How to Draw a Novel

Novelist Solares (Don’t Send Flowers) shares in these inventive and rewardingly off-kilter essays his idiosyncratic perspective on writing fiction. In “Doubles Cast in Shades of Night,” Solares meditates on how authors create characters, calling them “red playdough in our hands” and suggesting they sometimes constitute “freer, more courageous” versions of the writer. The collection’s most creative entry, “Structure’s Ghost,” expounds on classic novels by interpreting line drawing representations of their plots. For instance, Solares contends that the characters in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter “are registered with such precision that it seems like their downfall is being witnessed by a sniper” and illustrates the book’s plot as a wavy downward-sloping arrow with a sniper’s crosshairs over the arrow’s origin point. The author’s mercurial focus flows in unexpected directions, mixing literary analysis, biographical tidbits (“Flaubert claimed to read passages of civil law every morning to steep himself in the concise and neutral style he needed to record his stories”), and punchy aphorisms (“If the first phrase of a novel is like riling up a bull, then the last must be like the end of a bullfight”) in kaleidoscopic fashion, and the line drawings amuse (James Joyce’s Ulysses is a series of loops inside a loop, the tail of which reads “yes”). It adds up to an audacious and unique consideration of the art of the novel. (Dec.)