Not every story has a clear beginning, middle and end.  Here are three that challenge the traditional definition of "novel."

 

 

The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

 

The title of The Lover’s Dictionary describes exactly what is inside this novel: a story of a relationship told through alphabetical dictionary entries describing the large and small events that shape a relationship.  While the first entry describes a scene from the first meeting, the rest of the novel does not follow linearly. We learn of how the unnamed couple falls in love, events that cause tension, milestones in their relationship and vignettes about love. 

 

For example:

I, n.

Me without anyone else.

 

Imperceptible, adj

We stopped counting our relationship in dates (first date, second date, fifth date, seventh) and started counting it in months.  That might have been the first true commitment, this shift in terminology. We never talked about it, but we were at a party and someone asked how long we’d been together, and when you said, “A month and a half,” I knew we had gotten there.

 

Love, n.

I’m not going to even try.

 

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Taken as a whole, Dept. of Speculation offers a portrait of a marriage.  In part, it contains memories of past loves, travels and daily life.  We are witnesses to scenes from a marriage-both the mundane and the provoking.  Similar to Levithan, the characters are unnamed and the story is told in short pieces-though not dictionary style. While Offill and Levithan books both are centered on relationships, Offill pays more attention to the roles of wife and mother.  Emotional, bleak, reflective and suspenseful, this book demands to be read in one sitting.

 

 

 

Incendiary by Chris Cleave

“Dear Osama,”

Chris Cleave's first novel with those two words what follows is a stream of consciousness letter by a grieving woman distraught over the deaths of her husband and son by a terrorist bombing at a soccer game. The whole novel is a letter to bin Laden and has as much to do with global terrorism as it does with class politics in England.  To help with her grief, the unnamed narrator takes a job as a civilian in the anti-terrorism unit of Scotland Yard.  As the story progresses, the narrator begins to suspect the government knew about the plot and did nothing to stop it and becomes determined to put an end to further attempts.  The stream of consciousness writing takes a few pages to get used to, but in it is a compelling plot driven by grief.