Do you like novels to give you oodles of happy gushes, tear-inducing moments of delight, and embarrassingly maudlin wishes that you were the main character’s best friend? Or do you prefer novels propelled by cringe-inducing episodes that peel off ironic layers of the plot’s onionskin until the fascinating/earth-shattering/primal-scream-laden moment near the end when The Truth hits you in the face?
These are two extremes, of course, but I do believe that most successful novels (at least the ones that aren’t blatant pulp) tend to gravitate to one pole or the other. Let’s look at two novels with teenage protagonists that share some plot and theme elements, and see which relies on the Big Feel, and which on the Big Reveal.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and Aidan Chambers’ Postcards from No Man’s Land both feature teenage boys who visit a foreign country in search of their grandfather’s past—one who died as a soldier during WWII, the other who survived WWII. Both boys are bright, highly literate, and a bit quirky. Each meets a number of interesting people along the way who are unusual and funny, and who help them come of age. Each has a family secret at the center of their journey. Yet one story I would call a Big Reveal, and the other a Big Feel.
Everything is Illuminated does have a fascinating friendship develop between the narrator and his travel partner, but the tension that drives the story derives almost entirely from the narrator’s obsession to find a truth that he may unconsciously sense, but is not revealed fully until the story’s climatic scene. That Big Reveal moment brings the narrator’s obsession into full focus, changes him forever, and gives the reader (if the reader is like me) an emotional satisfaction that makes reading the story worthwhile.
Unlike Everything, Postcards’s reveal—if you can call it that—gets overshadowed by the dual narrators at the story’s beginning. The connection between these narrators gets gradually revealed over the course of the novel, but the Big Hairy Truth At The End that presents a conundrum for the main character is hardly a reveal at all by the time the reader gets there, because the ins and outs of it have been chewed over and spat out along the way. Postcards is what I would call a Big Feel novel: it relies on emotional bonding between the reader and its dual narrators to provide the needed momentum to get to the end.
Do I exaggerate? Yeah, but. Each of these novels do indeed have a number of feels and reveals to gratify readers, as do most other successful long stories. The age of their narrators, similar themes of wartime loss and search for family, and interwoven backstories make these novels feel like fiction siblings to me. Yet siblings usually have very different personalities, and so do these.
So, which do you like better: Big Feel, or Big Reveal?
J.S. Webster Mind Voyages 