The Science of Story

Scarlett Thomas is a workhorse of a novelist. Five of her eight novels have made it across the Atlantic from her native Britain, but unless you spend an inordinate amount of time in bookstores, you probably haven’t seen them; the American editions tend to appear for a brief moment in a paperback with an interesting cover, and then they’re gone again. Which is a shame. Her novels Going Out and PopCo are little gems; solid, straightforward novels that do their work so well you can’t see the sweat and frustration that must’ve gone into the writing.

Meg Carpenter, the star of Thomas’s newest novel, Our Tragic Universe, is a workmanlike author who churns out books on whatever tiers of competence her publisher desires—she’s the mastermind behind a series of hacky sci-fi novels, but she’s also written a middlebrow series that she’s moderately proud of—because she’s figured out the secrets behind stories. Carpenter teaches students in the basics of storytelling, packing the Greeks and the three-act structure into weekend seminars all around En­gland. She’s turned the art of narrative into a science. The autobiographical flourishes are lurid and fascinating. Thomas uses some of her inside knowledge to color Carpenter’s descriptions of the people you’d find behind the desks at any of the major publishing houses:

Most conversations in publishing were vaguely Alzheimic, because everyone suffered from over-thinking and over-reading and no one could remember if this was the first time they’d said something today, or the fifteenth, and whether it was true or made up. You can identify someone who works in publishing because they tell every anecdote as if for the first time, with the same expression as someone giving you a tissue that they have just realised has probably already been used.

Of course, the one thing Carpenter has never done is write her Serious Literary Novel. The plot keeps sliding into genre fiction, and she wrestles it back into literary shape, stripping the story of conclusions and symbolism until it sounds, finally, like real life. The problem is that her real life isn’t that interesting: She’s stuck in a long-term relationship with a weird, asocial man, and things are safe but dull. She writes book reviews on the side, and because Carpenter knows her editor likes saucy negative reviews, that’s what she gives him:

I ended up just summarising [the author’s] argument, which, like most long and complicated things, including great tragedies and anyone’s life story, sounded far more crazy and improbable in 800 words than it ever could in 800,000. In the end, the book trashed itself.

Universe, thankfully, doesn’t trash itself. Carpenter’s search for a story—both in her literary novel and in her real life—chugs along at a good pace. It’s a pleasant and good-natured book, and Carpenter is a refreshingly well-put-together narrator; even her dysfunctions are mild mannered. If things are a bit too workmanlike here and there, especially toward the book’s conclusion, there are enough interesting stops and lessons in storytelling along the way—a supporting character becomes obsessed with a hunt for a mythical beast as research for his novel, someone introduces Carpenter to the concept of a religion called Tolstoyism, paradoxes are discussed and rated—to make the journey well worth taking.