His fiction carries that extra sensitivity, perceptive and coloured beyond the needs of narrative.
Memory is a tricky thing: subjective, malleable to the needs of narrative or the fog of time.
The detective story approach worked well in Thomas Harding's Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz (Heinemann) but in Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Chatto) the needs of narrative forced Wendy Lower to tell an important story hastily and through a few individuals.
They do all that while making them fit the needs of the narrative, serving the story as much as they serve truth.
After the disastrous publication of his An Autobiography, his reputation became damaged by his ruthless attitude towards his art (so many words per day; his characters clinically subordinated to the needs of his narrative, and so on).
Mr. Lane does not peek out from behind his character to force his personality on us, but instead fuses his own comic persona and the character in a way that satisfies both the needs of the narrative and the prerogatives of maximizing laughs.
Perhaps, I suggest, the persistence of the myth comes out of a need for narrative, too; the notion of a crucible out of which she, Gray, Kelman and the others all emerged to write late-20th-century Scotland into being is a seductive one.
The book feels in need of more narrative drive, stronger pointers, an imposition of priorities.
Mr. Saramago's unpunctuated sentences, bundling together a statement, an objection, a qualification and a digression, need a lot of narrative detonation to keep them moving.
Needing some kind of narrative thread besides technological chest thumping, "Mystery Solved" loudly repeats some of the age-old questions about the Titanic's voyage and promises new answers, particularly regarding whether there was a "fatal flaw" in the construction of the ship's midsection.
"Won't you explain it to us?" Reed, meanwhile, gives as good as she gets, trotting out mouldy old writer-in-residence stuff like "Of course, one can argue that there's a basic human need for narrative: it's one of our fundamental tools for making sense of experience".
