Novelist and writing teacher Jane Alison illuminates the many shapes other than the usual wavelike “narrative arc” that can move fiction forward. The stories she loves most follow other organic patterns found in nature―spirals meanders and explosions among others. Alison’s manifesto for new modes of narrative will appeal to serious readers and writers alike. As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel―one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises grows tense reaches a peak subsides. . . . But: something that swells and tautens until climax then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual no? So many other patterns run through nature tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them too?” W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern rather than the traditional arc―or in nature wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker Anne Carson Marguerite Duras Jamaica Kincaid Clarice Lispector Gabriel García Márquez Susan Minot David Mitchell Caryl Phillips and Mary Robison. Meander Spiral Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says Let’s leave the outdated modes behind and in thinking of new modes bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.
