WEARY KINGDOM BY JOHN IRVING (SHORT STORy)
Minna Barrett, fifty-five, looks precisely as old as she is, and her figure suggests nothing of what she might have looked like ‘in her time’. One would only assume that always she looked this way, slightly oblong, gently rounded, not puritanical but almost asexual. A pleasant old maid since grammar school, neat and silent; a not overly stern face, a not overly harsh mouth, but a total composure which now, at fifty-five, reflects the history of her many indifferences and the conservative going of her own way.
This is the very opening paragraph. Old maids are a stock character in fiction, and perhaps in real life too, so the author doesn’t have to do too much before the reader gets a feel for what sort of life she leads. This expectation may or may not be fulfilled, however.
THE PENSION GRILLPARZER BY JOHN IRVING (SHORT STORY)
A small man, clean-shaven but with that permanent gun-blue shadow of a beard on his lean face, spoke to my grandmother. He wore a clean white shirt (but yellow from age and laundering), suit pants, and an unmatching jacket.
‘Pardon me?’ said Grandmother.
‘I said that I tell dreams,’ the man informed her.
I particularly like the way the grandmother said ‘pardon me’, because like us, she was too busy noticing this man’s dishevelled clothing to absorb anything of what he’d been saying. It’s also a way of giving the scene verisimilitude, because in real life, far more than in fiction, people need to repeat what they have said.
THE REHEARsAL BY ELEANOR CATTON (NOVEL)
This girl is good at voices. She actually wanted to be Isolde, because Isolde has a better part, but this girl is pale and stringy and rumpled and always looks slightly alarmed, which are qualities that don’t quite fit Isolde, and so she plays Bridget instead. In truth it is her longing to be an Isolde that most characterises her as a Bridget: Bridget is always wanting to be somebody else.
The clever structure of this novel means that the characters can be described via analogies with the characters they play.
Julia’s feet are always scuffing, and she has a scab around her mouth.
Here, two details are picked about this girl. That’s all readers need by way of a character sketch for now. The trick is in picking relevant details.
The Men’s room by ann oakley (novel)
Rather than give us a rundown on height, build and eye-colour, I like that Oakley homes in on one feature and elaborates:
There was something odd about the parting in Swinhoe’s hair; quite a lot of it started off in one direction, and then changed its mind and went the other way. Charity would have liked to give him some advice on how to improve the situation, and so would many of the people with whom he came into contact*, but nobody manged to, because no one was sufficiently intimate with him.
*Note that because Oakley writes with an omniscient narrator, such observations are possible. That’s the beauty of omniscient narration. Such a shame it’s seems to be going out of fashion.
IN OLDEN TIMES BY PENELOPE LIVELY (short story)
Doesn’t everyone know a woman like this?
She lived by the clock. Her days were apportioned, hour by hour, parcelled up into time at work, time for sleeping, time for house cleaning, for shopping, time for the chidlren. An hour, a half-hour, ten minutes. Time for love-making; time for ironing, for cooking, for taking a bath. A crisis meant time borrowed from one sector and forever owed — the entire week flung out of order by an emergency visit to the surgery, or a faulty washing-machine or car that would not start.
Penelope Lively takes this fairly common character attribute one step further for her character:
And each day was punctuated by the rigorous, inescapable blasts of the whistle: 7:30 (evening) — leave for work; 8:45 (morning) — arrive home from work; 8:50 — Tim leaves for work.
There’s a fine line between realism and parody once a writer decides to take a trait to its extreme, but it’s an effective technique because I’m fascinated by its consequences and want to read on. (Who knows? I might well know someone who actually blows whistles at home. We never know people’s private foibles, which is partly why we read.)
FREE RADICALS BY ALICE MUNRO (short story)
It was a photograph of three people, taken in a living room with closed floral curtains as a backdrop. An old man — not really old, maybe in his sixties — and a woman of about the same age were sitting on a couch. A very large women was sitting in a wheelchair drawn up close to one end of the couch and a little in front of it. The old man was heavy and grey-haired, with eyes narrowed and mouth slightly open, as if he might suffer some chest wheezing, but he was smiling as well as he could. The old woman was much smaller, with dark dyed hair and lipstick, wearing what used to be called a peasant blouse, with little red bows at the wrists and neck. She smiled determinedly, even a bit frantically, lips stretched over perhaps bad teeth.
Here the narrator goes one step further than describing physical appearance; she (it’s a feminine voice) makes assumptions about the people in the photograph (emboldened). The narrator’s voice is similar to the protagonist’s voice, because it’s really the protagonist making these assumptions, so they’re the sort of thing an older woman might think. I’m sure a different character looking at that same photograph would not make exactly those assumptions.
Using this technique in the thumbnail character sketches, Munro manages to tell us a lot about her protagonist, not just about the people in the photo.
TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN BY MARY GAITSKILL
The landlady was a rigid white creature wearing a hairnet and a dress covered with nasty flowers; she tried to be pleasant, but she was too unhappy to make it stick.
The first person narrator is also an unhappy person, which is probably why she sees it in other characters.
I stood and watched the sweating exercisers… There was the thin girl with sharp raw elbows and eyes so one-dimensional in their wounded uncertainty that people probably victimized her reflexively; in the dressing room, she revealed the thick, layered toenails of a dinosaur. Or the gum-chewing young blonde with her bleached hair tortured up on her head and a set of bright rings through her nose, who presented herself, with her ripped flamboyant clothing, as a jangling icon of aggression and mobility, but who sat like a matron, her heavy breasts dropping in her tatty, loose-fitting bra. Or the frail creature with her shoulders hunched as if she was expecting the blows of a whip, burdened with ugly, static, artificial breasts, from which the rest of her body seemed to droop.
Many of Mary Gaitskill’s thumbnail character sketches do go much further than simple observation; there tends to be metaphorical/symbolic/psychological observation to follow physical appearance:
Next to them was a table of boys with long hair tied back off their faces, a jumble of cups, dishes and glasses before them on the table. Their profiles, alternately stiff, gentle or fluid were finely chiseled in the sharp relief of the sunlight, like boys who had just moments before been statues sculptured in honor of youth.
The final line of this character sketch is a lovely observation:
Her father had grown full and hale during the Action years. He presented himself with his chest pushed out, his eyes vibrant with outgoing energy that allowed nothing in. He came into rooms and clapped his hard little hands together and said, “Well!” His silences were imperious excretions that nobly enshrouded him as he read The New York Times. When they went to eat at restaurants, he gave loud speeches at the table. When they rented a cottage in the Upper Peninsula, he stood calf-deep in the waters of Lake Michigan in his bathing trunks and pretneded he was conducting an orchestra while his wife and daughter lolled on the beach. Justine watched him jerking his arms above the waves and wondered why he didn’t look ridiculous.
And at the end of this character sketch (of a group of girls, not just one), followed by the best description of leery old men I have seen. Again, this sketch is followed a brilliant piece of unexpected dialogue:
In mid-August the Shades joined the Glade of Dreams country club, and Justine briefly encountered her peers. They were older than she and tall, with round, buttery muscles, modulated voices, and oval nails with neat cuticles. They had none of the raw toughness of her friends from Action, and Justine, while not afraid of them, did not quite know how to approach them. She stalked around the pool in her tiny black two-piece, gloating when the older men looked at her. The men were fat creatures mostly, baked pink and bearded, their self-satisfaction and arrogance expressed in their saggy-bottomed hips and their wide-legged stance as they stood staring, their thick pink lips smiling at thirteen year old Justine, as if they could know every single thing about her merely by looking at her in her swimsuit while they, on the contrary, remained sweating, lotion-oily sphinxes, about whom she could comprehend nothing, revelling in their complex ugly humanity. She looked at them with dumb, shielded eyes, an imitation of wide-eyed young girlhood she had seen in magazines. They were from the world of the evening news, like her father, part of the apparatus controlling even the little lapping lakes. They were hideous, she wanted nothing to do with them, yet she was happy to intersect with them in that way, playing a magazine girl, a creature they viewed with pleasure and relief. “You flirt well, Justine,” remarked her mother.
BEASTS BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
When sketching the character of Dorcas – which happens quite a while after we have first met her, by the way – she tells us about her personality before telling us anything about how she looks. This is appropriate, since Dorcas herself doesn’t consider her own physicality the most important thing about her.
Clearly she aroused their interest, their disapproval, their resentment, possibly their admiration. They would figure her as a hippie — an “artist-type.” For Dorcas didn’t offer herself passively to be judged, like most women. She wasn’t one to shrink from the rude stares of men; scarcely would she acknowledge their presence. She was a woman in her late thirties of ample proportions who exulted in her body, believing herself beautiful and desirable even if, in ignorant eyes, she might be repellent.
Likewise, we know quite a bit about Andre Harrow (aka The Object of Narrator’s Affection) before we know what he looks like. I suspect this is because Oates wants to make the reader wonder what he looks like before offering up a description. (That’s always best, in learning as well as in reading.)
Ups And Downs by Alan Bennett
Dad was shy and undemonstrative so that, whatever the gift, the actual giving of it was sure to put him off: he could never simulate the sort of surprise and gratitude such occasions required. His coolest reception was for a coffee percolator, a present which ignored the fact they had never drunk fresh coffee in their lives and weren’t going to start now. Dad rightly detected a hint of social aspiration in the gift, the message being that it might be nice if we were the kind of family that did drink fresh-brewed coffee. Dad would have none of it. ‘Faffing article’ was his way of describing it and in due course the jug part ended up in the cupboard under the sink where it came in handy when washing his hair.
I now have a very good sense of Alan Bennett’s father. This is not fiction, but even in fiction, it’s can be telling to take an item associated with that character and explain the object’s relationship to its owner. Objects sometimes become a symbol or motif. Alan Bennett used the coffee percolator to tell us his father’s disposition, his social class and his relationship to his sons.
At what point is it best to introduce a thumbnail character sketch?
Once I waited until near the end of a short story before mentioning that my character had a beard. One reader told me I should place that nugget of information much earlier, rather than ‘springing it’ on the reader. That amused me (because I imagined a beard springing off someone’s face), but made me think about reader expectations.
WHAT ARE YOUR EXPECTATIONS AS READER?
- How much do you like to know about what a character looks like?
- Do you want to know as soon as the character is introduced, or are you happy to told later, perfectly capable of recalibrating your mental image? In real life we hear about many people before finally meeting them, and they’re often quite different in person. Yet as soon as we’ve met them, we erase any mental image we’d concocted prior. Is it possible to do this with a character in fiction, or are you stuck with the original image?
- Do you have clear images of characters? Would you be able to draw a picture of the character in the novel you are reading right now? If not, does it even matter?
- Does it annoy you when you’re not given a character description?
- Would it annoy you if you weren’t given a description until long after that character had been introduced?
Every reader is slightly different in this regard. I hate too much attention to physicality in books, especially when the author foists his or her own subjective tastes upon the reader. (Perhaps this is why I can’t get into romance.) We live in an image saturated world, and it’s nice if the one last bastion, where looks don’t really matter, might be in novels. Instead, we’ve entered an age where every second book seems to have a picture of a woman on the front.
So much for that.
Related Link: Describing appearances: Moving Beyond Hair and Eye Colour.
Here is an infograph from Hint.fm showing the incidence of mentions of various body parts in different musical genres. Eyes feature heavily in some, while bums come first in hip-hop. I’d like to see a similar datavis for literary genres.
