Writing grief without naming it

J.R. Hardcastle · on what the narrator isn't allowed to say

There is a rule I have for Jake Reilly's narration, and the rule is this: the narrator is not allowed to name the feeling.

He can show you a hand that has forgotten what it was about to do. He can show you a kitchen where somebody who should be there isn't, and the coffee mug nobody has moved. Three pages later, the same coffee mug, washed and returned to the shelf. He is not allowed to tell you that Jake is grieving. The reader has to do that part.

Calling it a style choice sells it short. It is a structural decision that ended up, once I followed it out to the edge, defining the whole book.

Here is what naming the feeling does. It discharges it. When the narrator says Jake felt a wave of grief, the reader's job becomes reading the sentence. The feeling is received and set down, like a package. When the narrator declines to say anything of the kind, and instead shows you a man who has stopped in the middle of putting dishes away and is now looking at a cabinet door he does not remember opening, the reader does the feeling. The feeling happens inside the reader instead of inside the sentence.

The difference in temperature is not subtle. I would say it is the difference between a book you read and a book you sit with.

Here is a rewrite that happens in almost every chapter that involves loss. A first-draft version of a sentence:

That is fine. It is also closed. It tells me what he feels and where and how heavy. I have nothing to do as a reader except agree.

A later version:

Now the reader does the work. The kettle is a kettle. The kettle being where she'd left it is a sentence about the kettle. A man looking at the kettle for longer than he'd meant to is a description of a man looking at a kettle. All of it is about her. None of it says so.

The craft move has three parts, and I have found them reliable.

One. Displace the feeling onto an object. Not a symbol. An object. A kettle, a chair, a jacket hung on a hook. The object is not a metaphor for the person. The object is a thing the person touched. That is enough.

Two. Let the body do what the body does. Grief lives in hands that have forgotten their errand, in a sudden need to sit down, in the wrong sound of your own voice the first time you use it in a morning. Write the body's behavior; do not write what the body is about.

Three. Use duration. Time opens up inside a grieving person. They find themselves looking at a wall. They find themselves in a room they don't remember crossing into. Write the duration. Longer than he'd meant to. He'd been standing there for a while. The reader will do the math on why.

There is a fourth rule, which I use less often but which is the one that makes the quietest scenes in the book work: the narrator is allowed to register an absence the character hasn't consciously noticed. She wasn't at the table. That is not Jake feeling something. That is Jake telling you what was true about the table. The sentence is a factual observation. It is also the whole scene.

None of this is new. It's what Alice Munro has been doing for fifty years, what Marilynne Robinson does in a more patient register, what Denis Johnson does when he's being tender, which is more often than he gets credit for. What I have found working on this book is that the rule is not hard to understand and is very hard to keep. The default gravity of prose pulls you toward naming. Every draft wants a sentence that tells the reader how to feel.

Cut the sentence.

Trust the kettle.

The reader will do the rest, and what they produce inside themselves, from the small room the book has left them, will be bigger and more exact than anything the narrator could have handed them directly.

That is the whole craft of it. It's also, I think, the whole of what I'm trying to do with this book.