Characters That Lift Off the Page

Molly Friedrich, a top notch New York literary agent, says, “First of all, is there anybody out there who doesn't know that the easiest thing to sell is plot? But the thing that everybody wants is an original voice. And the thing that's kind of stuck in the middle is character.” To my mind, the reason to write a story is to become the witness to its characters. What lives on after you finish a book isn’t the plot. Voice, that of the writer, the narrator of the story, may be extremely important. But once I put down a book, what I take away is indelible characters. If I don’t care about them, I am not going to remember their story.

There is an objective criteria for great work, work “that may interest people in 2052,” as Irene Nemirovsky says. But it doesn’t mean that I am going to read every single great book. I’m going to read the ones that answer my questions, that have characters I can love and ponder, that point me in the directions I need to go. Thus, in my case, I will read Colette, whose most important character is Sido, her mother. But I am probably not going to read Slaughterhouse Five, no matter how important Billy Pilgrim’s life and death are deemed by all.

Often the main character is the author himself. Just as, in meeting people, presence quickly tells you who someone is, good books lead you quickly into the presence of the author. The love they lavish on their characters becomes what we feel. Who doesn’t long after Caddy Compson, as her brothers Quentin and Benjy do in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, though we are never allowed to hear her voice. I loved the passionate character Aksinia in Quiet Flows the Don, as Sholokhov must have. Whenever I go back to his books, I skip everything except the parts in which she is found.

James Salter

Don and I are reading Light Years together, the luminous prose of James Salter. I don’t think he meant the character of Nedra to take over the book, but she does. The book becomes Salter’s homage to a beautiful, fully alive woman. She is partly imagined, but he also knew a woman upon whom the character is based. In Burning the Days, his memoir, he says of the woman he knew, “I loved her, her frankness and charm, the extravagance and devotion to her children. I never tired of seeing her and listening to her talk. She smoked, drank, laughed raucously. There was no caution in her. … Hers was a singular life. It had no achievements other than itself. It declared, in its own way, that there are things that matter and these are the things one must do. Life is energy, it proclaimed, life is desire. You are not meant to understand everything but to live and do certain things. Despite all I had written about her, there was more.”

I don’t claim anything for my characters at the moment, except that I know and love them. Line, Marty and Paul begin their lives in The Pastor’s Kids and, Deo volente, continue into several other books. To achieve great characters, one must give oneself to them, but also have the craft with which to do so. We shall see, as the Norwegians say.