I have been re-reading What Salmon Know, a collection of short stories by the underrated Elwood Reid. What jumped out at me among other things was that two of the stories in the book were written in tenses that it is very unusual to see.
One of them, “Random Beatings and You,” is written in the second person. (“The tests at the VA hospital did not go well. The nurse was a butcher, couldn’t get the needle right. A vein in your arm collapsed, which leads you to question whether or not this is any way to make a living. You are a carpenter who can’t stand work.”) It’s pretty uncommon to see anything narrated this way. Pretty much the only other work I can think of like that is Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInnerny, although I’m sure there have to be others.
Even rarer than the second person is the third-person present tense, which is what the Reid story “Overtime” is written in. (“Drew looks down into his coffee, hands shaking. They’ve got the screws to him. He’ll have to ask someone to keep their press running and that means overtime…Fuck asking, Drew thinks. He’ll just tell somebody they have to work a few more hours.”) The entire story is narrated this way and the narrative voice does not belong to a character in the story. In my own experience it is very, very unusual to see this.
I really like this style, because I think it gives the stories a really powerful sense of immediacy and realism. Could someone recommend me some other stuff that’s written in these tenses?
The book I’m currently reading, Under the Dome by Stephen King, uses the third-person present tense at times. It also sometimes slips into second person (using imperative sentences).
Fondly Fahrenheit is a science fiction short story by Alfred Bester. It’s about a man who starts to identify too much with his robot. Bester wrote part of the story with the man’s first person perspective and the robot’s first person perspective in overlapping passages.
I came here to mention that one. Charles Stross’ recent “Halting State” is told in second person much like a choose-your-adventure novel - for multiple characters.
Bob Leman wrote a neat short story called “Instructions” which is composed entirely of instructions to “you” - and I don’t want to spoil anything else about it.
Fred Pohl’s “Day Million” has a very strong narrative voice - the effect is of someone grabbing you by the collar and insisting on telling you the story.
Second person and third person present, while unusual, don’t strike me as particularly rare, especially in short stories. In short stories you can get away with a style that would become grating over the length of a novel.
There is a new novel called The Interrogative Mood which consists solely of questions. Having read an excerpt in a review, I think the author cheats a bit, but most of the reviews seem positive, so it may be good.
“And then We Came to the End” is written in the first person collective.Its about a company going through layoffs and told from the perspective of the group of employees as a whole.
I see I am a little late for this one. I just finished it, and it is a very good novel. It really drew me in. It is, as mentioned, written (mostly) in first person plural past (“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise.”)
Charles Stross also wrote *The Atrocity Archives *and *The Jennifer Morgue *in third person present tense. I found it a little jarring, but the books are good enough to pass muster anyway.
Theres *Ibid: A Novel *by Mark Dunn, which is written entirely as footnotes.
And there’s A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (A Novel), which is an exchange of letters between the authors, the book publishers, and Strom Thurmond’s (fictional) assistant, hammering out the book proposal.
Only Revolutions by Mark Danielewski. It’s a story told from two different perspectives - both halves of a young couple who never age. You know how in some instruction books written in multiple languages, you hold the instruction book one way for English and flip it upside-down and backward for Spanish? This book is like that for the two perspectives. You hold it one way to read Sam’s point of view, then flip it upside-down and backwards to read Hailey’s point of view.
Reminds me of “Pale Fire” by Nabokov, which is ostensibly an annotated epic poem, but the real meat of the novel is in its…interesting…commentary.If by interesting you mean self-deluded, grandiose, and increasingly completely unrelated to the poem being commented on.
I don’t know if this is what the OP is going for, but I’m reading *Pygmy *by Chuck Palahniuk right now. It is a satire dealing with a group of espionage agents from an unnamed/fictional country sent to the USA to pull off some unnamed horrible terrorist activity, while posing as high school foreign exchange students.
It reads as though reports sent back to the home office, in this weird pidgin English.
Also, the Parasites by Daphne DuMaurier is written in first person plural. It’s about three siblings and although it goes into third person to discuss each individual character, it goes into first person plural when the siblings as a whole are talking about themselves. Sort of confusing at first because I was wondering who exactly was narrating in the first chapter.