Writing Prompt: All This Could Be Different, by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Or, a new way to write a novel about a house
I am writing to you today about a novel written about friends who get together to buy a house, a perhaps unlikely way to summarize Sarah Thankam Mathews’ National Book Award short-listed novel All This Could Be Different, but I will get to just what I mean by that.
A City On A Rock, artist unknown in the style of Goya, Spain, 19th century; from the Met’s Open Access collection.
Some background: I conceive of my classes as ways for me to think about things and as I prepared my syllabus for my advanced fiction workshop this year, I recalled an online course taught the year previous, What Is A Novel For, that took one idea through a variety of formal possibilities—what if the idea for the novel was instead an interconnected short story collection, interconnected essays, a YA novel, a thriller, and so on. I chose some recent debut fiction: All This Could Be Different, by Sarah Thankam Mathews; On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong; Fiona and Jane, by Jean Chen Ho; If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery; Objects of Desire, by Clare Sestanovich; and then, the only title that is not a debut: Lauren Groff’s novella, “What’s The Time, Mr. Wolf?” online at The New Yorker. The idea was to examine some of the expressive formal possibilities in recent long fiction, looking at examples that pushed at the forms the authors chose—in this case, two novels, two interconnected short story collections, a collection of stories that worked as variations on a theme, and a novella.
I created writing prompts after each reading as a way to effect analysis based on what students observed about the distinctive features of the works we were reading. I wrote up the results, adding observations of my own and all of it was meant to operate, start to finish, as food for thought for the students, whether they undertook the prompt or not. Most undertook at least one.
When creating writing prompts out of readings I reverse engineer a work into questions or features or both, and it becomes a way to analyze what might have gone into the work, an approach to thinking about it through various lenses like structure, craft, intention, theme, tradition and character, while avoiding a more straightforward literary critical approach that might not serve us in discussing these works after reading them for technique. I began the practice 15 years ago in a fiction writing class I taught at Amherst College. The idea was to go from How did they do that to Here are some steps. I like writing prompts because they make me feel playful, which I do need in order to write. I like how they spur me to do something I might not otherwise do, at their best. I think of it as related to my love for answering questions.
I’ve since created prompts out of works like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain, offered to students in a recent class I did for the Shipman Agency a few years ago which some of you may remember. I am now creating one for my upcoming June 18th online class on E. M. Forster’s Maurice that focuses not just on how Forster wrote his first and only gay novel but an anti-imperial novel that addresses queerness and class disparities at the level of plot.
What I’ll offer here are some greatly revised and expanded versions of this spring’s prompts as a series for paid subscribers, starting with Mathews’ All This Could Be Different.
I first took inspiration for this exercise in a quote from Mathews' interview at Phenomenal Media, where she talks about the challenge she set for herself in writing the novel:
Interviewer: All This Could Be Different” is a unique coming-of-age story in that it's not only about one main character coming into herself — it's a collective tale about many 20-something millennials growing up in different ways. What made you want to write about this "we" and not just an "I"?
STM: One of my great hungers when I was a younger writer was an emotional one: to feel my story, my specific life story, seen and understood in its entirety. I wanted to be represented, I wanted to be legible. I think that’s a very common and understandable desire. I wrote a whole other novel from this place of need that has never seen the light of day. But with this novel, with All This Could Be Different, I showed up with a different impulse. “What structure can I architect,” I asked, “to make people feel what I hope they will feel, to make them more likely to hold certain questions deeply?” That, I think, made for a stronger work of art. The person I am now cares a little less about the pure fact of representation than the question of for what, and for whom, can power be marshaled. The novel is at its heart a somewhat conservative form, historically best suited to show the journey and consciousness of a single self, and often a self that mirrors a nation-state. I wanted to see if I could work within this form while making it work for me. I wanted to tell a story that began with an “I” – a person like Sneha who believes herself alone and atomized – and chart an arc towards a “We” – a collective, compound love story that showed what interdependence can look like, that showed a self being formed by other people. All This Could Be Different tells this story of someone who dreams so little for herself beyond an individual security and safety, and finds herself schooled by love.
This arc is what I wanted to analyze for myself and my students as a possibility. As mutual aid and collective political action have become a greater part of the national news and the culture, I wanted to think about ways to write fiction about that.
Mathews refers to the bildungsroman repeatedly within her novel, and while the main character is not a writer, she is a reader, and understands herself in part through fiction—the novel is not a Künstlerroman for example. Her novel is to my mind about the way a community or a collective can offer someone healing after the ways capitalist individualism harms them. I don’t know enough German to name this form here but if you do, I’ll give the best attempt a free subscription. I would dare say this kind of novel is increasingly visible—Emma Frumpenberg’s Housemates, to my mind, is also about these themes.
Brandon Taylor’s essay on Emile Zola’s 20 novel Rougon-Macquart cycle was much on my mind as I did this. Taylor offers a consideration of Zola’s enormous body of work as a kind of context to the fiction of our era, given his role as not just a naturalist writer, but the one who made sure it was a part of our thinking about novels for perhaps all time. Taylor offers thoughts on Zola’s naturalism that seemed a good place to start thinking after that Mathews quote:
For Zola, a person’s psychology and appetites were determined by the biological (the hereditary) and the social (milieu and environment). The objective of the experimental novelist is
to possess a knowledge of the ... phenomena inherent in man, to show the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under the influences of heredity and environment, such as physiology shall give them to us, and then finally to exhibit man living in social conditions produced by himself, which he modifies daily, and in the heart of which he himself experiences a continual transformation.
His ambitions as a writer were vast and moral:
To be the master of good and evil, to regulate life, to regulate society, to solve in time all the problems of socialism, above all, to give justice a solid foundation by solving through experiment the questions of criminality – is not this being the most useful and the most moral workers in the human workshop?
Zola thought that if he could work out in his novels the exact combination of biology and environment that gave rise to all the evils in society – crime, disease, poverty, violence – he could save the world. This extra-literary dimension is what moves his naturalism beyond pessimistic determinism. The actions and circumstances of man may be understood as a product of his biology and social environment, but through careful study of these forces we can choose to act in ways that counter them. Therefore, Zola’s naturalism not only holds that one can shape and change one’s fate, but that it is a moral necessity to do so, at least in the extra-literary dimension that is life. For his characters, things are a bit bleaker.
A novel that can save the world. An idea I think we are always chasing and giving up on.
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