by 2019 Ivan Gold Fellow, Aube Rey Lescure
A novelist considering multiple timelines faces an oft-repeated threat: the reader will pick their favorite timeline and skip over the other. Sometimes, we don’t need to be hit over the head by what is essentially an extended backstory; other times, a frame narrative of a present narrator recollecting their past experiences adds little value to the tale of their youth. To avoid multiple timelines back-firing, the writer needs to convince the reader that there is pay-off in the ability, within the context of a particular narrative, to glimpse past and future at once.
When done with purpose, dual (or more) timelines can add tremendous value to a novel. Take Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, a critical success and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Great Believers is an example of both dual timelines and dual point-of-views: one timeline spans 1982-1991, centering on Yale Tishman and his social circle in Boystown, Chicago; the other is confined to a few months in 2015 and follows Fiona, a friend of Yale’s who is on a quest to track down her daughter in Paris.
(Spoiler warning: if you haven’t read The Great Believers and don’t want the plot spoiled, please, please, please stop reading.)
The main story in The Great Believers is, by measure of emotional resonance and thematic weight, unquestionably Yale’s. The central tension of the 1980s timeline is whether Yale will escape the AIDS epidemic and survive. At first his prospects for doing so seem good. Then, towards the two-third point of his timeline, we learn of the reversal of his fate. We still hold out hope that he might survive on treatment. But the last sections of the timeline focus on his heartbreaking last years, and the inevitability of his early death.
The Fiona timeline is structurally reliant on the plot arc of finding her disappeared daughter–but when she’s not on a detective quest, Fiona is often leafing through old photographs and pondering about trauma and memory. There are two main “connective tissue” characters in the 2015 timeline: Fiona, bearer of private memories, and her Parisian host, the American artist Richard Campo, who uses the medium of photography and video to memorialize the young men at the heart of the 1980 timeline.
Yet, when one timeline (in this case, Yale’s) seems to dominate another– or even if one timeline provides enough material to be a standalone novel of its own, a fundamental question arises: are the dual timelines necessary? Is the secondary timeline justified? What essential additions does it bring to the novel?
For The Great Believers, the easiest place to find initial answers about the necessity and justification of dual timelines are Makkai’s author interviews. Makkai has explained that she included the 2015 timeline because she didn’t want the 80s AIDS crisis to feel like a historical parenthesis now closed. She wanted to look at the impact of survivors, of those who still live in the present.
While the pacing of forward movement in time is vastly different for each timeline, the emotional cadence of the story arcs is in tandem. The more positive/light-hearted parts come together: a third of the way through each timeline, Yale acquires the art, and Fiona sleeps with a romantic interest. The darkest turns appear in consecutive sections as well: at roughly the two-thirds point of the book, Yale finds out he has AIDS after all; for Fiona, the Paris attacks happen. (Actually, the Paris attacks happen first, then Yale finds out he has AIDS. But the emotional weight still rests with the latter event. Independent of the exact timing of which section comes first, the Fiona timeline still clearly accommodates the greatest twists and turns of the Yale timeline.)
Do the frequent switch-offs between the two timelines and the tandem emotional arcs enhance the reader’s experience of “time” in the novel? Although the Fiona timeline is dwarfed by Yale’s and suffers from a clunkier plot (to me, Fiona’s missing-daughter plot is a distraction, though its beats dictate most of the switches in and out of the Fiona timeline), I do believe it fundamentally enhances the ways the reader experiences the Yale timeline. Fiona’s timeline’s greatest achievement is showing the passage of time and the process memorialization. Its core purpose is to show the aging of memory, the frozenness in time of a lost generation. As more and more characters from the Yale timeline pass away, we find pain and comfort in finding them in Fiona’s memory and in Richard’s photographs. The effect of the secondary timeline is like an emotional processing room, in which we are pulled back from the raw trauma of the 1980s timeline intermittently to meditate on loss and remembrance.
On the most abstract level, what dual timelines fundamentally alter for the reader are levels of knowledge with respect to time. There are many ways to manipulate what the reader does and does not know in fiction, but anytime an additional timeline is added, the reader’s knowledge about the universe in the book expands. To explore whether additional timelines pay-off, it may be useful to think about the equilibrium of knowledge between the reader and the inhabitants of the fictional universe–the narrator and the characters. Broadly speaking, there are three general scenarios for the equilibrium between reader’s knowledge and the characters’ knowledge:
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- In the most simple format, the reader and the character find out about everything concurrently. As events are happening to the character, as the character is learning things, the reader observes. The story and chronology here is usually in its most linear and straightforward form.
- The character knows more than the reader. This occurs, for example, with unreliable narrators, or characters/narrators telling the story from a later telling point. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is my favorite example of an unreliable narrator and character who knows way, way more than the reader. Even by the very end of the book, we still have very little idea of where the truth resides. We feel played, but also delighted.
- The reader knows more than the character, at least in some realms. This is often created when the novel structure or P.O.V. gets more complex. With any omniscient narrative, the readers know more about some aspects (such as what other characters are thinking, what their motivations are, etc.) than any particular character. With dual or multiple timelines, narrative distance is immediately created as the reader becomes aware that they have an upper hand in knowledge against characters in at least one timeline. When a past timeline is told from the future timeline protagonist’s point of view, the reader knows more about the past timeline’s character’s future than the young character herself (i.e. in Marlena, we know that this teenage girl ends up an emotionally scarred, alcoholic librarian). When two different timelines are told from two different characters’ point of views, the reader’s advantage of knowledge becomes even more complicated. They know what has become of some characters or plot points in the past timeline, but they also observe revelations about the past that present timeline’s characters may not be fully aware of.
What is the purpose of giving the reader this kind of access and superiority of knowledge? For me, multiple timelines are most justified when the reader experiences the poetry of dramatic irony. In The Great Believers, a character who everyone was convinced is dead returns to the 2015 timeline, and for some readers, his survival alone could justify the secondary timeline. Our advantage in knowledge is over Yale, in his dying days, who will never know that his friend, who he presumed dead, has survived. The knowledge wouldn’t have altered the Yale timeline in any dramatic way, but for the reader, there is great poetry, some comfort and hope, and a lot of heartbreaking irony in this reading the rest of the Yale timeline while aware of his friend’s survival. In another dramatic instance, Fiona reveals in 2015 that she beats herself up because Yale died completely alone. At this point, as readers, we did not know Yale would die a lonely death–but now, plunging back into his timeline, we have this bit of knowledge he doesn’t have. As we follow Yale’s last days, we feel the weight of sadness of knowing that he will die alone, especially because Yale himself has felt guilt for not being by his friends’ side as they drew their last breaths. We know, while Yale doesn’t, that he will meet the same fate.
There are two caveats to keep in mind while giving the readers advantage of knowledge over some characters with multiple timelines. The readers, of course, should be left with strategic blind spots.The readers of The Great Believers see a world where Fiona is still alive, where Richard is still alive, where there is the strong urge to find out who made it and who did not. Makkai could have told us that Yale died in the first Fiona section–but of course, she does not. Another caveat: the reader’s superiority of knowledge over the characters should peter out by the end of the novel. A certain degree of convergence should occur–the reader’s advantage in knowledge needs to erode as the book wears on, whoever lives in the state of not knowing in the book needs to slowly converge with the reader. It’s no fun if the reader finishes the book and knows a large amount of crucial truths or appreciates crucial ironies that nobody in the book can.
If multiple timelines are pulled off well, the writer is affording the reader the experience of “deep time.” At its most absolute, the poetry of deep time is that feeling we get when we think about the fact that the earth is 4.5 billions years old–it’s staring down the layers of the Grand Canyon; it’s to step, momentarily, abstractly, outside the inevitable confine of our own experience of time. A dual timeline achieves this in a small way. A zoomed-out perspective on time brings a poetic justice that is often unknowable in real life. In The Great Believers, we watch Yale go from a larger-than-life, flesh and blood character to a painful, guarded memory. We reserve judgment on Fiona’s poor motherhood because we’ve glimpsed her trauma of losing all of her family and friends, one after another. We gain understanding, empathy, and sometimes pain by experiencing the passage of time in a way that is unknowable in real life. And that, after all, is one of the core purposes of fiction.
