Style and story are the same thing

I have a friend named Francine who has great taste, and every two months she'll recommend me a book, and I'll read the book, and it's almost always excellent.¹

But the way Francine recommends books is somewhat off-putting to me. She never talks about the story or characters. Instead she says something like, "The writing is exquisite. The sentences are so beautiful."

I strongly dislike this style of recommendation, because I associate this sort of puffery with mainstream critics who are trying to convince me to read some over-hyped new release that is almost always quite clunky and overwritten. When a critic says a book has exquisite writing, I expect the plotting to be shoddy (that goes without saying), but quite frequently the writing in these books also turns out to be equally shoddy and careless!

However, with Francine's picks this is not the case. The style in these books is usually extremely precise, and when it's lush, it's because there's a lot of information that needs to be thoughtfully conveyed. The sentences aren't just a jumble of extraneous details and contorted metaphors.

But the funniest thing about Francine's picks is that her recommendations also tend to have impeccably structured stories. She's the one who recommended Fleishmann Is In Trouble and Ghost Writer, for instance.² These books are well-written, yes, but they're also complex stories, about existential problems that are worked out through the action of the story.

And when I talk to her about these books, I'll say, "Wow, I love the decisions the author made in structuring this story." And she'll say, "Yes, yes, but what about those sentences!"

It's quite comical, because I personally am not one for gushing about sentences. My feeling is that you generally don't remember the sentences in a book—you remember the story. A novel is a vehicle for telling a story. The story is what's sticky and impactful. It's like with a building, you don't say, "This is such beautiful concrete!" You say, "This building is so graceful and airy." And yet, in order to be well-made, a building also needs to be constructed from good materials.

And with sentences and story, well...they're the same thing, no? The story is constructed using sentences. Each of those sentences has some purpose within the whole. Beauty consists of fulfilling that purpose. If the whole is good, then the sentences must be good too. And, more importantly, the sentences take their shape from their purpose. The choice of what information belongs in the story—this is a choice that's determined by the nature of the story. And yes, the author's work here is usually done unconsciously or by instinct, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some unspoken connection between the part and the whole—it just means that even the author usually isn’t able to consciously explicate that connection.

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I'm bringing up Francine because of a Substack post by Catherine Lacey, where she writes:

As usual, I don’t think the plot of the book is very important. In fact (and I know I’m in the minority on this one) but I find it really weird when readers or critics pin their frustrations with a book to its plot. “I hated that the protagonist did XYZ instead of ABC” is a critique that feels totally beside the point, a request for the book to be a different book instead of responding to the book as it is. Of course the plot in a work of fiction is not happening and did not happen; that’s the relief of fiction and it seems to be something contemporary readers have forgotten. Things can happen that have not happened; morals can be on display that the author may not agree with; actions can be taken that do not “make sense” or satisfy traditional plot arcs.

I find myself disagreeing strongly with this statement. First of all, it's silly for Lacey to say she's in the minority here. The way she's talking about plot is the way most readers, writers, and critics of high-brow fiction talk about plot. We've all heard sentiments exactly like these before.

Secondly, do we think the plot is arbitrary? Or do we think it has an internal logic? Lacey seems to be saying that the plot does have some internal logic, and we should trust the author's choices. But is the author infallible? Does that internal logic always come through? Is it impossible for them to make a mistake? If that logic isn't apparent or seems fallacious, then to me it makes complete sense to say the plot should have been different.

The alternative is that the plot is arbitrary, in which case...you could also say just as easily that the plot could've been different. If the plot really could've been anything, then why couldn't it be different?

It seems strange to ask that readers not be invested in the story that the writer is choosing to tell. If we don't care about this story, why would we read it? What is the purpose of reading the book in this contingent manner that Lacey is asking for, where we constantly tell ourselves that the story is not real and doesn't matter?

So yes, I strongly disagree with Lacey's statement as it's written and as I understand it.

But I brought up Francine at the beginning in order to remind myself that a lot of how we talk about fiction is somewhat imprecise. Francine would probably talk about fiction exactly the way that Lacey does. Francine says this stuff about plot not mattering all the time! But, in practice, the books she loves tend to have decent plots.

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Almost all novels have plots. A novel is plot. It's things happening in a fictional world. I find that when people talk about a book not having a plot, or the plot not mattering, they're usually talking about one of two different types of books.

The first is a book with an episodic plot. Before the early 20th century, most novels had episodic plots. This is true of Great Expectations and David Copperfield, for instance, where the characters pass through a successive series of situations that are linked primarily by their presence. Episodic plots aren't really plotless—we're definitely invested in whether David Copperfield will ever get out of the ink factory—but there's not much of a story that persists across the episodes. Once we're done with the ink factory, we're done. Copperfield is on to the next thing now.

And because of that lack of an overarching story, episodic stories can feel plotless or even arbitrary. This was particularly true with picaresques, which are novels about rogues or vagabonds. I re-read Huckleberry Finn recently, and three major parts of the book (Jim and Huck on the river; Huck with the Duke and the King; and Huck with Tom Sawyer at Aunt Sally's) are tonally completely different, and seem like they could be three different books. I'd argue that they fit together well on a thematic level, but there does seem to be an arbitrary quality to this plot.

The other kind of novel that seems to have no plot is the book where the characters themselves aren’t particularly invested in the plot. An example would be Mrs. Dalloway, which is about Dalloway preparing for a party. She goes around town, doing a lot of things, feeling a lot of feelings, but there's not necessarily a whole lot at stake. There's events, but somehow it doesn't cohere into a plot.

Proust is similar. At various points, Marcel has aims: in one book he falls in love with a girl named Gilberte. At another point he becomes very anxious to be introduced to Mme de Guermantes. But...these things don't really seem to be the point of the book, and they often fall out of the story for vast stretches of time. Moreover, there's a huge amount of repetition in how Proust's stories play out, so the Marcel / Gilberte, Swann / Odette, Robert / Rachel, Charlus / Morel, Marcel / Albertine, and Marcel / Mme de Guermantes relationsjips all seem to play out in similar terms, with a brief period of infatuation followed by a period of cooling, followed by feelings flaring to life periodically because of jealousy and possessiveness and self-consciousness.

The point is, these are books where someone can honestly say the plot doesn’t matter.

So why do you read them? Well...because on a page-by-page level, they are beautiful and inventive. Proust has some of the finest character portraits I've ever seen in fiction: Francois, Robert de Saint Loup, Charles Morel, Swann, Odette, the Verdurins, Bergotte—these are characters you remember for your entire life. Similarly, in Mrs. Dalloway, precisely because you're not reading for plot, there are moments of shocked emotion that you'll remember forever (like when Peter shows up her party!) And in Mrs. Dalloway there is, of course, the spectral figure of the shell-shocked Septimus, who drifts through the background of the story. The book itself is a highly-constructed reading experience that seems to work quite well.

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So...it kind of sounds as if I'm saying that a book doesn't need a plot to succeed! By my own words, Mrs. Dalloway and In Search of Lost Time don't really have plots, and I love these books.

Yes, that's true, but...that doesn't mean I give every plotless book a pass.

That's the key, when something works, it works. But most books work, at least in part, because of the story they’re telling. Similarly, I quite frequently read novels where the book’s failure seems to arise from its lack of willingness to tell a story.

For instance, I recently read two books that were reprinted in 2024. Both are part of that cottage industry of 'forgotten classics' reprints. Both are by 20th-century woman authors who are largely out of print. Both deal with women who are paranoid and victimized by society. One of these books attempted to tell a story; the other didn't. The book that told a story is much superior to the one that didn't.

The Princess of 72nd Street is about an artist in Manhattan who senses she's about to slip into one of her radiances (a manic episode). She loves these radiances, during which she floats through what she calls her kingdom (72nd Street) and lives like a princess, unmoored from ordinary concerns.³ But she knows that these radiances inevitably end up with her hospitalized. So she determines that this time that won't happen! And she tries to create rules to keep herself out of the hospital.

The book is unusually gorgeous at a sentence-level. Here's an example, from when she's just beginning her radiance:

I began to run around and around on the hot dry grass and to look straight up into the sun. The sun understands me. The sun is a wine fire with strange threads of blue. It roars its comprehension of everything I am. I knew that. Peter and Melita became two exotic wet water flowers simple and spreading out white petals.

It's an extremely readable book, and it's certainly not conventionally plotted. The narrator doesn't have aims and goals—but we are kept in suspense, wondering if she can manage to hold it together, or if she'll crack up again. And in the end the book pays off beautifully: she comes out of her radiance, and she has to deal with the wreckage of her life. But...she did do it! She avoided the hospital!

Afterward, she starts trying to relate to a potential lover as an ordinary woman, and you can see her making the effort to put together a new life, but...we can sense the radiance lurking in the background, waiting to return. It's such a strange, startling ending, because we're so used to books like this ending with a discharge from the hospital. But here there's at least the hope that this woman has learned how to live a sustainably insane life. Great novel. Highly recommend.

The other book was They by Kay Dick. This book is about a near-future world where a mysterious They is banning people from reading, making art, living unconventional lives, etc.⁴ "They" come into the houses of bohemians at night and steal their books, swipe their paintings, etc. If you try to resist "them", then you're carried away for re-education, where you emerge (if at all) as a wiped-clean catatonic.

I didn't hate the book, but it did feel a bit thin. There's nothing more to the book than what I've just written. It's just a bunch of artists gnomically talking to each other about how they intend to go on as long as possible. The artists seem only slightly more real than "They" do. The artists have no real plan to resist, they just want to endure as long as possible, until they're eventually carried away too.

There's a feeling of dread, but it doesn't necessarily increase. The novel gives me no reason to think the artists might prevail, or that their sacrifice might be worth something, and as a result I just don't feel that invested in the story. It's not that I didn't understand that the purpose of the book was to evoke a sense of dread—I just think that a novel ought to be much more ambitious than this book was.

As I was reading this novel, I kept being reminded of Nadezdha Mandelstam's memoir, Hope Against Hope.⁵ This is a memoir about the Stalinist Terror. Mandelstam was married to Osip Mandelstam, the poet, who was sentenced to exile for reciting a poet where he said Stalin "rolls the executions on his tongue like berries". This poem is very different from anything else Mandelstam ever wrote, and Nadezdha claims that he wrote and recited it out of despair. He was tired of living in this climate of fear, and if the worst was going to happen, he wanted it to happen already! Essentially, he had a death-wish.⁶

Whether her account of his motives is true or not, I did get the sense that he wanted to stand up and be counted—to prove, definitively, that he was not on Stalin's side.

Not everyone reacted to the Terror like Mandelstam. Many convinced themselves it wouldn't touch them. Every time a friend was carried away, they said, "Oh, it was because he did this and that." Nadezdha is comically frustrated at this, at one point making fun of people who ask what a person did to be arrested. She is so incredulous that they can be ten years into this regime, and some people still think being arrested has anything to do with a person's deeds.

The point is, there are lots of stories you can tell about a situation where art-making itself has come under threat. Many people have told those stories. It seems like, in They, Kay Dick is purposefully avoiding telling those stories. I can speculate as to why she made that choice. For one thing, if she tried to tell a story, she would need to humanize "Them" a bit, or she'd need to write something like Mandelstam did—a book that gives a more complicated portrait of the artists, and which describes their various survival strategies, insecurities, despairs, squabbles, etc.

Indeed, as I was reading the book, I was thinking that there’s no reader, no matter how right-wing or philistinical, who wouldn’t sympathize with the artists in this book. The villains are so faceless—everyone who reads the book imagines themselves as the heroic artists, menaced by a shadowy 'They'. This, to me, seems a little dishonest. Surely a book ought to say more than just, "Persecution exists."⁷

This is the kind of critique that, if I'm understanding Lacey correctly, one shouldn't make of a book. Instead, the reader should simply understand that the point of the book is the feeling of foreboding that exists on the page.

Great...but...that's just not enough! The book is not good! It is dull! And it's dull precisely because these undercurrents of foreboding are never either developed or challenged. Instead they just flow ceaselessly, creating the same heavy-handed effect.

The choice to avoid telling a story is not in itself praiseworthy. As I’ve mentioned before, I do not think it’s courageous on the part of the author to refuse to meet the readers’ expectation of deriving some pleasure from this book. If a book avoids telling a story, it should (like Mrs. Dalloway) have so much going on, so much life, so many characters and conflicts and memories and struggles, that I read each page simply to see what new things I might find upon it.

Indeed, to some extent, telling a story militates against that kind of page-by-page novelty, because the machinery of storytelling takes up increasing amounts of space as the book goes on. Usually by about halfway through a well-plotted book, the characters are launched on their paths, and for the rest of the book you're only seeing them bounce off against each other. There's some room for surprises, but you can't do the thing Mrs. Dalloway does, where an old lover comes back from India in the second half of the book and suddenly dominates the proceedings despite not being very present in the first half—that’s because in a typical book, this maneuver would seem seem very random and would break some kind of contract with the reader. But because in Mrs. Dalloway there is no contract, Woolf is that much free-er to do whatever she wants.

So I fully understand there is a reason why Mrs. Dalloway has to be told the way it is—there is an internal logic that demands its relative plotlessness. Similarly, in They, I understand that the aim is to keep the enemy quite general and vague, and this vagueness means that the characters need to be correspondingly vague in how they talk about and respond to this situation.

But in the case of Mrs. Dalloway, I understand and approve of the choices that necessitate the book's plotlessness, while with They I do not think the benefit was worth the cost. Indeed, I think the benefit was no benefit at all.

In neither case, however, do I feel the need to spend many paragraphs gushing about the style, the way that my friend Francine would. The style in Mrs. Dalloway is exemplary, as we all know. I cannot remember any lines at the moment, not even the famous first one, but I can remember that when I read the book I was routinely awed by the style. And in They the style is less awe-inspiring. Any one sentence would probably sound fine, but taken together, the effect is somewhat portentous and tedious. Imagine a whole book written like this:

‘And if Sandy had lived with me, or in your house? This wouldn’t have happened?’ It was a question to Berg, although I knew the answer.

‘Why?’ ‘The single is a menace to them,’ Berg said. ‘They fear solitary living, therefore envy it.’

Style and story are the same thing. If one works, the other usually works as well, and if one doesn't, the other also usually doesn't either.

In truth, the opposition between story and style is a very artificial one, caused by the fact that certain writers are extremely over-praised for their sentences. I'm often told that Rachel Kushner and Garth Greenwell are consummate stylists.⁸ And these are the kinds of authors you might point to in order to say, "Look, I read these writers for the sentences, not for the plots."

However, I personally found the sentences in these authors' books to be tedious, full of extraneous detail, and somewhat atonal. And that is generally my experience when I open up the book of some stylish writer whose plots don't matter. As a result of years of these mislabeled ‘beautiful’ books, I now have a strong, negative response to critics who write about the style of a book.

Unless, of course, that critic is Francine. If she wants to tell me that she's reading some author just for the sentences, then that's fine, because in most cases I know the story is pretty good too, even if that's not Francine's main concern.

Year-End Praise

The end of the year brought a few accolades for my fiction.

• Tobias Carroll reviewed my literary novel The Default World in Vol 1 Brooklyn:

  “That blend of a classic format and very contemporary details makes for an enveloping, thoughtful read. But in the end, what I’ll take away most from this novel is Jhanvi’s perspective on the world, her reckoning with the gaze of others, and the things she’s willing to do to get where she wants to be. A memorable comedy of manners demands a great protagonist; The Default World does that brilliantly.”

• David Sessions also wrote about The Default World in a post on gay novels:

  The Default World is a sharp political novel that sees both sides of everything, including how progressive ideas can serve as a cover for the privileged and, at the same time, also nudge them toward greater openness and sympathy.

• My young adult novel, Just Happy To Be Here, was named YA Book of the Year by the The Transfeminine Review. I was also short- and long-listed in various other categories.

• My novella, “Money Matters”, was named to a list of top ten books under 200 pages by Abra at Booktender:

  “What’s more ordinary than not wanting to work for a living? But not every man answers to that conundrum the way Jack does. This short epic explores a complicated morality of money and relationships with honesty and empathy.”

If you want to read, The Default World, it’s available on Amazon and Bookshop. My novella is available here.

1. I talk about this friend quite frequently on Substack, so I’ve decided to call her Francine (not her real name) for the sake of convenience.

2. I wrote about Fleishmann here, and I wrote about Ghost Writer here.

3. I read Princess of 72nd Street because of a recommendation by

Bram Presser

. His write-up is here. The conceit of his Substack is that he writes very short reviews of very short books—it is so perfect. Has become one of my favorite recommendation Substacks.

4. This book was also a recommendation from a Substack!

𝙅𝙤 ⚢📖🏳️‍🌈

recommended it here (obviously she enjoyed it much more than I did). This is another Substack whose taste I generally trust, and I’ll certainly read other of her picks. Another great place to look if you’re in search of recommendations, especially because Jo is South Asian, and often brings up South Asian writers I’d never even heard of before—for instance, she mentioned Yashpal to me in a comment, and I’m very excited to read his Jhuta Sach the next time I have thirty hours to spare (here’s her write-up on a different Yashpal novel).

5. I wrote about the Mandelstam book here.

6. I’m not doing justice here to the complexity of Nadezdha’s argument. A year later, Mandelstam also tried to write a poem praising the dictator (his “Ode to Stalin”). She makes the case that he (and she) were under tremendous strain, and at times they cared little for their lives, while at other times they clung desperately to them. The book as a whole is very much worth reading.

7. What made Nadezdha’s book so great was that it took for granted that the persecutors were evil, but that didn’t mean the persecuted were beyond reproach! She portrayed the persecuted Soviet intelligentsia in all their smallness and glory, not stinting from either praise or blame wherever it was merited.

8. I wrote about Kushner’s Creation Lake here and Greenwell’s Small Rain here.