(There is also an aspirational dash of "The Real World": "This is the story of 10 strangers," runs a narrative voice-over, "one night, and all the ridiculous things we do to find love").
The practitioner must choose a "master narrative" (a stranger's story) and a "governing scene" (a key moment from that stranger's life).
What is stranger is that the narrative follows Eilis's own avoidance of this thought.
How curious that a complete stranger should drive the narrative by stating the bleeding obvious and yet I rushed home and told Mike that, consumed as I was with lust for him, I needed a child and we should try artificial insemination.
As long as the sex is there as part of the narrative – in Stranger by the Lake it is intrinsic, she says – and it has done the rounds at festivals and won critics over, "cinema programmers are more willing to play a film with high sexual content.
I've been wanting to write about that period for quite a while, and, with this narrative of strangers on a train, I found my opportunity.
Hers was a life jammed with encounters, and it is not by chance that her novels obsessively use the unexpected life-changing/life-threatening encounter as the drive into the narrative — think "Strangers on a Train" or any of the Ripley series.
Of course Republicans, no strangers to false narratives, said "allowing the amendment would have "blown up" the state budget, even though the program costs the state nothing".
The narrative involves a stranger in a bit of a jam looking for a ride, and you volunteering to help him deliver a package.
But I think even stranger is his (admittedly compelling) narrative that he came to Christianity on the basis of intellectual argument.
The slipped cosmos of 1Q84 encompasses, as well, narratives of even stranger worlds: in particular, a superlatively eerie fable about a "Town of Cats", which even devoted Murakami admirers would not want to visit.
