Most Virtuosic yet Manipulative Literary Trick Pulled by an Author

Cafe Society
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In this thread I’m looking for examples of authors using a very clever technique to deliver a massive emotional sucker punch. It has to be a literary trick, so someone refusing to write a sequel to successful book or “merely” killing off a beloved character don’t fit.

I’ve just finished reading Irving’s The World According to Garp. Those of you who’ve also read it probably know what part I’m refering to.

For those who don’t, the main character is obsessed with his two sons’ safety (Duncan and Walt) and has recurring anxieties about all the bad things that could happen to them. At one point, the three of them are involved in a terrible accident. As a result, Duncan loses an eye. The following chapter is dedicated to his slow recovery and his coming to terms with his reduced vision as well as his disfigurement. Then, towards the end of that chapter, there’s a dialogue that starts innocuously enough, but through which realize that

[SPOILER]Walt died in the accident.

For about 30 pages, Irving focuses entirely on the “lesser” tragedy, with such skill that I didn’t even think about Walt. Moreover, the way it is revealed is also masterly : Garp and his wife discuss having a third child and, while thinking about possible names, he immediately says “Not Walt”. When I read this my reaction was "Of course not Walt they already have a kid whose… oh no… NO, NO, NO! :eek: :frowning: :mad:

It had me go back immediately to the end of the previous chapter to re-read Walt’s last words (“It’s like a dream!” Walt said; he reached for his brother’s hand.) [/SPOILER]

Extremely well done. Infuriatingly manipulative, though. That one is going to haunt me for a while.

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In Anansi Boys, there’s a point at which the main character starts to be referred to by a different version of his name by the author, and there is an in-story reason for it. It’s incredibly subtle and clever.

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Ira Levin is a master of this technique. Rosemary’s Baby: He has his father’s eyes.

In a Kiss Before Dying, the twist is so amazing that my jaw dropped, and a friend reading the book threw it against the wall

The woman’s boyfriend IS the killer

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The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler has a lovely, subtle example. The main character, Flannery, is one of a group of eight friends (the “Basic Eight” of the title); she’s closest to Natasha, who encourages her ‘wild side’. Natasha doesn’t talk much to the rest of the group. Toward the end of the book, Flannery is talking to Douglas, one of her other firends, about something Natasha just did. Douglas answers,

[spoiler]“Who?”

Which is how we find out that Natasha is a figment of Flannery’s imagination. That’s why she never talked to anyone else. It would have been obvious, except Flannery was part of a large group of friends so it wasn’t weird that they weren’t all similarly close … [/spoiler]

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Not quite right. It was, “He has his Father’s eyes.”

A subtle but important distinction.

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“The Gone-Away World” by Nick Harkaway, when it becomes apparent about 2/3 of the way through the book who the narrator is.

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Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, where it becomes evident at the very end that the whole book is …

… a guy telling his psychiatrist his life’s story.

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Stu Redman was one of the beloved characters in Stephen King’s The Stand. Towards the end, he and a couple of his friends (Larry and Ralph?) are heading out West to confront Flagg. They are obeying God’s orders via Mother Abigail. She has told them that at least one of the three “will not make it.”

Stu busts his leg up bad on the way. Broken. He’s in pain. They see the writing on the wall; they know the score. God even forewarned them. The other two leave him there, in the gully he fell into. They give him some pain pills and a loaded gun. As the other two continue the trek, devastated, King ends the chapter: “And they never saw Stu Redman again.” Full stop.

It’s a gut punch. Poor beloved Stu.

But here’s the kicker…

Stu survives! It’s the other two who get killed. King was accurate in that “they never saw him again” but for 180 degrees off what you assumed.

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To avoid spoiling it, I’ll have to be deliberately vague. In Roughing It, Mark Twain tells a “true” story about a camel and a topcoat. It quickly becomes an obvious joke, but Twain eventually gives it a twist that delivers a wonderful suckerpunch to the reader.

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The one that blows me away, even on re-reading, is Hugh Trevor-Roper’s A Hidden Life/The Hermit of Peking.
A biography of Sir Edmund Backhouse, the leading Sinologist of the early 20th century. Bit outside Trevor-Roper’s usual stomping ground, but he prefaces it all by explaining that he’d been approached by a private collector who owned a manuscript version of Backhouse’s memoirs and could he recommend them for publication?
No, he couldn’t. Backhouse’s memoirs were a wildly (mainly homosexual) pornographic fantasy about how he’d slept his way round all the brothels in the Far East and in the beds of virtually all the major figures of the late 18th-century world. Nope, all obviously unreliable.

But, fascinated, he began researching the truth about Backhouse’s life and the book is the result.
And that result? The thing is that any time I’ve read or, even re-read, it, I’m always caught out by its conclusion that …

Backhouse lied about everything. Right from the beginning. The book tempts you down the treacherous path that that early story seems plausible enough. Backhouse hasn’t quite started telling his fibs just yet. Yet the twist at the end is that he evidently had.

You think you can’t be fooled by the pair of them. But you always are. A brilliant bit of literary trickery that one can never quite put the finger on of how it draws one in.

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Except that I guessed that maybe 20 pages in. Some trick.

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Congratulations.

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Thanks. It wasn’t hard.

I found Portnoy’s Complaint to be one of the most overrated and annoying books ever.

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THE THIRD TWIN, by Ken Follett.

Oh, there’s a third twin? Thanks for telling me; here I am, reading about two brothers, and already I’m a step ahead in knowing a third brother is heading into the book; the story plods along, as I wait for a character to catch up; maybe I’d have seen it coming even without that dumb spoiler of a title, but now I’m doomed to nod as they find out there’s a third.

…wait, there’s a fourth?

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Not in a book, but a screenplay. I love Peter Stone’s screenplay for Charade* It’s practically a textbook on How To Do Exposition. One of my favorite bits is something I hadn’t noticed until I’d seen the film several times.

CIA agent Hamilton Bartholomew (Walter Matthau) is having coffee with Reggie Lampert (Audrey Hepburn) as they discuss the circumstances that lead to the trouble she is currently in, being pursued by three ex-OSS officers after the money her now-deceased husband had stolen with them during WWII (and then absconded with, without them). Besides her husband and the three of them there was a fifth member of the team, Carson Dial. The group had been ambushed by Germans, with one of the team (Scobie) losing a hand to gunfire while Dial caught a volley full in the stomach. The dialogue goes something like this:

Bartholomew: Dial was dead, but Scobie could still travel…

(waiter comes by, bringing their coffee. Conversation halts.)

Bart: Where was I?

Reggie: Dial was dead…

Bart: Oh, yes. Dial was dead, but Scobie could still travel…What did you just do?

Reggie: I lit another cigarette

Bart: (picking up the still-lengthy cigarette butt). Do you have any idea how much these COST over here?

Reggie: Go on.

Bart. Oh, well, Dial was dead, but Scobie could still travel. They made their way to the lines…
Along with the humorous interaction, which helps establish Bartholomew’s put=upon demeanor, the scene does something important. It lets them repeat, at least four times, that Dial was dead.

[spoiler] This is significant because Dial was NOT dead. He was, in fact, the one who killed Reggie’s husband and started picking off the other OSS officers. But Stone managed to repeat it multiple times without being obvious that he was doing so, which helped set audience expectation.

In fact, Dial was played by Matthau, who was only pretending to be CIA operative Bartholomew. Stone had set the audience up again, portraying Matthau
s character as a somewhat humorous , put-upon government employee, while he was, in fact, a stone-cold killer.[/spoiler]

(Pay no attention to the remake, The TRouble with Charley, one of the most pointless films ever made, which sucked the life out of its attempt to re-do Charade.

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If you can find a copy of genius private-eye writer Joe Gores’s 1974 thriller novel Interface…about a San Francisco PI (Gores was one himself, in the ‘50s and ‘60s) and a vengeance serial murderer, grab it.

In the very last sentence, Joe takes a two-by-four to your balls.

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Old stuff, but at the time this infuriated everyone.

In Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one finds out in the last chapter that

the narrator is the murderer. There was another Christie book that I thought was even worse, i.e. more unfair, I’m not sure but it might have been Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. In this one

The local police superintendent is the murderer. In both cases, the reader is led along the garden path masterfully. These books of course don’t pack the emotional punch that some of those referenced in this thread do, but if you are a fan of this genre, they will still get to you.

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A Kiss Before Dying yanks you back and forth like a dog on a leash! I read it as a teenager about 40 years ago…I may have forgotten enough about it to read it again with the same enjoyment.

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Roderick Femm:. If the second Poirot novel you cite is a favorite of yours, read Thomas Burke’s short story “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” (1931).

It’s been called the greatest mystery story of all time by folks like Dorothy L. Sayers, and Alfred Hitchcock had it adapted for his teevee show in the 1950s.

Burke may be best known for his story “The Chink and the Child,” which was the basis of D.W. Griffith’s great 1919 film Broken Blossoms.. And “Ottermole” is another masterpiece of authorial sleight-of-hand.

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John Irving uses the same technique in The Hotel New Hampshire and to some degree in A Prayer for Owen Meany. One of the many reasons he is one of my favorite authors.