a vignette? in your contemporary novel? groundbreaking

I haven’t enjoyed many books released this decade. They tote the same prestige. The apples of fashion magazines’ eyes, written during prestigious fellowships, a residence or two on the résumé, a college degree or three in the back flap bio. Authors proclaimed as- well, the “next big thing” doesn’t cut it. Sally Rooney ate that title up. Devoured it. No room for other emerging talent left. They’re relegated to one-liners on Twitter. The death of the literary scion one sound bite at a time. Yet publishing houses continue to churn out these so-called literary darlings of the 2020s. And I continue to read them. Always get hooked on a good premise, though inevitably get disappointed. Why? Structure. The scaffolding of novel-writing has collapsed. People don’t write books these days. B O O K S. Real, flowery, bonafide books. Instead, modern writers pump out short bursts of scenes loosely connected to each other like popsicle stick art and call it the Next Great American Classic. 

Those popsicle stick scenes have an official title: the “vignette.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “brief verbal description(s) of a person, place, etc.; short descriptive or evocative episode(s) in a play, etc.” You would think, with the luxury of space, time, and page count, the 2020s novel would try to oppose the attention economy. For every short-form video addict, there are countless others who watch hours-long video essays, binge eight straight hours of TV, and even go to the (gasp!) movie theater. To watch movies. Aren’t books the perfect art form to satiate this desire for immersive world-building? Apparently not with the mediocrity that’s getting pumped out.

What if I just want to read for fun? My taste doesn’t always have to run Pulitzer Prize. Same! I get it, my taste fluctuates from lowbrow to highbrow and back down again. But that argument is apples to oranges here. It is one thing for a romantasy author to cover up dearths in context, introspection, and material consequences for their characters with vignettes. Rapid-fire scenes interspersed by chunks of negative space are just as vital to the genre as the smut. I expect nothing from these types of books. Nothing. Quality thrown out the window the second you open the spine. Barely any energy needed to muster for the reading experience. Turn-your-brain-off content. How else are people gonna complete their insane Goodreads challenge? 200 books is nothing when you can flip through your favorite genre’s catalog like a magazine. 

It is quite another situation when highbrow authors employ these same techniques. The problem here is that I do expect quality from them. Good fucking writing. All I ask. All I want from them. But it’s increasingly hard to find someone to give it to me these days. The publishing industry has folded the lit-fic space into its ~easy breezy lighthearted~ industrial complex to keep up with the demands of readers on social media platforms. This demand delineates reading as a source of consumption, not of critical engagement. Brandon Taylor explains the predicament in his piece “against casting tape fiction,” positioning our current literary culture of bite-sized prose as a result of our 24/7 televised reality.

“...for writers of this new era, conveying contents of a thought or even depicting the process of a thought has the same foreign, baffling aspect as their trying to use a rotary phone. They simply do not know how to write thoughts. And indeed it sometimes seems as though thoughts themselves are an alien artifact from another time. This generation of writers did not grow up as readers. They grew up as watchers. Their experience of consciousness is fundamentally a mediated one. It exists solely on the surface.” 

Due to this “mediated consciousness,” lit-fic falls into the same vacuous claws that romantasy has. Both genres are encouraged by a publishing environment that seeks breakneck pacing over quality. Keep those eyeballs on the page, make those readers flip through as fast as possible, getthroughit getthroughit getthroughit. Snappy makes cash and dominates the bestseller charts, yes yes, all true, but it has started to win literary awards too. How many times have you read a book applauded as a “distillation of our current moment?” What moment is that, exactly? You’re the hot new ingénue if you distill the kind of reality the cultural gatekeepers live in, regardless if your prose is on the same level as Bob Books. “Bob and Jane live in Brooklyn. Bob has ennui. So does Jane. Bob and Jane engage in the driest sex you’ve ever read in your entire life, taking breaks to chat some watered-down leftist theory. Bob and Jane break up. Bob is sad. Jane writes a book. The end.” Booker Prize, here we come. 

I kid, I kid, but the problem still stands. A great premise always belies weak-ass writing. OK sure, publishing houses live in fear that audiences lost their attention spans to short form videos, hence their push for this going-through-the-motions style. But what about the writers? How did they zone out of their own story? When they only write in vignettes, they annihilate the space-time continuum so no one can place where the book is set historically and who the characters are psychologically. Just a short burst here, there, everywhere. They can’t lay the plot out beat-by-beat, methodically, a well-oiled machine like every Great American Classic. Thought-provoking, deep, intellectual writing is too difficult now. Besides, you’ll get charged with the crime of pretension. Didn’t you know? Vibes over craft only.  

A shame and a sin. Books are the art form with the strongest ability to convey time. Chronologically of course, but how it passes as well. How it can stretch or contract depending on the setting, the catalyst, the character development, the climax, all those little labels we learn in fourth grade English. How do the characters feel about the events that occur? How do they change over the course of the plot? Or maybe they don’t change at all - how does that impact the plot? Their relationships? Their life? Whether it’s one day or centuries, time enforces ramifications on literary characters in ways that other mediums simply can’t touch. Ample room for worldbuilding and introspection. So much acreage to dig in deep and wide. No video, no movie, not even a TV show can handle the breadth that a novel can. I mean, what visual medium can portray a person’s internal monologue? Those invisible shifting sand dunes of the brain? None that I can think of. 

An overreliance on vignettes destroys this acreage. It’s a tool that, when used too liberally, makes time irrelevant to the narrative. Fatal flaw. Although detrimental to all genres, lit-fic gets hit the hardest under its tyranny. Dan Sinykin describes lit-fic in The Nation as “fiction that prioritizes art over entertainment…It announce(s) aesthetic ambition: literary fiction [is] not commercial, not popular, and not genre fiction.” All these proto-Literary Greats are compelled by “aesthetic ambition,” yet what could be less ambitious than a vignette? Dashed off in a flash, it fails to achieve the lofty heights the author clearly aspires to. Brief, sparse, entrapped by mindless physicality. 

Here, an example. In All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky, the narrator navigates life after her sister Debbie’s disappearance as she spirals deeper into drug addiction. From the plot summary alone, you might think “wow, how intriguing! This book will really ~grip~ me!” It didn’t, unfortunately. It is structured by, you guessed it, vignettes. One scene jump-cuts to the next like a 2010s-era YouTube vlog. You can imagine, with this kind of writing style, how little the characterization of Debbie is sketched out. Both sisters are party girls; Debbie religiously, the protagonist by extension. And that’s all Debbie really gets to be before she goes missing. They get into all different kinds of scary situations that build up to the disappearance, but here’s how Madievsky lays out the breaking point, the event that cleaves their relationship in two:

Then, Debbie was saying something, the wrong thing, and I was laughing in a voice that sounded like it came from elsewhere, from the hellmouth of the canyon itself, and I was thinking about what the prince had said, that it’s a virtue to rid yourself of anything that doesn’t serve you, and I was lunging at Debbie with my knife. She was slapping my arms away, and the men were laughing and cursing, and I sunk the blade into something supple. The slapping stopped. 

Wind rushed through the low grass. My knife stuck out of Debbie’s upper arm at a ninety-degree angle. Right triangle, I thought. We stared at it in silence, as though paying our respects to a historic moment. 

And then one of the princes said, “Shit, shit, fuck, shit.”

Debbie eased the knife out at the same angle it had gone in and handed it back to me. I wiped the blood off with the hem of my shirt and returned the knife to my purse. We watched the sleeve of her tan denim jacket turn the color of raspberry jam. 

We looked at each other.¹ 

Madievsky wants to portray this relationship as complicated, messy, and problematic, an attempt valiantly made in this scene. What she achieves instead is cold disinterest. Some pretty prose here (“from the hellmouth of the canyon itself”) to cover up the fact that we have no idea what the sisters really feel about this moment. They are merely sequences of actions. Cause. Effect. Cause. Effect. Action. Reaction. Action. Reaction. Actionreactionactionreaction plunk plunk plunk. Can you pinpoint in this paragraph how the protagonist feels about the stabbing? Sure, the prince’s quote is the premeditation. But the actual act? The aftermath? Where are those thoughts? Those emotional conflicts? Are they too “foreign and baffling” to convey, as Taylor points out? 

If the sisters don’t get to have any interiority when one assaults the other, both just blankly “look[ing] at each other” instead, why should I, the reader, care about what has happened, or what will happen as a consequence? “We looked at each other?” That’s it? That’s all we can pull out for these vivacious, ornery, pilled-up women? Where’s the drama? Where’s the poetry? Where’s the goddamn introspection? HOW DO THEY FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEL FOR CHRIST SAKES? Nothing! They feel nothing! Absolute emptiness! Could be a commentary about the effects of drugs on your mental state, but I didn’t get that impression from this passage either. I could’ve if written properly. But I didn’t. I got nothing. Nadda. The “princes” showed more verve in the situation, and they’re literally throwaway characters.

And what do you know - three pages later and Debbie’s been missing for a month. A month! A whole month. The catalyst has hit. Sister is gone. I’m still not invested. That missing month is meaningless. Hit the fast forward button like a remote, too busy breaking up with the boyfriend (half a page) and accelerating her addiction spiral (one and a half pages). No leg room apparently to dedicate to the missing sister. The missing sister. The missing sister! Sister is gone, the whole premise of the book, gone for hundreds of pages, yet her absence is just that. Oblivion. Nullity. A bare white apartment wall, no hooks no nails no anchors, only a smooth dry finish. 

For all my whinging, I didn’t hate the book. I didn’t! Madievsky can write beautifully, which is why my disappointment is so forceful, so paramount. I didn’t crack this open preparing for mediocrity like I do with a Sarah J. Maas book. I wanted it to be good, and I was ready for it to be. Madievsky has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, started the Cheburashka Writers’ Collective, and published a poetry collection prior to releasing this book. That’s a stacked résumé. And yet the book still failed me. Guess that’s what happens when your novel is set atemporally, chopping up time into too many increments so the story becomes meaningless. 

Here, another example: Loot by Tania James. Set at the turn of the 19th century, the book follows Abbas and Jehanne, two young people from Mysore, India who seek to track down a tiger automaton. The automaton is the work of Abbas and his teacher, renowned French inventor Lucien du Leze, which gets pillaged back to England after Mysorean ruler Tipu Sultan goes to war with the British army. 

James at least grounds the narrative in a set chronological timeframe (the book spans about fifteen years) and cares deeply about its historical framework. I wanted it to be a masterpiece based off the premise, but the same issue abounds; we jump around points-of-view every section, each one interspersed with VIGNETTES. One plot point stood out to me as the most egregious use of the technique: Jehanne’s travel to France. It is in the wake of Tipu Sultan’s skirmishes with the British army that lead to the all-out war. Tension is high. Jehanne’s French father gets them on the fastest ship out the country alongside our favorite inventor Du Leze. A tragic series of events thus occurs. Jehanne’s father dies on the trip over, so Du Leze informally adopts her. They settle in France for years until Du Leze, quite unexpectedly, dies “offscreen.” A figure who looms over both the protagonists' lives passes away with barely a sound. 

The deaths of these two men happen quite quickly. There is no in-depth interrogation into her grief after her father's death, nor any kind of development of her relationship with Du Leze. An entire decade of instability chopped up, spaced out, and erased to make room for a random sailor’s diary.² To which I would ask James - why? Why were you afraid of writing more of your story? Of this strand of it in particular? You’re an associate professor of George Mason’s English MFA program. If anyone could tackle a decades-spanning work in the vein of George Eliot and Fyodor Dostoevsky, it would be you. What about Jehanne and Du Leze’s years in France together made you shy away? If Loot was actually written during the early 19th century, it would have traced the course of their relationship’s development as well as their outsider statuses in post-Revolution France. That’s why books become classics in the first place. Topology of the world mixed with the psychology of the characters.

When Du Leze died, I felt two things: passive shock and dismissal. To give such a strong character such a paltry, abrupt end was a strange choice. He literally could not return to his home country for years due to the laws against repatriation at the time. Where was that fear? That anxiety? The gradual realization that he was safe, that he had something to live for in his new daughter? And there went my dismissal - I couldn’t buy into Jehanne’s grief because I had spent no time with them together. Abbas’ grief made sense; entire chapters are dedicated to their mentor-mentee relationship. But what was it like, entering a foreign land as an orphan with only this eccentric old man to guide you? No asides to finishing school will satisfy me. I want pages, pages and pages, chapters and chapters and chapters, and all I got were vignettes. 

Maybe I shouldn’t attack the form itself. After all, I enjoyed Girl, Interrupted immensely, and it is only made up of vignettes. So what’s the difference? I suppose it’s because Susanna Kaysen is as intentional as you can be with this sporadic writing style. The book conveys her experience at a psychiatric hospital as a teenager, so the chopped-up sections emphasize her mental, social, and physical disarray as a patient. All-Night Pharmacy and Loot tell stories that suffer from an overuse of this tool. They are character studies, not deeply meditative memoirs, or even beach reads you can fly through in a day on the sand. They necessitate elaboration. 

What are you looking for, snob? What could possibly live up to my expectations? Take John Updike’s slice of life study of a Terrible Man: Rabbit, Run. He sets the most abysmally average American setting alight with its titular character’s inner struggles. The book only spans a few months, but Updike weaves them with a clear sense of Rabbit’s ennui, helping us understand the path he chooses out of his nuclear family’s life. We feel his suburban disillusionment intimately. His yearning for the glory days as a high school basketball champion makes him both pathetic and sympathetic to the reader. Every horrible decision he inflicts on those around him, particularly his wife Janice and mistress Ruth, is complicated by our identification with him. We hate him, he sucks, yet his disappointment, disgust, even rage towards his unfulfilling, empty, and ultimately pointless existence can resonate with anyone who wakes up in the morning and thinks, Ugh. Here we go again. 

Thus, with a complete picture of Rabbit’s character, impulses, and thought process, as well as a robust visualization of the novel’s setting of Mount Judge, Pennsylvania, full of flora and fauna and red-tiled roofs, Updike injects a climactic death into the narrative that slaps you in the face, punches you in the gut, sends your stomach straight down to hell when you realize just how destructive Rabbit has become. This death is nothing like Du Leze’s demise or Debbie’s reappearance. It’s a grenade that takes out all of Rabbit’s nearest and dearest, and sends him off again on another self-destructive jaunt. 

You don’t need a shocking death to convey this kind of emotion, though. Longform writing- truthful, detail-oriented, with a coherent flow - can turn any old thing into a climax or cliffhanger. If you’ve read My Brilliant Friend, you’ll know how Elena Ferrante turns a pair of shoes into an irreversible schism that changes the lives of its characters forever. And if you haven’t, you’re probably like, wait what? Shoes? Really? That’s the object of despair? Yes. Ferrante brings us through a labyrinth of relationships, particularly between its two protagonists Elena and Lila, to make the final image of the shoes pack such an emotional punch. 

Like Updike’s 1950s Pennsylvanian purgatory, Ferrante crafts a milieu of the Italian city of Naples that underscores the choices, or lack thereof, that await for Elena and Lila. The streets of the city are just as alive and complicated as the girls, teeming with excitement and treachery. She crams her pages with incessant descriptions of places and feelings, following the girls basically day-to-day from childhood to Lila’s wedding. When the final shoe scene occurs, we are so knowledgeable of Elena and Lila’s histories that it feels like a shot in our own hearts when we see whose feet they end up on. Vignettes couldn’t touch the emotional resonance that comes with a writing style like this. Assured and confident, a worthy successor to the Classic. Writing that knows where it is, who it describes, and what happens next, unspooling the plot methodically as it knows its Big Moment will hit the hardest the more comprehensive the world-building and character development are. 

Here I go, projecting again. Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll succumb to the vignette. When I read the words I’ve written, I wonder if all I convey are the reality TV-type vibes that Taylor denounced. It is pretty scary on a metaphysical level, how much of my life has been mediated by a screen. Watching “day in my life VLOGS” in which shiny, streamlined influencers narrate their days sans psychology. Target runs, gym time, cooking dinner, anything else? anything else? anything else you guys are doing? How do you feel? What do you feel? Do you feel? Do I? Does anyone anymore? Or are we just the talking heads of apathy? Even in my assuredly non-influencer status, I feel my life pass by like I’m on an extremely boring version of Big Brother, watching my words, thoughts, and moods get time-stamped into the ether for all eternity, meaningless in their digital posterity. Emails. Texts. Slack messages. Comments. This is me, right? This has to be me. These words, I mean. Are me. Yes? No? I can’t understand them, I can’t feel them. Where is the poetry? Where is the vivacity to imbue in all this cold, hard, transient communication?   

Is this all we can create now? Flashes in the pan, dashed off without review? How long would it take me to write a vignette-less book, a book that reflects the complexities of a human psyche and the society that shapes it? Years, duh. Do I have it in me? I hope so. Did fifteen years of screen mediation, starting at the impressionable age of twelve, snap my introspective skills in two? I hope not. Working with a post-Wifi brain here, so who knows what my cyborgian perspective is capable of. Maybe I’ll do it the easy way, adhere to the pressures of the publishing industry, driven by market forces, those inexplicable invisible hands, pushing me to churn out baby formula books just to get to print, just to see my name on a hardcover, just to feel like I accomplished something, anything, in my chosen artistic field. Look! Cut I’m a writer! Cut I write! Cut Professionally! Cut See! Cut I count! Cut Pay attention to me! Cut Cut Cut I’m here!!!

1. Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy, (Catapult, 2023), pp. 76

2. yes, if you've read it, i get what she was trying to do, different POVs are fun, but he really had no connection to the wider narrative besides speaking French to Abbas. great short story/character to build a different book around, but it just felt jarring in this one