POV Peeve
[spoiler alert]
E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel after a thorough survey of point of view in fiction, decided that the only rule was that a writer could do anything he could get away with.
I don't presume to argue with Forster, but I do have a POV pet peeve: first-person narrators who don't level with me. The big advantage of first-person is that a character can talk directly to the reader. When the author exploits this advantage, then has the narrator-character keep back important information just for the sake of preserving plot twists, that strikes me as cheating.
So Lisa Lutz set me to grumbling in The Passenger when the narrator was on the run and wouldn't tell me why until near the end. Especially when she explained it all to another character, but kept me in the dark!
It isn't that authors have only recently become manipulative. Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree is a novel in which the narrator is an impostor. Late in the book, she blithely confides that she is the person she's pretending to be.
A more famous example is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyda whodunnit in which the narrator reveals at the end that the murderer is--himself. Edmund Wilson found this stunt so tedious that he wrote an essay demanding, Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?
I exempt from this criticism The Girl on the Train in which the heroine was practically on the scene of the murder and wonders if perhaps she commited it herself. But she has a perfectly sound reason for not providing the reader with the answers. She was blind drunk at the time and can't remember. What reader wouldn't sympathize with that plight?
E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel after a thorough survey of point of view in fiction, decided that the only rule was that a writer could do anything he could get away with.
I don't presume to argue with Forster, but I do have a POV pet peeve: first-person narrators who don't level with me. The big advantage of first-person is that a character can talk directly to the reader. When the author exploits this advantage, then has the narrator-character keep back important information just for the sake of preserving plot twists, that strikes me as cheating.
So Lisa Lutz set me to grumbling in The Passenger when the narrator was on the run and wouldn't tell me why until near the end. Especially when she explained it all to another character, but kept me in the dark!
It isn't that authors have only recently become manipulative. Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree is a novel in which the narrator is an impostor. Late in the book, she blithely confides that she is the person she's pretending to be.
A more famous example is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyda whodunnit in which the narrator reveals at the end that the murderer is--himself. Edmund Wilson found this stunt so tedious that he wrote an essay demanding, Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?
I exempt from this criticism The Girl on the Train in which the heroine was practically on the scene of the murder and wonders if perhaps she commited it herself. But she has a perfectly sound reason for not providing the reader with the answers. She was blind drunk at the time and can't remember. What reader wouldn't sympathize with that plight?
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