Jesmyn Ward Delights in Being Bewildered

The best-selling novelist and two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward tries not to think about her audience until the end of the writing process. Doing so, she explained, can be anxiety-inducing and stifling. “It’s always difficult to navigate between being too plain—because you don’t want to insult your reader—and being too obtuse,” she said. “Not every reader will find my work enjoyable,” Ward added, but she writes in the faith that those who are at least receptive to her writing will be able to follow it and find meaning in it. She extends this type of trust not only to her readers but to her fellow-writers: “Sometimes being bewildered is just part of reading,” she said. “Anytime that a story asks you to do a lot of work to understand the world and the characters being constructed, there’s something to be learned.” Ward recently joined us to discuss a selection of laborious novels that she enjoyed, not despite their bewildering qualities but because of them. Her comments have been edited and condensed.

Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

This is the second in a series about necromancers who live in a faraway galaxy. The political and social structure of their society is related in the first book, “Gideon the Ninth.” Essentially, there are different houses that serve a single emperor. It’s all pretty straightforward, and readers are closely aligned with one character, a knight from one of the houses. But that all changes in this next installment, which is told from the perspective of the heiress whom the knight served. The heiress gives a nonlinear and contradictory account of the events that took place in the previous book, and readers aren’t given clues as to why.

I found the first two-thirds of the book almost entirely incomprehensible, but I went at it doggedly. Frustrated, I kept asking myself, “What makes me want to continue even though I’m being asked to work so hard to figure out what’s going on?” It was because the story was so clever and inventive—from the character development to the dialogue—that it inspired trust. I sensed that there’d be a payoff at the end, and there was.

Cane

by Jean Toomer

There’s no definable main protagonist in this novel, or a specific question that’s being asked, or even a clear narrative engine driving the story. The book is very short and impressionistic, just a series of encounters with different characters. I had to read it as an undergraduate, but the real reason I was committed to finishing it was because it made me feel something. I’m motivated to write by the love I have for the place I come from, and for the people who are here, and I recognized this in Toomer. He pays such careful attention to the experiences of his characters, to their smallest utterances and movements, and there seems to be a kind of love underpinning his work.

Bunny

by Mona Awad

Unlike in “Harrow the Ninth,” the mechanics of the plot in this book are clear: The main character, Samantha, is an M.F.A. student on the East Coast. She’s a bit of an outsider at first, but she gradually becomes friends with other women in the program. They are, at least on the surface, sort of caricatures of femininity—poofy dress, lots of pink. Samantha eventually discovers that these women turn rabbits into men, party with them, then discard them. Although it’s totally illogical, I went with it because the book is humorous and highly entertaining. It also makes observations so sharp that it’s as if Awad were winking at me.

The end did leave me feeling a little cheated, though, like the empathy and trust I invested in the text was misplaced. I won’t spoil it, but everything I thought I knew—about Samantha, the program, her friends—was wrong. Still, the book made me feel comfortable in the presence of the surreal and the strange, and that’s something that I seek out in stories.

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

Morrison demands that her readers work from the very beginning, which is powerful and assured. At the same time, she signals to you that she knows exactly what she’s doing—she knows the world she has built and the people in it—so it’s easy to trust her. You have the sense that if you put in the work the book’s mysteries will get solved, and there are so many.

There’s the initial mystery of what happened to Sethe, the book’s central character, when she was enslaved. The arrival of her daughter’s spirit brings with it two more: Is it actually the ghost of her child, and, if so, what does she want? That’s all bewildering plot-wise, but Morrison also bewilders readers through language. Her prose is very complicated and layered. It’s like poetry, with its attention to rhythm and detail. Surprises are woven in at the sentence level, so readers have to be present in every line in order to understand all that’s unfolding. I try to emulate this sort of intricacy and texture in my own work.