While reading The Mezzanine, it is hard to ignore Howie's constant attention to detail abut everything, from something he did five minutes ago to a memory from five years ago. At first when I was reading Mrs. Dalloway, I thought it was going to be very different since it is a much older novel and isn't even divided up into chapters as The Mezzanine is. However, after I started reading Mrs. Dalloway and started comparing it to The Mezzanine, I found that the two novels are surprisingly similar.
Starting with the differences, The Mezzanine is told in first person, as if Howie is telling the reader his stories, like we are his audience, and Mrs. Dalloway is told in third person. She doesn't know that we're listening in on her every thought. They are also different in the sense that Mrs. Dalloway takes place over the course of one day, and then seems like a short time, but The Mezzanine takes place over the course of about thirty seconds, keeping in mind that almost everything he talks about is a flashback or recent memory.
Now for the similarities. Mrs. Dalloway takes place over the course of one day, and to most readers, this seems like an incredibly short time to have a one hundred and ninety page novel discuss, but in The Mezzanine, the story takes place over the course of about thirty seconds, making Mrs. Dalloway seem like an eternity. It is the incredible amount of detail that Nicholson Baker and Virginia Woolf put in to their novels to make them both so interesting. Since Mrs. Dalloway was published in the early 1920s and The Mezzanine in the late 80s, it seems like there should be such a difference in the style of writing because the time periods were so different and so were the most popular styles of writing for those time periods.
Someone picking up one of these novels, after having read the other, might initially think that they couldn't be similar at all, but after beginning to read, I think they would be surprised to find how much they actually have in common.
1 comment:
Good observations. Perhaps the most basic and important thing both novels share is the idea that ordinary lived experience is the proper stuff of fiction: not fantasy, romance, escape, suspense, or any of the aspects people often associate with "enjoying a good novel" (or movie). Both authors have a keen awareness that life is fleeting (see Howie on Aurelius or Clarissa reading the "fear no more the heat of the sun" line from Shakespeare), and they conceive of narrative fiction as a way of arresting that transience, of recording not only the details of life as it is lived (and we *feel* the difference between the 1920s and 1980s on every page in these novels, and the ways these eras differ from 2011) but how these details interact with the *minds* of the people who are alive at this time,
Post a Comment