Time Travel

Evening uses several styles of narration to show different experiences of time.

The chapter entitled A Pale Bay begins:

She kept the curtains back in the day and in the night. Her parents had slept with the shades down and on the rare occasion Ann dared enter their room it was always pitch black…Her mother wore a sleeping mask over her face cream, and earplugs. Ann’s father snored.

In this section, the narration is fairly conventional and unlike other parts of the book. It is third person, simple past, and reads like a storyteller entity telling us a story from Ann’s past. It does not read like one of Ann’s recollections from her death bed. The storyteller seems to want to give the reader some context for who Ann is.

This passage, which we can guess presents a time of perhaps 1940, goes on for several pages and tells a story of Ann’s childhood. After a line break, time leaps to 1954. “The smell of bacon, the kitchen door. Ann Grant was nearly knocked over by a golden retriever as she opened the screen.”

This passage remains in third=person, simple past but has a different feel than the one regarding Ann’s birth family. It is more immediate; it contains a lot of dialogue which the childhood passage does not. Heavy use is made of sentence fragments. Here’s an example from the 1954 section:

You look like a painting, said Harris Arden, opening the door.

So he said that sort of thing to other girls. Of course he would. Why wouldn’t he?   

That last line represents Ann’s inner-ness—something that is presented more formally in the childhood section:

Smells good, said her father as Ann steered him to his chair, trying to disturb as few pieces of furniture as possible. He sat down then got up immediately and picked his way out of the room as if leaning into a gale.

In this passage, which represents a child Ann trying to help her drunken father, the reader has to infer Ann’s inner state of fear and worry, rather than, in the previous style, experience it more directly, as her jealousy over Harris is shown.

After another line break, the story is back in the present:

Her breathing was shallow The I.V. rose above her like a flagpole festooned with transparent ribbons. 

Here, the narrator begins by commenting on Ann’s breathing—the narrator, not Ann because, of course, a person wouldn’t think this about herself—that "her" breathing was shallow. The section leads to an intensely subjective passage of Ann apparently experiencing a sponge bath given to her by a nurse, but her consciousness slips to remembering other experiences of being undressed:

Let’s slip this off. This arm first. That’s it. A warm sponge moved over her shoulders. Strange how little people were naked. Won’t you take off your coat can I take that for you here let me thank you not at all would you mind if I undid this what are you doing

This passage is reproduced as it appears in the book—without punctuation and with italics.

There is another line break, and we have: Someone was sobbing down the hall in one of the guest rooms then it turned into waves. The sea, she thought, the sea…She shot herself out of a cannon and flew from the house.

Here, Ann remains in the book’s present and is apparently under the effects of strong medication. She imagines herself flying free of the house and going on a magical journey through Boston to Maine.

Next, she is back in 1954 amidst the wedding preparations and Harris Arden’s presence.

Then, a brief passage which is probably not clear at a first reading. It shows a memory from perhaps fifteen years later—around 1960—just before Ann learns of the death of one of her sons.

And then we return to 1954.

The chapter continues in this fashion, using different styles to show different time periods. There is a present time passage shown from the perspective of one of Ann’s daughters and there is a passage showing a dialogue between Ann and Harris (what I’ve previously called the “he/she” dialogue):

Ask me again.

What?

To look at you

What do you mean?

The way you did.

We’ve discussed this style a bit already. It is mostly dialogue, unmarked in terms of the names of who is speaking. It is intensely subjective and personal and represents Ann’s innerness as she imagines a conversation with someone who is not there, someone whom she hasn’t seen for decades. The reader must imagine the characters speaking to each other as there is almost no scene setting or beats that would indicate how the characters feel, where they are, what they’re wearing, their facial and postural expressions, anything. And this is in contrast to many of the other narrative styles. Perhaps this style can be said to be “out-of-time,” meaning it could occur in almost any time after Ann and Harris met.

A hallmark of Evening is the way time is presented as being fluid. We are shown a character in the present—or technically, the recent past, as the events of Ann’s death are presented by a narrator after the fact—who time-travels around her life, from fifty-five years earlier to thirty-five years, to twenty years, etc. There is an equivalency between these different sections in that there is no strong distinction made between the book’s present and the various past times. These are not “flashbacks,” in the conventional sense of the term. There is no guidepost saying, “Now we are in the year 1954.” The guideposts that are present are the differences in style and voice that I have mentioned. Careful reading will reveal how these different styles of narration help to establish these times as distinct from each other.

By careful, I mean careful, my friends. Last time, we discussed readerly and writerly texts and I “cut the diamond” by asserting that Evening belongs to the readerly persuasion. All this time-traveling in distinct styles is a fine example—the book demands the reader work to understand.

Till next week.

#Evening #SusanMinot #AlanBray