Isabel Allende spent decades as a journalist in South America and had three plays produced in Chile, the country of her youth. She has written a number of award-winning novels, one of which, Daughter of Fortune, is a New York Times best-seller and an Oprah Book Club pick. You don’t reach these rooftops by being a hack.
Yet when I read Daughter recently, I was surprised at how clumsily Allende uses a literary device or two and how much exposition she employs.
Overuse of a Parallel Theme
In Daughter, Allende writes a colorful story about young women suffering from and overcoming strict societal conventions of mid-nineteenth century Protestant England, “papist” Chile, and wild, unrefined California. This makes the story line appropriately attractive to women and may have been the reason Oprah liked it. (Hold onto those letters! I am not being sexist here. Novels are written with the reader in mind. Some are written for men, others for women. Some for young adults, some for those over fifty. This is as it should be. Readers vary, novels vary. Trying to write a novel for everyone is a recipe for failure.)
Still, Allende seems to over use this theme. In the first quarter of the book we are introduced to three women, Rose, Paulina, and Eliza, each of whom have extramarital affairs with men their families don’t approve of. In Rose’s case she is seduced by a married Viennese tenor. The other two young women fall in love with men who, according the women’s relatives, are born into ranks beneath the family.
Eliza is the main protagonist and Rose, her maiden aunt, is thrust into raising her. Although the family has relocated to Chile, Rose afflicts Eliza with the same strict conventions she encountered in England. Allende’s use of the parallels over the two generations to establish the existence of long-instituted social norms works. But, to me, to add Paulina into the mix within so few pages simply brings Allende’s use of the literary device into focus; something one doesn’t want to do to his or her reader.
Introducing a Character
In another instance, at a point in the story where Eliza and her friend Tao Chi’en are on a ship journeying to California, Allende increases the suspense, by having Eliza, who is a stowaway and must remain hidden, become ill and reach the brink of death.
Since Tao’s duties as shipboard cook made it illogical for him to have the time to take care of a person so ill, Allende needed someone he could call upon to help. But, at this point there is no appropriate character for her to use, so—it appears—Allende simply went back in the storyline and introduced one.
This is all fine and well. As novels are crafted the author often finds she needs to go back to earlier parts of the story and lay the groundwork for something that will happen later in the story.
But Allende, in an apparent moment of laziness, went back a scant five pages and suddenly and clumsily introduces a new character, Azucena Placeres, the archetypical whore-with-a-heart-of-gold. (Remember Miss Kitty in the old Gunsmoke TV shows?)
In one long paragraph of exposition Allende tells us the background of this woman: Although a prostitute, she’s a kind soul who has nursed a young sailor back to health. Because of this she had earned the respect of the ship’s captain and the freedom to move about the ship, thus she is free to administer to Eliza. After this paragraph, Azucena disappears until Tao calls on her for help.
Show Don’t Tell
The suddenness of the appearance this character and the transparently contrived use of her to fulfill a plot twist is something one might expect from an author of less skill. And, by choosing to tell us Azucena’s background, rather than showing us, Allende missed a superb opportunity to weave this potentially colorful character into the story. She could have done this by showing us the how the sailor was injured and how it came about that Azucena ministered to him.
Allende could even have created some tension between Tao and Azucena since Tao was a healer in his old country and one of them could have felt threatened by the other. This tension would add to the scene where Tao approaches Azucena for help.
Showing the reader would have worked for a seamless introduction of this necessary character and worked to move the plot along as well.
In another missed opportunity, Tao is faced with the problem of sneaking Eliza onto the ship. Yet, the reader only learns how Eliza makes it on board when Allende writes:
Eliza was taken aboard in a sack over the back of a stevedore, one of many loading cargo and luggage in Valparaiso.
Here Allende had a chance to put the reader into the sack with Eliza. We could have felt how scratchy the sack was, how hard it was to breathe in it, how humiliating it was to be tossed over this brute’s shoulder like so much carriage, and how frightened Eliza was that even the slightest movement on her part would result in being discovered.
There is an old saw that every writer needs an editor. Isabel Allende is a hugely successful author and one wonders if an editor somewhere along the way was too intimidated to suggest a few changes that would have made her excellent work even better.
How does this apply to your writing? Go back over your work and look for places you tried too hard to make a point. Also, search out and replace exposition with vivid scenes that will take your reader into whatever is happening so they become part of the experience.
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