Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels онлайн

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If you want to make people think write a novel—but be sure you know how! Mrs. Norris does. Why, is easily answered. She was not a newspaper reporter for nothing. Newspaper training does inculcate “a taste exact for faultless fact” that “amounts to a disease,” quite as the lilting lines in The Mikado have it. The fiction of Kathleen Norris is distinguished by several unusual qualities, all due, in the present writer’s opinion, to newspaper training operating upon a gifted and observant mind:

As in a good piece of reporting, a single important idea or fact or problem is at the bottom of each of her novels.

Each story is first of all a story, the crisp, penetrative account of certain persons and events.

Mrs. Norris never appears to have taken her fact or idea or problem and said, “I will build a tale about this.” She seems always to be describing actual people and actual occurrences. This seeming may be deceptive. It may be that she goes about it the other way, proceeding from her idea to her people and incidents. If she does, the trail is covered perfectly. For the reader gets the sensation first of persons and “doings” and then, later, of problems arising from their relations to each other; which is the precise and invariable effect life itself always gives us. We do not think of the problem of divorce first and of our neighbors, John Doe and Cora Doe, afterward; we see Cora Doe going past the house and recall when John Doe was last in town and then, and not until then, do we think of the tragedy of their lives and the dreadful question mark coiled in the center of it.