Cleaning out my bookshelves, I pulled up Iain Reid’s excellent I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It was a great Netflix movie–directed by Charlie Kaufman–, one that made me ask “how the heck did he do this in writing?”¹, and I found it one night I happened to be in a store. The movie crossover edition. It’s got questions for your book club in the back. (This is all catnip for me.) And yet it got buried behind layers of other must reads. Now, back in my hands, wavering over the “to sell” and “to keep” pile, I finally start in.
Reid is really stellar.
Chuck Palahniuk talks a lot about how to get an audience on the side of a character. His ur-example is Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. How she’s naive and the audience comes to be on her side, to want to take care of her.
You want to make your reader feel smart, smarter than the main character. That way the reader will sympathize and want to root for the character. Scarlett O’Hara is charming and smart and can convince men she’s beautiful. We have every reason to hate and resent her, but she’s too dumb to recognize that Rhett Butler is her soul mate. So we’re hooked. We feel superior and in our patronizing, condescending, voyeuristic way, we want her to smarten up. In a way, we “adopt” her. (Consider This, “Textures: Attribution”)
Reid does this in a really interesting way. How do you reveal character–two characters², in fact–with a single line? (Here comes a spoiler.) On page 7, Jake talks to the as-yet-unnamed girlfriend, Lucy. They’re at a pub and enjoined in pub trivia. Jake’s team is called “Brehznev’s Eyebrows.” Lucy does not understand the reference and Jake says, “He was a Soviet engineer, worked in metallics.” Saying he was an engineer is like referring to Ronald Reagan as an actor. Yes, it’s true, but that is not the salient point about him. (Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union from 1966 to 1982.)
I really love this point. That Reid has one character who completely doesn’t know something, and another who is entirely confident in his knowledge, but is only partially right. And we sort of love them both.
And just a few pages later, Reid actually invites us to understand this about this, asking us to see these characters for all their ignorance and confidence. This is really a lovely piece of work. Jake refers to himself as a “cruciverbalist.” Again, Lucy does not know what this is. (Hell, I didn’t know it either.) But Jake leaves a charming note in Lucy’s purse, which causes her to look it up. “Before going to bed I looked up cruciverbalist. I laughed and believed him.”
We are practically invited to follow along with her and look it up. Which I did³. And armed with that knowledge, you have to feel, again, a little superior to–and protective of!–these characters and whatever misguided information they have about what it means.
¹ The answer is that Kaufman, Mr. “Adaptation”, took some liberties, which shouldn’t really be a surprise. But that’s another thing entirely.
² Yes, yes. I know, the thing.
³ Oh, go on.