I often find myself in this pattern of reading and re-reading the beginnings of books, trying to understand anything and everything going on in the world in which the characters reside. This constant need to understand everything fills me with frustration when the plot is too complex, the world is too abstract or the prose is too winding. Reading in this state, one in which you are constantly out of breath from trying to keep pace with the author, is simply no fun.
It’s easy to fall into this desire to fully understand the inner workings of a novel, but doing so might actually hold you back from engaging with the book at face value. Every time I find myself agonizing over the layout of a town or trying to remember each and every character at the start of the book, I lose the joy that comes from reading in the first place. Diving into these worlds is certainly laborious, but to expect you are going to pick up everything at once is ambitious and needlessly overwhelming. The first thing you do when you move to a new city isn’t memorize every street and building you might come across, but rather start home and explore from there. While easier said than done, when you start reading a novel, the last thing you should do is strain to understand every last thing the author is saying.
This topic of confusion in novels was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend of mine about Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” a multi-narrative novel with an expansive cast of characters and a whiplash-inducing timeline of plots. While I finished the novel, she put it down partway through due to the same reasoning I listed above — she couldn’t begin to enjoy reading the novel because she spent the first 50 pages just trying to get steady footing. I assured her that my finishing the book had nothing to do with my mental fortitude or ability to comprehend the twists and turns of narrative better than her. Instead, when I came across something I didn’t understand, I just filed it away and kept going with faith that the details would iron out at some point.
Although I finished “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” it certainly wasn’t the easiest book to start. The novel has several distinct plot lines with characters that have only a whisper of connection to the next — more often than not I found myself flipping back to the previous chapter to see how any component of the current story could have followed from the previous story. But I found pretty quickly that this avenue of literary investigation was fruitless and that trying to understand all the connections between the stories before the author wanted me to was a little absurd.
Having patience when reading dense and confusing plots is a virtue — you must trust the author to bring you back to what’s important. Reading is a dance between the author and their audience — if they are doing their job you will not be left alone to figure things out for yourself, but guided through the narratives to a point of apex in the story. “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel is a perfect example of this relationship of trust between author and reader: Her multi-narrative plots set across multiple millennia are woven together tidily. Although she eventually gets to a point of connection across narratives, it definitely takes time to get to the holistic understanding many of us crave. By reaching the end of the book, the satisfaction I was left with was from those “aha!” moments of connection, all of which stem from the questions budding right from the beginning. In so many multi-narrative novels like the “Sea of Tranquility,” you don’t get to know everything. You’re just going to have to be okay with it.
Confusion doesn’t always stem from plot and varied character perspectives, but comes from dialogue as well. One of my favorite authors is Sally Rooney, but the most common objection I hear to her work is the lack of quotation marks in her dialogue, which for many renders her novels confusing and difficult to enjoy. While a fair criticism, I counter this objection with my own: Your confusion is the point.
Similarly, having just read “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy for one of my classes, I talked extensively about this ambiguity of who said what, and whether or not it was an internal or external dictation. Whether it’s a novel about a young couple who can’t seem to make it work or about a man and his son trekking across a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the lack of quotation marks mirrors the blurry lines and disorientation that the characters in the novels face. For our two main characters of “The Road,” their dialogue could represent a reality in which they might not be able to track where their thoughts end and the outside world begins. For Connell and Marianne in “Normal People,” this uncertainty might bridge the gap of their inability to voice that which consumes them mentally, allowing us the naivety of ambivalence as to what has been said versus merely thought. Perhaps, at points in which you find yourself uncertain about the plot, it could be useful to reflect on if being certain is even the point.
“A Visit from the Goon Squad” being a direct example, I have found that the books I have struggled with most in the beginning have often also had the most profound impact on me by the time I get to the last page. It’s possible that this stems from my own desire to absolve myself from the sunk cost of reading a confusing novel, but I’d rather subscribe to the idea that confusing and indirect narratives can give readers room to be lost, guiding them to make their own interpretation of the text. Reading books that give you more questions than answers can be annoying — there is certainly a time and place for ambiguity — but this brings you into the equation of analysis, giving you room to draw your own conclusions.
This isn’t to say that the novels we read need not be clear in message or that we can give leeway to underdeveloped plots and characters. Rather, if you don’t understand everything going on in the first 50 pages of a book, it’s not quite time to freak out yet. Leaning into the obscurity might just get you closer to literary satisfaction than trying to overanalyze everything you come across. Wander through a maze, turn the corner without checking if it’s the right way, forget the character’s name and come back to them later. And to my friend who put down “A Visit from the Goon Squad”: Pick it back up. Be confused.
Daily Arts Writer Logan Brown can be reached at loganvb@umich.edu.
