What Close Reading Can Reveal About an Author’s Intentions

Margaret Atwood’s short story, “Death by Landscape,” opens with an elderly widow who has recently moved into a Toronto apartment along with her fine collection of Canadian art. After a brief description of Lois’s relief at no longer having to worry about lawn care, destructive ivy, and “strange noises”—the building has a security system and no plant life except in pots—we are introduced to the paintings that surround her:

They are pictures of convoluted tree trunks on an island of pink wave-smoothed stone, with more islands behind; of a lake with rough, bright, sparsely wooded cliffs; of a vivid river shore with a tangle of bush and two beached canoes, one red, one gray; of a yellow autumn woods with the ice-blue gleam of a pond half-seen through the interlaced branches….

Because of this collection of hers, Lois’s friends—especially the men—have given her the reputation of having a good nose for art investments.

But this is not why she bought the pictures, way back then. She bought them because she wanted them. She wanted something that was in them, although she could not have said at the time what it was. It was not peace: She does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them fills her with a wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people in them or even animals, it’s as if there is something, or someone, looking back out.

After a space break, the story apparently begins again.

When she was fourteen, Lois went on a canoe trip. She’d only been on overnights before. This was to be a long one, into the trackless wilderness, as Cappie put it. It was Lois’s first canoe trip, and her last.

Some writers would call a spooky, provocative opening like this one “hooking the reader.” An expression I’ve never liked because it implies the reader is mostly guileless, swimming aimlessly along, thinking of nothing much, until caught by the writer with a tempting line. A more respectful term for the beginning of an accomplished story like this one is an invitation—the writer invites the reader into a created world by introducing them to interesting characters and to a situation that hints, very early, at trouble.

We readers accept a story’s invitation—we keep reading—because we’re intrigued by that promise of disruption in the early paragraphs. We are curious about people who seem to be at risk.

For instance, something is not right with Lois. She has deliberately collected paintings that disturb her, haunt her. She wants to be alone with them. She wants to be haunted. Why? We must go back to her past, to her childhood, to the summer of her first and last canoe trip, to find out.

We readers accept a story’s invitation—we keep reading—because we’re intrigued by that promise of disruption in the early paragraphs. We are curious about people who seem to be at risk.

Atwood’s story certainly offers an invitation. But by spending so much precious time framing how she wants us to read this story before getting into Lois’s long-ago canoe trip, Atwood goes a step further.  his opening is a canny acknowledgement of us, her reader on the doorstep, and of what binds writer and reader together. An acknowledgement that is underlined when we learn that Lois has collected those landscape paintings precisely because they fill her with unease:

“[I]t’s as if something in them, or someone, is looking back out.”

Imagine the walls of Lois’s apartment lined with bookshelves instead of framed paintings and, at least to this reader, the meaning of that statement becomes plain. When we decide to read a story it’s because we want something that’s in it, without knowing exactly what. Not peace—or what would be the purpose of suspense?  We want to go somewhere vivid and convoluted. We want cliffs and cliff-hangers. We want, weirdly enough, to be made uneasy. And one of the uneasiest aspects of reading fiction is feeling that there’s a presence looking out at us from the pages, drawing us in. A presence capable of anticipating our questions, and posing new ones. A presence that—if it’s a really good story—seems to know us, the reader. To see us and our secrets. To hold answers that we need.

Consider those moments when you’ve been reading a story and suddenly been astonished by a writer’s insights into your life. Into you. Insights by a writer you have never met. A writer who may have come from a different country, from wildly different circumstances than your own, who may have been dead for a hundred years. But who has voiced something you couldn’t put into words, who has made you feel seen, recognized, in ways even your loved ones cannot manage, perhaps even your therapist cannot manage. Who seems to have written this story with you specifically in mind.

What a strange feeling. Exciting, gratifying, intimate, and also—unsettling.

So, there you have the reader, being looked out at. Meanwhile, the writer of that same story sensed a presence looking in as she was writing it. A presence who had to be led through a tangled plot, who would give up if they got too lost, or bored, who required all the writer’s humor, wisdom, skill and compassion to make it to the end of the story. And who wanted, in one way or another, for the story to be about them.

A story is a window, with two people looking through it from opposite sides, both holding onto the faith that there’s something there to be seen.

Of course, not all writers feel so closely related to their readers. Here, for instance, is Shirley Jackson:

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer…is the reader….The reader is, in fact, the writer’s only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless….It is, of course, the writer’s job to reach out and grab this reader: If he is a reader who cannot endure a love story, it is the writer’s job, no more and no less, to make him read a love story and like it.

Thus, the reader as adversary or, possibly, prey.

Now E.M. Forster:

We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next….Some of us want to know nothing else—there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity.

The reader as brute.

More recently, a well-known writer was quoted in Publisher’s Weekly as declaring: “I don’t think about audience at all. I actually think it’s condescending. Who am I to assume I know what they want?”

The reader as beside the point.

Finally, there is Toni Morrison’s description of the relationship between writer and reader as “One’s own mind dancing with another’s.”

Like all relationships, the one between writer and reader is changeable—and probably most writers cycle among attitudes rather than clinging to any single one. That said, I love Morrison’s way of thinking of readers: not as people who must be captured, disarmed, kept spellbound—or ignored altogether—but as partners. Dance partners. A relationship that echoes Atwood’s acknowledgement of writers and readers as fellow presences sharing an imaginative experience, and enraptures it by picturing that shared experience as an embrace. Even if it’s an awkward, difficult embrace. Maybe especially then. Two human souls are trying to listen to the same music, while of course hearing it differently, trying to keep time with it, to let it guide them into moving together in ways they ordinarily would not move, in ways they could not move alone.

A story is a window, with two people looking through it from opposite sides, both holding onto the faith that there’s something there to be seen.

Morrison’s emphasis is on simultaneous movement, on responsiveness, on transport, a word with both mystical and practical connotations. By the end of the story, what a reader wants is to have traveled somewhere beyond her own living room. What a writer wants is for the reader to be a little changed from the person who read her opening paragraphs, as the writer has been changed by spending so much time making up a story for someone else. At the very least, she hopes to convince her readers (and probably herself) to tolerate the possibility that their own convictions are not the only ones, that there really is more than one way to think about, say, elderly widows who spend all day in a stuffy apartment, brooding about the past.

To me, a story is an experience of care. Care is in short supply right now, and I’m not just talking about cuts in healthcare subsidies, or about expanding our ability to empathize with others. I’m talking about feeling cared for. Considered. In a time when thoughtlessness is often treated as a virtue, it’s heartening to remember that a story is written for you, the reader. Whatever the writer’s initial impulse, the final result is generous. A story is an attempt of one mind to engage the sympathies of another’s, as if to say, “I am trying to see into your head, by letting you see into mine.” We do not issue such invitations to people for whom we cannot care.

Of course, not all care is good care, as anyone who has ever encountered a clumsy dentist will tell you. How to gauge what quality of attention you can expect from a story? Read those first paragraphs. Can you visualize where you are and the characters to whom you are introduced? Is there also an odd detail or two, hinting at mystery? Or are you left standing in the hallway, holding your coat, waiting to be offered something?