Volta

Every Novel is Boring — Until It Isn’t Emma Adler tells us at Public Books. Not sure I altogether buy that: I suspect we may have to allow for some novels that are just boring. However Ms Adler believes that there comes a point (which she calls the volta) at which any novel suddenly engages the reader. She draws the term from the sonnet. As The Poetry Foundations tells us “In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet.” OK. I admit that there are points in many novels where you get hooked, but I think that more often than not that comes so early on that there’s no way it can be looked on as a “turn” — like maybe just after reading the title! The road seems dead straight to me when engaging with War and Peace — I’m hooked from the first paragraph. On the other hand there is no turning in The Road by Cormac McCarthy, just a dreary trudge on…