In Edward Mendelson’s book ‘Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers’, there is an essay on William Maxwell, author of ‘They Came Like Swallows’ and ‘So Long, See You Tomorrow.’ It begins: ‘In the nineteen-forties and fifties a new style of novels and short-stories – plotless, undramatic, quietly nuanced, faultlessly phrased – became dominant in American literary fiction.’

These were the sort of stories that appeared in the New Yorker magazine where Maxwell was an editor. There was often a sadness about these stories. They worked by implication; sometimes, they ended oddly, with an ambiguous image, a moment calculated to suggest the sheer strangeness of things. The stories created an atmosphere, perhaps of a time remembered and now evoked with telling detail but no simple drama or easy set of feelings. It was, as Mendelson points out, calm and cool and detached. It was the world as seen from a window.

I read Mendelson’s book when it came out in 2015. I was surprised by his essay on Maxwell who was, I believed, a writer universally admired for his delicacy, his ability to create a scene that had the same sort of resonance, say, as an image by Edward Hopper. I thought that Maxwell was a writer who exuded a sort of integrity; he would never work with easy plot or coincidence. His descriptions were carefully textured to suggest delicate states of mind. His sentences were finely made, with not too much display or ornament.

The poet Elizabeth Bishop once remarked how much she enjoyed it when a friend questioned something she had genuinely believed, up to then, to be true. Her own poetry is built on what is uncertain, somewhat doubtful. Her own statements in poems came, it seems, only after much testing and trying out.

Mendelson’s account of Maxwell was entirely new to me. It was something I had never considered. And that made me read the essay with pleasure.

There was one single paragraph in the essay that stayed in my mind and that I returned to again and again. It said something that I should have known all along. But I hadn’t read it before, or I hadn’t seen it set out so clearly and persuasively.

Mendelson wrote: ‘All of Maxwell’s novels have a story but no plot. A plot is the means by which fiction portrays the consequences of actions, but it is not like a pool table; one event never mechanically causes another. In a plot each event provokes other events by making it possible for them to happen – possible but not inevitable, because human beings are always free to choose their response to provocation. Maxwell succumbed to an error common among writers who organize their work for the finest possible rhythms and textures: the error of thinking of plot as mechanical and therefore trivial. As he explained to John Updike: “Plot, shmot.”’

I read this at a particular moment in Irish writing when concentration on rhythm and texture was producing the most astonishing and acrobatic results. Two years before Mendelson’s book, Eimear McBride published ‘A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing’. And in 2016 Mike McCormack’s ‘Solar Bones’ came out, all mesmerizing tones and rhythms. In both books there is a plot, but the actions of plot are secondary to the actions of language, to the tone itself, to the energy that the words themselves release.

I am sure I am not alone in wishing I could manage the sweeping lyricism of Mike McCormack’s book or the extraordinary control of emotion, all coiled in tense sentences, that Eimear McBride displays in her novel.

But I was still pondering on the implications of that paragraph in Mendelson’s book.

What can be done with plot? What novel has the best plot? What novel has the most exciting opening that will have serious consequences? What about Chapter 1 of Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’? It opens: ‘One evening of late summer, before the present century had reached its thirtieth year, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors on foot.’ By the end of the chapter, the man has put his wife up for sale and she has been bought by a stranger.

No matter what else happens in the novel, this will have consequences, but ones that are not inevitable. The longer the novel goes on without dramatizing these consequences, the more compelling the consequences become. Hardy loves fate and chance, but he is also intrigued by oddness, by willfulness, by what his characters cause.

And then there is Joseph Conrad’s ‘Victory’, his last great novel. In a small island in the Malay Archipelago, Axel Heyst is living in isolation with only a servant for company. But once his detachment from the world erodes even slightly, there is an opening for the novelist. Part of the richness of the plotting of ‘Victory’ is not merely its story - the things that happen - but the way in which the same events are described from several perspectives, as though perspective itself is a kind of consequence, the result of an action, but also, of course, the cause of another action.

In the winter of 2005 I wrote a piece of fiction that had a plot. Someone had told me a story. It was about a woman in the high Pyrenees who, one day in the early 1950s, walked out of her own house having had a row with her husband. She began to walk to her own village, where she was born. It was a mild winter day, the sort of day that can be dangerous in the high Pyrenees. Snow can fall fast, coming as if out of nowhere. The woman got lost in the snow. Her body was not found until the spring.

That was all I knew, all I was told. It was enough, because it would have consequences and I could imagine them. That was my job, if you can call being a novelist a job.

As I worked, I knew that it would not be sufficient to evoke an atmosphere, describe the woman’s marriage or that landscape. I would need to finish the story, tell what happened next. How did they find her? Who went to look for her?

Rhythms and textures would not do on their own. The woman went missing in the winter; she was found in the spring. It was like a ballad. I thought of keeping the story – it is 25,000 words long and called ‘A Long Winter’ - close to a folk tale and then making sure that the consequences of the woman going missing would not be predictable. It was as if I was working out on paper what Edward Mendelson would formulate a decade later. I left my human beings free to choose their own response to provocation. But everything that happened led to something else. At times, the most important thing was to slow down, let creation of pure atmosphere - what William Maxwell is so good at - work at keeping the reader in suspense.

Keeping the reader in suspense? Can you really do that still in fiction? ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ was published in 1886; ‘Victory’ in 1915. Surely what Eimear McBride and Mike McCormack have shown us is that if the language is rich and tense enough, that will be the plot. The words themselves, the phrasing, will thicken the plot, be the story, be the theme, perform the action, be the consequences.

As I was musing on all this, unsure as usual, and was walking along the street – this was just as the pandemic was descending – I got an idea for an opening few pages of a new novel. And the image that came into my head was an action, and the novel would be its consequences. I would be writing a book with a plot.

When I finished writing the novel in January, I felt the same as I did when I finished ‘A Long Winter’ almost twenty years ago. I felt: I will never be able to do this again; I will never get a plot like this again; soon, I will go back to creating an atmosphere, working on rhythms and textures.

I don’t know why a novel with a plot you have invented from scratch seems like something lucky. All I could do was take it when it came.

And all I can do now is accept the sad fact that it is done. The time I was working on it won’t return. But maybe that feeling of sadness is a feeling that will go away. Or maybe it will even have consequences. Who can say?

Colm Tóibín (March 2023)