and I have read a Natalia Ginzburg novel,
so I'm good with Contemporary Italian Literature in Translation. I baulked at Ferrante when, opening one of her novels at random, I ran across a sentence along the lines of "Mary was upset that Thomas disapproved of the way that Marcel treated Angela after hearing about the way her parents had snubbed Toni and Loius". Too many people in one sentence. I just can't track that many people, I found myself saying, without really knowing what I meant.
It wasn't until I was well underway with George Gissing's novel The Nether World
that I realised what I meant. Gissing wrote Grub Street, which is about writers and journalists, so writers and journalists love it and that's the book "everyone" has read, but he wrote a whole lot more besides, and from an overview, with more interest in describing aspects of the wider society than, say, Henry James. He's not Dickens, but then no-one is, except maybe J B Priestly on a good day.
The Nether World is about the poor in Clerkenwell and the surrounds. Everyone is poorly-dressed, in and out of work, hungry, living with two other families in one flat in a noisome tenement or multi-story house, surrounded by children, dropping in at the pub, speaking in a very similar manner with a limited vocabulary, doing piece-work in the garment trade, paying rents that take up much of their earnings, and there's a nice line to that working women have always looked down on stay-at-home-mums . ... and so on. It's hard to tell them apart, or at least I found it so. Gissing was a capable novelist and a proficient writer by the standards of the time, and maybe it was a deliberate effect to make a point: to the middle-class, the poor look alike. Whichever, I had to keep checking up who was who, and I could not summarise any of them for you now.
Because I couldn't track the characters.
As we read a novel, or watch a film or play, we build up a list of characters and facts about them. Here's the pseudocode:
If Passage.Text.Contains(Name) then
If Not Character(Name).Exists then Character.Create(Name)
Character(Name).AddFact(Passage.Text)
End if
It's no problem for a computer, but if the last time a character appeared was sixty pages ago (say four days ago in your reading schedule), checking through your memory for it may take some time, or fail. Also updating each of the characters' fact-list in one of those many-person sentences may take time or fail.
That's what I mean by "tracking characters".
A number of things make it easier to do this.
First and obviously, give each of your characters a unique name, unless the plot is going to hang on a confusion.
Second, keep a character's name consistent: Detective-Constable Stephen Jones must be DC Jones, DC Stephen Jones, and can only be Stephen if he's off-duty and the context is very clear. Never call him 'Stephen" in one sentence and 'DC Jones' in another - if there is more than one 'Stephen' then the name-tracker will take the first one it finds and add the fact to that character, which might not be the right one. Gissing breaks this rule all the time and sometimes in the same paragraph, and I found it hard to get the characters established in memory.
Third, reduce the use of pronouns - 'he', 'him', 'she', 'her'. Whereas proper names have global scope - refer to the same character throughout the novel / trilogy / series - pronouns have a local scope, somewhere between one sentence and a half-page paragraph. Used over a number of sentences, in which other people's names may occur, the name-tracker may get confused as to whom the pronoun refers. As in "John asked Andrew to help. John and Andrew hefted the gun into the river. He brushed his hands and started walking back up the bank." 'He' most likely refers to John, but it might mean Andrew. If in doubt, use character names rather than pronouns and that will keep the name compiler straight.
Fourth, give each character something we can remember them by, even if it is to remind us that they are un-memorable. It might be the way they speak, or what they talk about, it need not be some physical characteristic, though it might be.
