Novels that tell multiple stories across different historical periods have become a staple of contemporary literatureby Sam Sacks / August 21, 2014 / Leave a comment
Published in September issue of Prospect Magazine
Time rarely goes straight in literature any longer. The smooth, uninterrupted passage from a beginning to an ending has fallen out of favour. Instead, books that juxtapose multiple stories from different periods in time—such as AS Byatt’s Possession, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and recently Philip Hensher’s The Emperor Waltz—have grown into a genre of their own. Once a sci-fi plot conceit, time travel has become among the most popular structural devices in contemporary fiction. Today “time machine fiction” reigns supreme.
One signature element of these books recalls 19th-century novels, whose meanings (and satisfactions) grew from the organisation of parallel plots. Think of the constellation of indirectly connected characters in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, or the forking destinies in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Spinning multiple stories, which could converge and diverge at telling moments, was a way for novelists to build a world out of individuals.