a novel and the reader can infer how Furst does the deed himself. The fictional writer says that there should be invented characters who are types or contrary to types so as to make the characters interesting and that there should be added local color, such as the colors of streetcars, so as to provide an authentic atmosphere. First applies his own prescriptions into this novel. Some women are portrayed as experienced, some less so, and he shows how it rains on a November Paris street, doing particularly well how a train filled with Germans and civilians are strafed by the RAF. That makes a novel engaging and moves a story along. But what is important in a novel are not these mechanics which provide some entertainment but also what might be called the themes of the novel which give it some moment, the sense of the meanings that a novel captures as the way life itself, here and everywhere and not just in the Occupation work, and so raise a novel to being more than an entertainment, if the way the world works is distinctive and clear enough, so that the reader gets an Alan Furst novel, or a Joyce novel, or a Morrison novel, it having created world distinctive in its own at the same time as an insight into the overall metaphysical world to which it has entered. These structures or ways in which being exists, are not as easily replicated as the schoolbook rules about how to create a novel. They have to do with the wisdom the writer may or may not know about the metaphysical and actual worlds are structured and can be inherent in the way the writer composes or thinks, Hemingway having always known ever since his early stories that his sentences added up to his pointillism style while Mann accumulated learning and history to add to his fluid style, his best work, in my opinion, during his most mature work, with “Joseph and His Brothers” rather than in “Death in Venice”, just as the mature Dickens had a dark complexity from “Great Expectations” on that made minor the comic romps of “David Copperfield” and “Oliver Twist”. So let us see what Furst does and not mind that he may not say what it is that he knows what he is doing.
Every novel worth its salt and many who don’t measure up have an arc in the narrative. There is an initiating event, and then follows a number of complications, and then there is a resolution of the original problem. In “Pride and Prejudice” two young men are out to find wives and by the end of it, they have the, There are a lot of complications and subplots along the way. I count eleven full out characterizations in the novel-- no chamber ensemble is this. In “Vanity Fair”, the heroine is an opportunist out to make her way in the world and she does so, with the plot twist that she is caring and loyal to the men she becomes conjoined. James Joyce, in “Ulysses” spends a day traversing Dublin from morning to night and in the process experiences all the physical traits of life as well as the intellectual and social ones. Sometimes the subplots can seem to muddy the waters concerning the main arc, but that is not the case. Charles Dickens has two plots, that of Pip and the convict, and that of Pip and the ward of Mrs. Haversham, but the two are connected in that everyone is concerned with ambition and how each of them are furthered by the others, however bizarre and outlandish these two older people are. Even an inferior or minor novelist, like Somerset Maughm, does the same thing, Phillip, with his clubfoot, becomes emotionally engaged with a tawdry girl and takes a long time before he is freed of her.
The arc of a novel can therefore be thought of as the “theory” of the novel because it finds a theme whereby the events and descriptions that make up the novel are offered up as something the author means to add or cannot but inadvertently imply, even though theory in this case is a metaphor for what happens in novels in that theory is usually reserved as a term for propositions used in words and formulas to find as an explanation of what is happening in real life, when story arcs need never be stated in so many words but are an inference. But the point is that a reader or a person cannot avoid making these inferences so as to make sense of the real world or what might be called ordinary life. You cannot avoid concocting an inference about those apparently random events that are interspersed and sometimes at long intervals in political life. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the arc of history is long but bends towards justice. Joe Biden says that the job of the President is to manage coronavirus and the economy and so not to be distracted by other matters however much there may be civil rights atrocities along the way. So people within history comment on history with their theories and therefore change history. How could it be otherwise? There is no doing away with both events and theory, however untidy the arc of the story may be.
I am not being abstruse, only to show how a novel works, and by inference how any model works. Alan Furst begins “Under Occupation '' with a chance encounter that gets him tied to the Resistance. Then he moves from one incident to the next, each an adventure where the hero escapes detection from the Gestapo, requiring as he does so to kill people or have people killed. These are briefly stated encounters, sort of short stories each one, or rather, parts of a picaresque novel in that there are different characters and problems in each one of them, each to be resolved before going to the next, though there are continuing characters--two women-- to provide some respite from the tension of escaping from the derring do. The arc of the story is to consider when the Gestapo will finally take hold of the hero and torture and destroy and even turn him, in which case there would have been asad and melodramatic story, or else there will finally be an escape, which does happen in many of Furst’s novels, and so this is a romantic ballad, like “The Scarlet Pimpernel” or “The Mark of Zorro”. Either way, pulp fiction, except that the way the arc is formed does give a way for events to be formed, and so even pulp fiction has its rewards. They are ways to make sense of things. Also to be appreciated is that Furst does very well on atmospherics even if none of the characters are well filled out, just pointing to a lesbian or a fiction writer or a thug. Furst shows how cold Paris is in the winter and how claustrophobic occupied Paris was, papers required everywhere and options of escape closing.
Here is another way in which the stylistics of a novel can inform the reader that the metaphysics of the world created by the author is distinctive and not just a display of the standard images and maneuvers by which an author makes his mark as pleasing, however much that first impression of Furst, for example, feasting in the atmosphere of Paris, is what makes his book entertaining to a reader. Furst, like other authors, provides a sense for the meaning of “cause”, by which is meant, in novels, Aristotle’s definition of efficient cause, which means how things happen in that one event precedes another and so lets a jury decide that a defendant had resulted in a broken nose because he had hit the plaintiff with his fist rather than because the plaintiff had a preexisting condition whereby the cartilage in his nose was weakened and likely to break. Jurors have to race ahead and determine what is to be taken as a relevant cause. What Furst does, whether or not he does so consciously, though I suspect authors are more self aware than we think them to be, is that there is a tension in this novel between the coincidences, accidents, lucky circumstances and the like that allow the hero to survive so long, and the long arc of fate whereby everything accumulates so that the hero is destined to be in the particular predicament in which he will find himself. How that will unfold, how he will go ever and ever more deeply into a muddle, is intriguing. That is very different from the recently reviewed John Le Carre book where the cause of things are set up by the protagonists deliberately even if one or the other people involved-- the bystander, the daughter, the counterspy-- have to unravel what were the underlying causes, which in that case was that a spy turned into a traitor. A very different story because of a different metaphysics, though both make use of very rainy weather.
The best way to understand Furst or any other novelist is to stand back and refer to a principle that is obvious, general, well discussed, and very profound, which is that story is very distinctive from exposition, even though both of them include sentences that provide descriptions some of which are true and some of which are fanciful. A story is a srt of events that are somehow tied together to provoke a variety of emotions but mostly to inquire what will happen next and that result in a way that the initial conflicts or problems get resolved. Othello kills the woman he loves while just about everyone around Hamlet dies, while the Rostov family in “War and Peace” and all of Russia carry on. How you get from the original situation to the conclusion is the story. Explanations, which are offered in the form of declarative sentences, can be offered in the characters within the body of a story or in the parenthetical remarks of the at least somewhat omniscient observer and so attributed to part of the action in at a character finds out or develops an understanding or else is strategically revealed by a narrator so as to amplify a particular point at a story, the story itself the metaphysical object on which everything--sentences, moods, characters-- hang, while expository writing is to make as best possible the meaning revealed about some other object. The story may have meanings but exists in itself alone, without purpose even if a writer like Hawthorne has a purpose in writing the story, while expository prose has an end in itself, which is to explain something, such as Lucretus or “Ecclesiastes”. So a reader can learn from Leviticus that it is an abomination for men to lie with one another but that it is of a different order of things to infer that the story of Sodom is about homosexuality because the story does not say so but is only a story even if thought to be a true one.
The consequence of this distinction is that even if characters say so, the meaning of a story is always inferred from the actions within the story because even if a character or narrator says something, what is said might be false or ironic or done to reveal something about either one of the two. Story and exposition are different kinds of being even if both use sentences and are parallel to the easier to understand difference between art and art criticism, where art criticism tries to explain or describe pictures in words while paintings and photos exhibit the geometric arrangements and images of art for whatever they are as experiences, not easily commensurable, any more that treating a Beethoven sonata as following a programme whereby a meaning is induced rather than the structure and sound of the music itself. So the maxim about novels is not to rush too quickly to find the meaning rather than why the story is compelling because of the plot devices, the atmospherics and the characters and the other aspects of story that are part of its repertoire. There is hard work in concluding meaning as more than a moral of good or bad people and “meaning” is a weak word for the metaphysical structure of the world of the novel constructed as indicated in the themes I have mentioned.