The Deep Eye: On the Embedded First Person
by Michael Byers
From the Archives: Michael Byers on how to succeed—and fail—in the first person.
Michael Byers is the author of The Coast of Good Intentions, a book of stories, and two novels, Long for This World and Percival’s Planet. His first book was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other citations. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan.
From the Archives: Michael Byers on how to succeed—and fail—in the first person.
“Ozzie’s sacrificial journey is a typical Rothian romp. It’s also meticulously made”: Michael Byers on how Philip Roth pulls off allegory in “The Conversion of the Jews.”
“The writer’s first tool—even more important than language—is empathy”: Michael Byers on ZZ Packer’s “Brownies” as a story about becoming a writer.
On Barthelme, that comforting surrealist.
The voice Welty created is so entertaining on its own terms that for more than seventy years the political aspects of this story have gone essentially unremarked upon – even undiscovered, at least as far as I can tell.
If description is the art of distillation, what’s the ideal potato-to-vodka ratio? Sit down and stay awhile: things are about to get metaphysical.
Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted is made up of journal entries that recount the main character Pam’s travels, troubles, and search for meaning. In Michael Byers’s review, he wishes the novel were braver, and argues that the literary novel must take itself seriously, while considering why we hold genre fiction to a different standard.
Ptolemy was trying to describe a system that didn’t exist. His point of view, literally, was wrong. He wasn’t looking at the planets from a fixed center, but from a body that was itself circling the sun. Copernicus’ eventual understanding of this fact led swiftly to the discovery of several other beautiful truths, including those of Kepler, Brahe, and Newton – suggesting that where you stand has everything to do with what you can see. And that if you’re standing in the wrong place, or facing the wrong direction, you’re going to see a very strange, distorted view.
All of which is to say, point of view matters. It might be proposed that an author does well to be relatively Copernican, even if his characters start out almost entirely Ptolemaic. … The supreme example of a character remaining Ptolemaic within a Copernican story is Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog”. In this story, Chekhov knows nearly everything, and Anna knows, perhaps, only a little less – while the point of view character Gurov knows almost nothing of what goes on around him.
