We can tell ourselves it was all fine before Stephen Dedalus and his moo-cow, or before Windham Lewis came along to Blast it all up. It’s also tempting to assume that if we’re looking for narrative unity, we have to go back before Modernism. Given these circumstances, omniscience would seem to be not only impossible but also undesirable-about as appropriate for our culture as carrier pigeons. Ours is a diverse world, authority is fragmented and shared, communication is spread out among discourses. ![]() It’s tempting to view this current polyphonic narrative spree as a reflection on our times. If the contemporary novel had a philosophy, it would be Let’s Agree To Disagree. ![]() Old Filth tells his story and The Man in the Wooden Hat tells hers. The second two give up on shared perspective altogether, splitting the story into separate books. The first is a formal experiment in which alternating narratives tell the same story of a marriage-which is really two different stories, their course determined by just one action. On the top layer of my nightstand alone, I found Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World and Jane Gardam’s Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat. I found what we might call cocktail-party novels, in which the narrator hovers over one character’s shoulder and then another’s, never alighting for too long before moving on. I found crowd-told narratives, like Colum McCann’s elegant Let The Great World Spin. I looked for omniscience among recent books I had admired and enjoyed. ![]() It wasn’t long before I realized I had no idea how to achieve this. A narrator who could do anything at any time anywhere. I would write a narrator who had no constraints on knowledge, location, tone, even personality. Fatigued from working on one manuscript with multiple first-person limited narrators, and then another with two different narrative elements, I thought how simple it would be, how straightforward, to write this next book with an omniscient point of view. As I was taking notes for a new novel recently, I took a moment to consider point of view.
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