In an essay for Lit Hub, writer Rebecca Solnit extolls the virtues of novels and non-fiction works that take time arriving at their destinations.
“Some books have a single storyline, and they pass briskly through the landscape, often to a destination that doubles as payoff,” Solnit writs. “Other books—some of mine, I hope—are instead trying to map the surrounding territory and understand where we are…Such books are concerned not so much with what happens but with what it means; they are less about destination as resolution, and more about meaning revealed along the way.”
Solnit discusses a number of novels that take a non-linear path to their conclusions, including Cloud Atlas, Bleak House, War and Peace, and Tender is the Night. Even a book like Moby Dick, where the protagonists have a clear objective, doesn’t rush to its ending.
