Three Novels of Character

Bergen, David. The Matter with Morris. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2012

Gibbons, Kaye. A Virtuous Woman. New York: Vintage Books, 1989

Barry, Sebastian. The Secret Scripture. London: Penguin Books, 2008

We used to talk in English 101 about character-driven as opposed to plot-driven fiction. Granted, both are necessary but there are novels where the dissection of a personality seems to be the primary driving force. Take The Matter with Morris. Morris Schutt is a post-modern man, a failing journalist with a weakness for mining the follies and foibles of his family and friends for a regular syndicated column. But when you write in judgment of the world and the people around you, you’d better be careful that you personally stand on firm ground or the core of your existence will crumble. This happens to Morris when his son is needlessly killed in Afghanistan by a friend mishandling his rifle. It’s a tragedy made more poignant by Morris’ having taunted his “wimpy” son into joining the army.

               Morris has been on a trajectory of estrangement from his wife and daughters for some time; the son’s death is too much to handle gracefully and his wife breaks off entirely and Morris moves out.

               There’s a concept in fiction writing known as verisimilitude. The basic idea is that a writer creates a world; that world bears similarities to the real world but is also unique, so that in writing, for instance, a Roadrunner episode, Wiley Coyote is not expected to act as real world coyotes do, but must behave in a believable fashion for the character and the setting the author has created. Characters “believability” hinges on the author’s ability to submerge him/herself into the milieu of his creation and to transmit faithfully to the reader verisimilitudinous characters and actions.

               The matter with The Matter with Morris is that Bergen fails to achieve verisimilitude. Morris does things that are both bizarre in relation to his situation, but are pointless in the advancement of the plot. Drawing out all his assets in cash and buying a safe to store the $300,000 plus proceeds in his apartment is a case in point. This kind of plot whimsy pales, however, in comparison to the behaviour of the minor characters who are super nice for no apparent reason and super critical, also for no apparent reason—and sometimes both at the same time. Then there’s the prostitute he hires only to discover that she’s his son’s one-time friend and a former guest in his home. Bizarre and irrelevant.

               If Bergen had written Hamlet, Ophelia would have been discovered not to have drowned after all, would marry Hamlet after the disposing of Claudius and the reconciliation of mother and son, Polonius would have recovered from the sword thrust to his vitals and Denmark would have been launched on the road to greatness—with copious apologies all ‘round and pledges to do better.

               My advice: give this one a miss.

               Oprah’s Book Club recommends A Virtuous Woman, but I try not to let that stop me from reading a novel. Gibbons’ second novel, it’s set in the south of the USA where landowners rent plots to rag-tag sharecroppers and migrant workers survive by working the fields, sheltering in shacks for night. The “virtuous woman” is the daughter of landowners. As a teenager, she is seduced by a handsome ne’er-do-well who beats her, abuses her psychologically and then abandons her. She’s subsequently “traded”; her father strikes a deal with a migrant worker to give him a small property that he can share crop if he’ll marry Ruby.

               The story is narrated by Ruby Pitt and her second husband, Blinking Jack Stokes until the last chapter where a third person narrator completes it out of necessity. Like Bergen with Morris, Gibbons’ task here is to make Ruby live for the reader as a character deserving of our empathy. In general, she is much more successful than is Bergen. My only reservation would be that motivation is not as clearly drawn as it might be; Ruby’s descent into the madness of a futile marriage is explained by her as something of an infatuation. At the same time, she’s full of praise for the household she’s abandoning, parents who are loving and dependable, a Nanny/housekeeper who is efficient and respected.

But then, pretty girls falling for bad boys is new neither to reality nor fiction. Think Lorna Doone.

A pretty woman is the central character in Barry Sebastian’s The Secret Scripture as well. Like Ruby, her downfall comes at the hands of a reprobate husband, not one that abuses her but one who succumbs to the pressure of a tyrannical Catholic mother to annul his marriage to this child of Presbyterians. Left pregnant and destitute in Sligo in Ireland, a series of circumstances lands her in an institution and when we first meet her, she is a very old woman in yet another institution painfully scratching out her life story on sheets of paper she hides under the floorboards.

Like Gibbons, Barry uses the technique of two narrators simultaneously telling the same story, one being the hapless Roseanne McNulty and the other, a doctor in the nursing home charged with assessing residents for relocation when the old building in which they live will be demolished. Barry masterfully draws out these two characters as he reveals the chasms between what is real and what is remembered by both.

The Secret Scripture requires some suspension of disbelief; it’s hard to imagine a woman of the age and decrepitude of Old Roseanne writing what she writes and how much she writes. This, however, is not much of a hurdle. Verisimilitude: the characters are true to the milieu in which Barry has placed them.

If you’re looking for your next novel read, I’d highly recommend finding The Secret Scripture. Barry is a masterful storyteller and his success as a playwright is evident in scene setting and in dialogue. I can’t help but place him in a long line of superb Irish writers like James Joyce, Dylan Thomas and T.S. O’Rourke to name a few.

I’d also recommend A Virtuous Woman, but with some reservation. I think I should have read two other items first: her first, award winning novel, Ellen Foster, and the biographical notes at http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/11381306.html?refer=y. Gibbons is purportedly an author whose novels are more autobiographical than most.

David Bergen, of course, is Canadian and his latest novel, The Age of Hope made it to the top five in the Canada Reads event on CBC and the web just concluded.