Manual For Fiction Writers by Block, Lawrence (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

fact that we lose sight of this while we're reading. Our voluntary suspension of disbelief enables us to become convinced that the story is happening as we are reading it.

Let's consider a frame of another sort, one in which the framing device is not a conversation but the passage of time. An example that comes quickly to mind is True Grit, the novel by Charles Portis. The book takes the form of the first-person narrative of a fourteen-year-old girl's pursuit of her father's killer, but we are being told the story years and years after the fact, by the woman into whom that fourteen-year-old girl has grown.

You would think that this would gut the book of its suspense. Mattie, the heroine, is in danger of death at the story's climax, yet we know with absolute certainty that she is destined to survive for at least another half-century. It is a measure of Mr. Portis's considerable skill that Mattie's story remains highly suspenseful in spite of the fact that we know she has lived to tell the tale.

Still, distance is distance. There's no frame in the film version of True Grit, and I'm sure it was an easy decision to dispense with it. I think we would have to acknowledge that some suspense and some immediacy is lost as a result of the frame device. Are there gains to offset this loss? And what might they be?

It seems to me that there's a significant gain in dimension. In Portis's novel, we see Mattie's whole life, not just the portion she tells us about. We learn by means of occasional asides that she never married, that she has become a rather hard-nosed businesswoman, that her neighbors and associates have come to regard her as somewhat eccentric, and by learning this while watching her perform as an adolescent we are seeing an illustration of Wordsworth's observation that the child is father of the man (or, in this case, mother of the woman). We watch the unfolding of the story itself through Mattie's fourteen-year-old eyes and from her vantage point as a mature woman, and this gives the book scope that it would not otherwise have.

A Covenant With Death, by Stephen Becker, is similar in that the narrator, a middle-aged judge, recounts a case that took place early in his legal career. Again, how that experience looks from the perspective of age, and how it shaped and colored the intervening years, is part of the story.

The frame is not a device I employ frequently, but I did write one which appeared not long ago in Gallery. It's set in an unnamed island in the South Seas, where two brothers, a planter and a trader, are trying to get the better of one another in an exchange. One has a legendary bottle of 1835 Cognac, while the other has as his ward a nubile young woman of mixed ancestry. Each consults the local doctor in the hope that he can devise a method by means of which the other may be cheated, and this the cunning old doctor does.

It would have been simple enough to tell the story without a frame. Instead I elected to surround it with a fictional superstructure. I had as my narrator a younger man, a writer on the rebound from a broken relationship, who in the course of his travels finds himself as the doctor's dinner guest. As they sip a postprandial brandy, the doctor offers to recount an incident in which he played a part, one which he thinks the younger man might be able to turn into fiction.

The doctor then tells the actual story. At its conclusion we return to the frame, and the doctor explains how he actually tricked both men in the course of pretending to help them, thus winding up with the Cognac himself and enjoying the first embrace of the young lady.

Why did I use the frame? I may have done it in part as an act of homage to Maugham and other writers who used to do this sort of thing all the time. It seemed to me that a South Seas story just plain belonged in a frame. I was using a sort of old-fashioned plot, and by telling it in a similarly old-fashioned manner I felt I was following in hallowed footsteps.

Another reason I used the frame?or at least another effect of having used it?has to do with distance. Of course the frame created distance between the reader and the actual story of the doctor's machinations with the two brothers. I felt, though, that such distance wouldn't adversely affect the story's impact. The story is one of plot, and its appeal is more intellectual than emotional. Distance doesn't hurt it.

At the same time, a frame cuts one sort of distance while creating another. Remember a few moments ago when we were talking about those two Venusians in the bar? The reader, I pointed out, was in the position of an eavesdropper on a nearby barstool. If he's distanced from the story, he's simultaneously brought closer to the two people who are having the conversation.

The frame device I used had a similar effect. Assuming for the moment that the story does what I wanted it to do, the reader is drawn into that tropical dining room. Like the narrator, he sits at the doctor's table, sipping brandy and listening to the older man's dry