Who Is a Novel For?

With Nothing on Her Shoulder, After the Apple Harvest, and With a Baby on Her Shoulder, by Gaby Gummesson, 2022-2023.

Photo by Louise Krause on Unsplash

The books

Med Ingenting i Bagaget, Efter Äppelskörden, and Med Barn i Bagaget, trilogy by Gaby Gummerson, Förlag Gaby Gummersson U&M, 2022 and 2023.¹

Why write about them

I can’t stop thinking about these simply written, self-published novels, set in rural Sweden in the early years of the 20th century.

In part that’s because the characters are still living in my head, and in part because the novels have got me thinking in new ways about the how, why, what and for whom of a good novel (and also about what a good novel is).

How I came across them

A while back a friend invited me to an author’s talk in a weekly series that was called something like “Books and Handicrafts.” I was delighted. The series’s title brought up a wonderful, cheerful image of a traditional book reading and discussion at which half the audience was simultaneously knitting, crocheting, whittling, etc.

It turned out that the book events and the handicraft events took place on alternate weeks, which was disappointing, but I accepted the invitation anyway.²

All I knew about that reading was that the author was retired, had never written a novel before the two that she would be discussing (two parts of planned trilogy), and that she had based the plots on her grandmother’s childhood in poverty in the Swedish countryside during the 1920s.

None of this led to me to expect that I’d end up reading the books themselves. The books didn’t sound like literature with a capital L, and they also didn’t sound like silly feel-good reads. My fiction-reading had been careening mostly between those two in that year, which was still in that complicated time of coming back to normal after the pandemic.

But something that the writer said during her talk interested me more than almost anything I’ve heard before in a book reading, and I’ve been to a lot of book readings by a lot of writers, including writers of literature with a capital L. This writer, it turned out, had had a career in communications before retiring, and she had a precise idea of what she wanted from her novels.

She had written them, she said, on the assumption that they would be mostly of interest to friends or relatives or neighbours (in the broadest sense) who had grown up in the region where the two novels of the planned trilogy were set. This was a readership that likely included some for whom novels were not a main thing, who might read a book or two a year but not necessarily much more.

So, she said, she wrote the books to be accessible to people who aren’t in the habit of reading many books. She thought a great deal about sentence length, and about the size of the print on the page, and even about the colour of the paper. She didn’t write the novels she could have written, but rather the novels that she wanted to write for the context she was writing them in.

I don’t think that I’ve heard a novelist say something so clear and direct and inclusive about their work before.

I was in the middle of writing a novel of my own at that point, with the idea that it would say things that I thought were important. The model I vaguely had in mind was Ali Smith’s Seasons Quartet books, but less political; I was interested in how Smith used each novel to offer readers a great deal of information about a single writer or artist, woven into the plot of the story.

I didn’t have the skill to write novels as brilliant as Smith’s from a literary perspective, but I wanted my book to be, in some sense, good: I wanted the sentences to be beautiful and clear and balanced, and the story to be compelling. I saw the plot and the language as a way as a way to share things I wanted to share and to explore questions I didn’t have the answers to, because fiction seemed to me to be unparalleled as a form for doing that. (The guiding principle was in some ways a speech Tom Stoppard gives to a playwright character in his play The Real Thing, in which he describes good writing as the equivalent of a well-sprung cricket bat, getting ideas far and wide into the world.)

I was writing the novel to be useful, but it had never, ever, crossed my mind to consider writing it for people who weren’t constant readers, and I felt, if I may admit it, ashamed of myself because of that.

So I bought the first volume of the planned trilogy. It was indeed written in simple language, as the author had intended (“easily read” is the phrase in Swedish), and there were signs that it had not been through the process that I imagine a publishing house would have offered: the main character was too perfect, there were typos, and so forth.

But: I read it in an afternoon — I never read books in Swedish so swiftly — and went out the next morning to buy the second volume. Then I waited for months for the third volume to come out, looking forward to it actively the entire time. And when the third volume came out, I read it that same day. They were hard to put down.

I’ve loaned the first volume out twice now. Each time, the borrower came back to me within a few days. They complained that the book was simply written, and that the main character was too perfect. Then they asked when they could borrow the next two.

Photo by Hümâ H. Yardım on Unsplash

About the books

I’m trying to untangle, for myself as much as for you, what it is about these books that makes me want to write about them as much as I do.

There is how well they foster engagement with their characters, on the one hand. The three volumes so far (they’re all relatively short) have taken us from the main characters’ early childhoods through to their early twenties, and we’ve also followed their parents and friends and others in their community along the way.

The characters are sketched relatively lightly. The thoughts that we are let in on are not idea-driven, but mostly focused on the people around them and on what they want from life.

But all the same I am fully invested in these characters and their lives now. I want to know what happens next. I want them to be happy. I want to know how they continue to tackle hardships in the little villages they live in, and what happens with their apple trees, and whether a young couple who don’t get along very well will become better with each other, or worse. I’m living their timelines along with my own.

The last novel I read where I felt so strongly that I was inhabiting characters’ lives alongside them was Afterlives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, whom I had never heard of before he won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago. I think that Afterlives is going to be a classic for a long time, in part because of this sense that one has lived several full lifetimes alongside the characters. I felt that way with Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries, too, though in that case it is mostly a single character whose life one feels one has inhabited.

These books are different from those two, of course. They are manifestly less complex. But they had a similar impact, and that fascinates me. At first I tried to devote time to figuring out how the writer did that, made me feel so strongly that these characters were living their lives parallel to mine, that they actually exist, but then I realised that I don’t know how Gurnah does it in Afterlives, either.

Thinking about the simple language and structure of the trilogy, I thought a little of Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel Pollyanna, which also has fairly simple language and a child main character, and which carries most of its ideas and principles on its sleeve. There is a lot of complaint that Pollyanna is too simply written and its main character too perfect, but that was a beloved book for a very long time and sparked who knows how many movies. I loved it as a child, and can probably still recount many of the scenes from it.

This leads me to the second thing I wanted to talk about, after that sense of engagement with the characters. It’s about how much a novel can stay with one, how much it can carry, even when it’s not especially literary, even when it is fairly direct about what it wants to say.

The books in Gaby Gummesson’s trilogy have a great deal that they want to say, it seems to me, about the circumstances in which the main characters are living. Some of the characters are illegitimate or have illegitimate children, and deal with the societal punishments associated with that. Gender as an issue comes up regularly, woven into the fabric of the story (the main character is a girl and then a young woman). We see a wealthy wife unable to meet her grandchildren because her husband won’t allow it. We see differences between wealthy and not wealthy.

The novels are researched, and we live inside a tiny house with a stamped-earth floor, and walk with the characters between villages because there is no other form of transportation available. We see how much depends on how the apple harvest comes through.

One tiny detail that has stayed with me is when a character walks a long way from one village to, essentially, a yard sale, in another, but only buys one or two dishes, as that is all that she can carry home; there is no alternative.

I feel as if I have been brought to think about interesting things by the novels, directly and indirectly.

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

In 1888 an American journalist named Edward Bellamy published a novel called Looking Backward: 2000-1887. I first encountered it in a $1 Dover Editions cheap reprint, in the days before the internet, when one could go into a bookstore and find the rack of Dover books and buy out-of-copyright classics on thin, poorly-printed paper for almost nothing. I read so many writers that way whom I would never have read otherwise. In my memory the books mostly cost $1 or $2, but this was a long time ago and I could be wrong.

In any event, Bellamy’s novel was there among the Dover classics. It’s not Literature with a capital L. It is written in what might be called serviceable prose; that is to say, it’s not hard to read, and the sentences are perfectly fine, but one does not have a sense that one is reading art.

Unlike in the trilogy, Bellamy’s characters barely exist, except to witness the world he wants to portray. The plot is fairly minimal.

The main character falls asleep in 1887, presumably the year Bellamy was writing the book, and wakes up in the year 2000. The rest of the novel consists of his marvelling at the changes in society and technology that have occurred in the years in between.

For us, reading it in the time Bellamy is imagining, it’s astounding to think of how things we take for granted now are part of his Utopian fantasies: music on demand in every house, for instance (he imagines that every city has several orchestras playing day and night, whose sound can be piped into every home, allowing residents to choose which one to listen to). A system of licensing for doctors, so that one can trust in their training. A shopping system in which one looks at prototypes in a shop and orders the items one wants, which are then shipped over from a warehouse and appear on one’s doorstep later in the same day.

A world in which women work and have independent sources of income, making marriage a matter of choice for everyone. (As I recall, there is a wonderful line about how, now that a woman, in asking a man to marry her, is not in essence asking him to support her financially for the rest of her life, she can be as proactive in a romance as a man can.)

Then he imagines things that have not happened today, like a universal basic income and a work life of 20 years (unless one wants more), after which one does anything one wants. And so on and so forth.

Bellamy’s book was immensely important in its time. People created Bellamy Societies to try to change the world they lived in. The story, minimal as it was, unsubtle as it was, was enough to carry his ideas forward.

I consider it a wonderfully enjoyable book to read, but I find it hard to call it a novel, much less a good novel.

This trilogy, however, feels to me like a novel, a real novel, and a good novel. The language is simple, but the characters exist; even if, like Looking Backward, it has things that it wants to say and says them without a great deal of complexity, it is still more than just a conveyance of those ideas in the way that Bellamy’s book is.

If you read Swedish and pick the first volume up, you’ll be disappointed if you’re looking for Gurnah or Shields. But you’ll likely read the second book, and then the third, and the perhaps the characters will stick with you in the same way that they do with me.

As I said, I can’t stop thinking about the books. I suppose that I’m hoping, with this essay, is to let the questions of what one is trying to do with a novel, and what one can do with it, and why, swirl around a little. In the meantime, it seems that there will be a fourth volume. I look forward to reading it.

Photo by Ryan Arnst on Unsplash

1. My (loose) translations of the Swedish titles.

2. I’ve been playing around with the idea of starting some kind of cultural organization in my own little village, and may in fact try to implement something like that if so. How marvellous to offer poetry readings, music, book talks, etc, and add as an aside that people are always welcome to bring handicraft projects!

These days the idea of a totally passive audience almost bothers me; it feels as if moments of connection when people come together are stronger if everyone is engaged in some way, even if only with their own individual projects in their own hands as they listen or speak.