Reading in Public No. 71: Intimacy, authenticity, and reliability of point of view

Considering POV from a reader's perspective

Mark your calendars! Reading in Public is moving to Wednesdays. To give myself more time to think, write, and edit, I’ve shifted my publishing calendar back one day.

Today I’m also trying something a little different. In this essay, I’m sharing some musings about POV and how considering POV is impacting my reading. The majority of the essay and all of the foundational thinking is available for free, but behind the paywall I’ve included more analysis and examples from my own reading. I’m trialing this format in advance of some ideas I hope to implement in the coming months. As always, thanks for reading!

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Throughout my reading life I have had moments of upheaval when I feel my taste, interests, and aversions morphing. Shortly after completing my MA and starting my career as a high school English teacher, I found myself drawn for the first time to young adult fiction and other “accessible” novels I could easily pass along to students. As my online reading presence grew and I began receiving books from publishers, I became fascinated by the shifting trends of the contemporary literary landscape though I’d previously almost exclusively read classic and backlist books. When teaching The Things They Carried I developed an interest in metafiction. I devoured as many meta books as possible and found that the more I read, the more it impacted all of my reading. While reading a mountain of new releases for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, I noticed my distaste for short, staccato sentences and intangible similes, both of which still bother me to this day.

I am currently experiencing another moment of upheaval having to do with point of view, or what Rebecca Makkai succinctly describes as “narrative perch.” Makkai explains that narrative perch is not just who is telling the story (the basic first, second, third we learn in school) but also whom they are telling it to, when it is being told (at what distance from the events), and why the story is being told.

In truth, I hadn’t thought all that much about point of view until the last six months or so. Maybe this makes me a bad reader. Of course I considered it and analyzed it when it was clear to me that it really mattered. Nick’s narration in The Great Gatsby, for example, or Jane Austen’s brilliant free indirect style. I would often ask myself how reliable the narrator of any given novel was, but I didn’t think much about why the author might have chosen a particular perch for their narrative, nor did I consciously notice what effect these choices had on my reading.

I think one of the reasons I didn’t give POV much thought is that so many works of contemporary fiction are written in first person or alternating first person points of view. Often when I do encounter contemporary third person narratives the lens is so close to a single character, it feels like you could replace the he’s with I’s, make the verbs agree, and have basically the same effect. I think I’d cataloged books in my brain by thinking that most contemporary fiction was first person while most classics were written in third, with the exceptions being quite notable. Another likely reason for my lack of attention to POV is that I am not a fiction writer. Other than one truly terrible creative writing summer class I took in college¹, I have never tried my hand at writing fiction and have never wanted to. Most of what’s written about POV is from the perspective of writers for other writers, and having never thought about POV from the position of a writer, I wasn’t inclined to dig into it.

Certainly there are other reasons why POV has never been a glaringly apparent craft choice for me (I’m much more of a forest person than a trees person by nature), but, whatever the cause, it’s been something that’s blended into the background. While I remember many details from the books that I’ve read, I bet if you had asked me six months ago what points of view my recent reads were written from, I wouldn’t have known at least fifty percent of them. What a fascinating feat of craft that such a major decision by an author can become nearly undetectable to a reader!

But all of this has changed for me, and now I can’t stop noticing and obsessing over point of view. I started the year knowing I wanted to read more books written in third person. Though I’ve love many of them and couldn’t at the time express why, I knew I felt weary of first person narratives. Further fueling my interest in POV were an essay from Brandon Taylor and the aforementioned post by Rebecca Makkai. Both authors teach creative writing as well as write critically acclaimed novels themselves so they read a lot of fiction in development and coach emerging writers towards the most effective ways to tell their stories.

Taylor’s essay considers how the prevalence of visual mediums has impacted contemporary writers, stating, “We have a generation of writers who have watched more movies, television, and footage of human life than they have experienced of that life firsthand.” As a former teacher, I can tend to get a little defensive about blanket statements about the youth, but Taylor is a teacher as well and I think his observations ring true. We do a lot more watching in our modern era which leaves much less time for thought and reflection. The result of this, in Taylor’s view, is that first person narratives are losing one of their primary purposes: interiority.

What I encounter in workshops and drafts and sometimes even in published pages is a cooly objective first-person narration, stories and novels told from an I lacking both explanatory power and the impulse toward explication itself. The deracinated I is a filmic projection, dancing on cinema’s halogenic glow, but lacking the charisma and poetic force of cinema qua cinema. The first-person narrator without interiority, subtext, and indeed the very capacity for thought or judgement is the purest expression of the passivity that organizes much of contemporary life.

This fascinates me because I initially disagreed with the premise that “a cooly objective first-person narration” is dominating contemporary fiction. A lot of the contemporary first person narratives I encounter are what can be described as voicey. They have a distinctive rhythm or set of speech patterns that make them leap off the page, and the author is able to communicate personality through character voice. But voice is not the same thing as interiority. Many of the voicey narrators I meet in fiction are not all that introspective—the voices are directed outwards.

For Makkai, the issue isn’t first person POV itself², but a lack of consistency and an inability to fully grasp theory of mind. Many narratives struggle when authors do not firmly stick to the rules of whatever POV they have chosen. A first person narrator cannot see themselves from the outside, for example. Or perhaps a narrator wavers on whether they know what’s happening in a character’s mind or how far removed they are from the action of the text at the moment of the telling. In her post, she writes,

95% of the problems that I see in the work of advanced students can be traced back to point of view. That 95% includes issues with orientation and clarity, issues of framing, issues of meaning and change… all of which stem from foundational missteps on the narration itself.

Makkai believes these issues account for the majority of missteps for writers, but what I’ve been wondering as I’ve encountered these pieces, is what impacts POV issues are having on readers.

I had the opportunity to really think deeply about this when preparing to teach a class on point of view to our Novel Pairings community³. I wanted to move beyond just being able to identify the POV of a text and to consider the benefits and limitations of various narrative styles. This was such a valuable exercise for me personally as a reader, because there aren’t easy answers to these questions. It’s not necessarily a case of “use X point of view to create Y effect in reader,” but certainly every POV choice an author makes affects the reading experience—yes, even if the reader can’t accurately recall the POV after reading. I dug back into my copy of How Fiction Works to pull together this class and, in the process, I learned a lot about how POV affects me as a reader. I am beginning to suspect that, just as Rebecca Makkai believes 95% of writing issues come from POV disorder, most of my issues with books actually come down to the point of view.

Recently I’ve been frustrated with narrators withholding information from the reader, authors inserting themselves into the voices of their characters, and third person POVs tricking me into sympathizing with unsympathetic characters. I’ve met characters from the 18th century who sound just the same as a 21st century narrator. I’ve encountered many books told in present tense so that the story feels like it’s merely being recounted, not crafted. I’ve realized that third person narrators can create a moral system for a novel that I find I’m missing in much of my reading. I’ve noticed that the narrator and tense contribute to how reliable I feel a narrative ought to be. All of these observations about who I am as a reader, what I’m looking for in my books, and what I value in my literary life have come just from paying a bit more attention to point of view, and it’s opened a whole new world for me.

Let’s look at a few examples.