The goal, all agree, is to immerse the reader in the narrative in a way that goes beyond mere imagining.
In "Heist", the staccato, James Ellroy-style sentences are just beginning to reward the reader, and the narrative just proving interesting, at the moment the story judders to a close.
It is with this metaphor that McFarlane enters dark psychological territory, continually subverting the ways in which the reader perceives the narrative and its characters.
Most novelists are accustomed to writing with a degree of impunity; there seems to be a distance between the reader and the narrative, which insulates the author from direct blame for what happens.
Only the reader, as the narrative slowly unwinds, can appreciate the ways in which each woman -- defining herself against her parents even as she unconsciously follows in their footsteps -- mimics and refracts the experiences of those who've come before her, struggling, as if anew, with the same difficulties of sex and love, work and children.
But it is Conradi's own more subtle presence that locks the reader into the narrative: "I see him, to his fingertips, as a Popular Front intellectual," he writes of Frank at one point, elsewhere confiding: "It is moving to me that half a dozen of his school contemporaries are still with us".
The poem describes the narrator's opinions on melancholy and is addressed specifically to the reader, unlike the narrative of many of the other odes.
I try to interfere as little as possible with the historical part of this review, to let the reader enjoy the narrative.
Readers of the narrative and viewers of the film, as free people, can immediately understand what Northup, a cultured man who made his living as a violinist, lost.
A more selective approach and a focus on a few stories rather than a multitude would help readers keep the narrative thread.
