inconstancy

I hadn't planned to spend large chunks of yesterday reading The Deathly Hallows, but, as it turned out, that's exactly what I ended up doing. My sister-in-law bought the book on her way home from work and it sat, face down and unread, on the kitchen table. I had already looked at an online chapter-by-chapter summary and felt oddly guilty about not reading the book itself. So I picked it up and read it: first the end, then the very beginning, then pieces of the middle, then the beginning, starting where I had left off, then the end again.

I paid less attention to what I was actually reading than to trying to come up with ways of thinking about it. Mainly, I reached the highly unoriginal conclusion that what's remarkable about fiction and one of the main ways it diverges from real life is how consistent everyone is. If a character in a book is kind, honest, and trustworthy, he generally stays that way. If Character A is fond of Character B, that generally doesn't change all that much either. The reader's understanding of the character's motives or actions might change, but the story depends on a certain underlying predictability. Now, I realize that there's such a thing as character development or a character arc, where someone changes or grows or evolves over the course of the narrative. But those changes are generally incremental, spurred by events or realizations and the character moves in a steady line along a well-defined track. He doesn't swing back and forth like a pendulum or spin round and round like a top.

Real people are different. They change without warning. They do and say and feel things you never would have expected. Someone calls you on the phone and tells you that he never really loved you. Your best friend does something incomprehensible, unforgivable and you think: "I never really knew her at all." Because, I've decided, one of the problems with life is its lack of a coherent theme or plot. You think you're in a musical comedy, when, all of a sudden, they wheel out the set for a Jacobean revenge play. There's a dagger in your hand and someone's hiding behind the curtains and you know that it's just a matter of time before the body count starts its inexorable climb.