Dennis Foon’s Skud

Foon, Dennis. Skud.  Toronto Groundwood, 2003.
Four boys who attend the same high school all face problems relating to their understanding of what it means to be masculine.  As a result, at least three things happen in the course of their alternations, as each speaks of what is happening to himself in first person in the [...]

Conventional Attributes of Masculinity

Some of the novels I’ve been looking at lately, and plan to do some thinking about in entries here, revolve around ways in which their male characters think about their maleness and what it might mean or ought to be. For that reason, I thought I’d better post here a handout I prepared some years [...]

J.L. Powers’s The Confessional

Powers, J.L.  The Confessional.  New York: Knopf, 2007.
The El Paso Chamber of Commerce must have hit men out gunning for J.L. Powers, the author of this book–or if not, they should have.  It makes life in that city sound completely hellish (and indeed, confirms my own impression of it from a brief stay at a [...]

Rob Thomas’s Slave Day

Thomas, Rob.  Slave Day.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
This novel describes what happens to as group of people on a southern high school’s “Slave Day”–a day in which individuals are auctioned off to then act as slaves for those who bought them for the rest of the day–in particular, a group of eight alternating [...]

Margaret Lanagan’s Tender Morsels

Lanagan, Margot.  Tender Morsels.  New York: Knopf, 2008.
I decided to read Tender Morsels as a break from my consideration of alternating narratives; all I knew about it was that a lot of people were talking about it, and it sounded interesting.  And I started to read it and, surprise, it contains alternating narratives!   I take [...]

Welwyn Wilton Katz’s Come Like Shadows

Katz, Welwyn.  Come Like Shadows.  1993.  Regina: Coteau, 2000.
The most noticeable thing about this novel is just how very, very complex is the situation it describes.  The plot centres around a production at the Canadian Stratford Festival of Macbeth, but also involves at least four different historical events: Shakespeare’s version of what happens in Macbeth, [...]

David Lodge’s Thinks . . .

Lodge, David.  Thinks . . . . 2001.  New York and London: Penguin, 2002.
This novel is so elegantly and intricately built on its alternating focalizations that I’m tempted to identify it as a meta-alternating narrative–an novel in which the structure of alternating narratives is so completely linked to and expressive of its meanings that it [...]

Terry Pratchett’s Nation

Pratchett, Terry.  Nation.  London: Doubleday, 2008.
Nation is most interesting (in the context of my alternating narratives project) as a very messy version of the alternating narrative novel.  There are, yes, two central characters whose points of view alternate throughout the book.  They are, yes, representative of apparently opposite groups or cultures.  They do, yes, turn [...]

A.M. Jenkins’s Beating Heart

Jenkins, A.M.  Beating Heart.  New York: Harpercollins, 2006.
The alternating narratives are visually distinguished from each other–his is third person present narrative that looks typically novel-like, hers a first person collection of thoughts set out on the page to look sort of like poetry (but hardly actually ever achieving anything poetic–the only thing this spacing of [...]

Joseph Bruchac’s Children of the Longhouse

Bruchac, Joseph. Children of the Longhouse.  1996.  New York and London: Puffin, 1998.
It’s the late fifteenth century, pre-contact with Europeans, for a twin brother and sister who are members of the Mohawk branch of the Iroquois nation, and the novel alternately tells of what happens from his viewpoint and hers–in the long run, mostly, his, [...]