Why are novels written? An answer I read somewhere said that they are written because of the shortcomings of history. History leaves a lot of gaps, and historian are only so good at filling those gaps but with their well calculated guesses. Novelists, on the other hand, have the ability to imagine, and thereby bring into reality, a whole life existing in those gaps.
Novels are also a product that writers sell to earn their livings, that could be one of the answers. But money isn’t the only, or primary, reason that novels are written. It has to be something deeper, given their importance and lasting effects both on the individual and a society.
Should we turn to look at readers, we might find a common ground there, wherein the reason for the existence of novels might lie. As a reader, novels are great for understanding the life in general through stories that come in all shapes and sizes, and throughout and even beyond the time and space. Novels give the context, a complete one at that, through which we come closer to understanding our existence in this shifting, troubling, and sometimes overwhelming place we call life. I am remembering a line from poem which said that ‘days are the place we live in’, as in the houses where our lives reside.
So maybe, if reading novels is an exercise for readers to understand life through other, complete stories, for writers it is a similar exercise as well. They arrive at an understanding of life, or the ‘human condition’, through writing, as we do through reading. Accepting this as a viable answer, we can now judge novels, as many of them that exist and keep pouring out, a bit less harshly and more consciously for what they are. Novels that don’t have to be historical, morally enlightening, inventive, socially involved, or responsible for being objectively fruitful for the common reader – novels can be whatever they become to be.
Even if a writer starts a book with a structure, how that book turns out to be can never be solidified at the start. Take for example this review: it is only just before starting this review, that I come up with a beginning case for the review, and through it pave my way for the things that I want to say about the book. But never am I certain about what I’ll end up writing. It happens as the words flow after one another, and a good writer is one who doesn’t allow himself to come between the words and the writing.
Tyler’s book, in its premise, is a very simple one. It is a story about a twenty-five years old black boy, the only male in the family of six sisters and his mother and grandma, who comes back to his hometown from his college in New York, after hearing about a sudden news about one of his sisters. The whole novel follows the story of his brief stay at home and what unfolds during those few days.
Yet sometimes, it is such simple storytelling that touches the reader in the most beautiful manner. Exhausted by the philosophies, histories, ethics, and never-ending flow of attention demanding current events, it is stories like ‘If Morning Ever Comes’ that brings back the tranquility and simplicity of a life that, at its basic, is supposed to be a quiet and gathered interval.
I loved how removed this story felt. It is only about this women-dominant family of Ben Joe, and few other characters that are involved with the story. Tyler’s crisp descriptions and details of the weather, streets, houses, facial expressions and features, complimented the moody and quiet atmosphere of the story. It is a story set during winter, cold and mostly dark.
The protagonist, too, is a restless young man, who is more in pursuing of this emotions than his reasonings. How he got bored at home, felt that his family was irritably worry-less, judged his actions which were done out of goodwill, and so on – resonated with me. On the whole, the story’s calm progress; a welcome abstinence of surprising plot-twists; a plot that involves only a few, yet definitive, days from the lives of these characters; and its almost calming, quiet atmosphere made it, for me, a reading experience that I might’ve rarely tasted before, and a most desirable one too,a given my frustrated reading encounters in the past few months.
Tyler’s book is a really good one, not only for how it reads, which I’ve talked about extensively, but also for the story it tells. Just lovely.
Ratings: 5/5 ***** October 4, 2022_