![]() ![]() In all eras what most readers want from a novel is heart-pounding suspense, as in Heather Gudenkauf’s The Weight of Silence, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, to name a few recent ones. One thing I can see wrong with Peckham’s model is this: his feeling that discontinuity all but disappears in more placid eras-he evidenced the 18 th Century-does not hold water. ![]() One could add that in contemporary literature much discontinuity also is provided by fresh narrative strategy. Discontinuity in fiction, he said, is manifested in the twists and turns of plot and character. Morse Peckham, a professor under whom I took a class in graduate school, had a theory that the role of the arts in a complex, stressful society is to provide discontinuity, so that people might rehearse the experience of it in their daily lives. ![]()
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