A Masterful Job of Novel Construction, as Proven By a Mistake–Anna Quindlen’s “Still Life With Crumbs”

Normally when reviewing someone else’s work, I delve around into all the many thoughts I had about the book while reading, put together my sense about the book and what my experience of it led to in a general way, and then commence writing my post about it.  But in the case of Anna Quindlen’s novel Still Life With Crumbs, what happened was that my experience was what you might call a “nouveau” reading session, unintentionally taken on through a mistake in the website, while the book itself, though masterful, was more or less a straightforward read.  There were small flashbacks and flash forwards, but the flash forwards predominated over the flashbacks and were nearly always heralded with the tantalizing phrase which I came to look forward to, “but that was later,” or “that happened later.”

Here’s what I thought happened the first time through:  I started with a novel chapter entitled “A Young Agent, An Old Photographer,” which was fairly self-explanatory.  As I read forward from that chapter title, I was occasionally puzzled by references to characters and events that I didn’t recognize, but was able to piece together enough of the elliptical story to follow where the author was leading.  Things were clear as they developed from that point on, though I felt adrift from moment to moment, and had to stop and remember a few things more than usual in order to understand what was happening.  When I got to the last chapter, I was thoroughly startled:  this was simultaneously one of the best novels and absolutely the shortest one I’d ever read.  It was rather more of a skeleton of a novel, charming as that technique and difference from others was, than it was a full-fledged development.  Nevertheless, at that point I did what I usually do, and keyed into the website to go back to where I had started in order to write down names, plot formations, and details in order to revive the experience of reading for this post.

Imagine my surprise (and also a strange sense of letdown, oddly) to find that through some glitch in the library website, the book was actually much longer at the beginning than the point at which it had originally situated me!  In fact, the point where I had begun is roughly three-fourths of the way through the novel!  Dutifully, I read through the actual first three-fourths of the novel, and found that to my delight I had managed to get almost all of the story correctly as it had developed from the real first page!  When I thought about it, that gave me my topic, my new topic, for this post–how many novels you’ve read can you say were actually so well put together that you could follow the storyline that late in the novel and not be totally at sea, all the while feeling still excited both by the shorter storyline and the original true full length novel?

Just to clue you into the gist of the novel, it’s about a late middle-aged photographer, a woman, who is supporting both her aged parents to some extent and also contributing some money to her talented son’s well-being, in addition to supporting her own career in two different homes.  Money troubles as well as a curve in the nature of her subjects cause her to rent out her New York City apartment, which she loves, and rent a small cabin in upstate New York, a place with which she has no initial innate sympathy, lacking country roots.  Gradually, she starts to shoot new subjects and to become aware of an entirely different lifestyle and group of friends.  She is touched as an individual not only by the newness of it all, but by all the incidents which involve her friends, both old and new.  I won’t spoil the ending for you by telling you how it ends, except that it develops in a way which seems totally natural to real life, as people call it.  Though there are no improbable leaps of the imagination called for, however, the pace never lags, the interest never wanes, and the whole is a tour de force of full blown fictional creation in very simple words and sentences.  Once one has read the whole in its proper order, the last fourth of the novel, which I had at first assumed was all of it, clearly and cleanly concludes all of the foregoing material and tops it off very neatly and happily.  Yes, it has a happy ending, after various trials for the characters, and a few unhappy internal events.  And what’s more important, the happy ending is neither soppy nor improbable.  The whole gives the impression of having been written by someone well-versed with the particular sort of life lived by the heroine.

Though I’d never read Anna Quindlen before, she is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, and her writing shows quite obviously why she was given this award.  She has written both fiction and non-fiction.  Another book of hers which I’ve heard of before but never read is One True Thing, a title which may well be as familiar as you as it is to me.  I think I’ll look for it on the websites soon, because as curiosity provoking as her title Still Life With Breadcrumbs is, One True Thing is, as a title, equally enticing.