Suspense: The Painful Pleasure

For some reason, suspense and the contemporary novel don’t seem to mix all that much.

Insomuch as suspense is a fairly key element of storytelling, I don’t think we need to couch a discussion of suspense in terms of “genre” fiction versus “literary” fiction. Instead we can ponder why suspense is often squeezed out of many contemporary novels.

Classically, the selective omission of information and methodical pacing are employed to imbue a plot with suspense. Here the stingy storyteller parcels out information bit by bit to satisfy the hungry reader who works to piece together the fractured details. But to provide just a puzzle is not enough to bring about the painful pleasure of suspense. There must be peril, uncertainty, or unease as well - dark clouds on the horizon or just overhead.

Hitchcock was a master here. He could imbue a story with menace, build up expectations of a disaster and string the viewer along until the string was taut to the point of breaking. And more recently, some contemporary novelists have experimented with suspense, testing its limits and breaking its rules - I’m thinking Paul Auster here and The Horned Man by James Lasdun, a suspenseful favorite of mine.

Many modern novelists seem to eschew suspense, however. They willfully remove the story from the heat before it can reach a boil. A flash-forward or flashback will reveal some critical point in the early going, and the reader’s focus is guided back to subtleties.

In The Cottagers, Marshall Klimasewiski sticks with the suspense. First, it is the menacing sort. From the opening pages, when we first meet creepy, young Cyrus, peering through the brush at his new temporary neighbors, we know something terrible will happen to “the cottagers” who have arrived for an extended stay in sleepy East Sooke. Then, once that terrible thing has finally happened, the detective story begins, though Klimasewiski turns this on its head by letting the hapless yet self-important “scoutmaster,” Constable Cortland be our Sherlock Holmes.  And finally, once the chain of events has more or less been sorted out, we are left with how the protagonists will go on from here.

The cottagers’ lives are shattered by their trip to East Sooke, but rather than the plot petering out or the unveiling of a moment-of-truth epiphany, that lingering legacy of Joyce (“the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling upon all the living and the dead”), Klimasewiski delivers a payoff here that is completely unexpected and prompts the reader to reassess the entire book.

Hitchcock’s memorable silhouette comes to mind once again, pointing to Norman Bates’ mother.

Suspense, in itself, is not enough to sustain a story. As the storyteller builds suspense, the reader subconsciously builds expectations and comes to expect revelatory plots points that conform to those expectations. The skilled storyteller can take that built up emotional capital and shatter it with a final virtuoso twist that confounds everything that comes before it. The epiphany was meant to replace this final twist in fiction, to evolve it. As James Joyce and his many descendants have shown us, the epiphany can elevate fiction in its way, but readers should not deny themselves the satisfaction of suspense.

Comments

[Garth]

I'm put in mind of a recent Anthony Lane piece on Hitchcock, in which he distinguishes between suspense--in which the reader has most of the pieces but can't quite put them together--and mystery, in which the pieces themselves are hidden from the reader. This latter tendency might be what made the Ed Norton vehicles Fight Club and The Illusionist so ultimately unsatisfying to me.

Is this just another of those Malcolm Gladwell faux-distinctions, or is there something to it? I thought the Cottagers was well-calibrated...nothing was witheld from the reader coyly, and yet so much stayed unknown that I couldn't put the book down.

[Edan]

In grad school, Chris Offutt told us this: Suspense is created when the reader and author know something the character doesn't know. In other words, a character walking into a room with a killer hiding in the closet is suspenseful because the author and reader know this information, but the character does not ("Don't go in there, girl!"). The readers (or viewers) stay with the story because, although they know there's a killer in the bedroom closet, they don't know what will happen next, and the suspense has been ratcheted up so high that now they need to know. Often, amateur writers try to create suspense by withholding information from the reader, which, while adding some element of mystery, usually only serves to confuse and annoy the reader.

[Marshall]

I seem to remember Hitchcock somewhere making the distinction between suspense and surprise by talking about the bomb under the table, right? If the people at the table are speaking and suddenly a bomb goes off and they all explode, that's one kind of thrill, but something he said he wasn't much interested in. But if you show us the bomb as well as the people, long before it goes off, then you have suspense, and their conversation is likely to become a lot more interesting in the process. I do like those added layers suspense can offer: the way the anticipated or dreaded future can sit on top of the present in a novel and apply its own pressure and spin.

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