Narrative layers in The Favorites by Layne Fargo

I’ve labeled The Favorites as women’s fiction / sports romance, following the lead of Layne Fargo’s publisher (who labels it women’s fiction) and readers (who nominated it for a Goodreads Choice Award in the romance category). But I think this is a case where genre labels proved misleading for some readers, especially romance readers looking for a classic happily ever after. (I’ll say more about the ending in my post on the overall structure.)

I think the best way to understand the novel isn’t through the lens of genre at all but by reading it as a loose retelling of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s tragic lovers Cathy and Heathcliff are lifted from the Yorkshire moors and reimagined as ice dancers Kat and Heath, competing at high-stakes events around the globe. Fargo borrows the tragedy and passion of the original, and she also borrows the frame narrative of Brontë’s novel. A frame narrative is simply one related by narrators who stand outside the central events of the story. (See my scene study of What We Can Know for another example.) Readers tend to forget the frame narrative of Wuthering Heights altogether, but Fargo foregrounds it, using it to comment on celebrity culture and positioning readers as sleuths in pursuit of the “real” story.

In my post on the opening of The God of the Woods, we saw Liz Moore drop us straight into the plot promised in her book description. Fargo chooses the opposite strategy. She introduces us first to present-day Kat relating events from the past, then to an excerpt from a documentary about those same events, before taking us further back in time, to the years that led up to the central drama. Before we trace how those layers work in The Favorites, though, let’s look at how they work in Fargo’s source material, Wuthering Heights.

As I noted above, the frame narrative of Wuthering Heights is often forgotten—in part because the Heathcliff and Cathy drama is so compelling and in part because Brontë doesn’t weave in and out of the frame narrative frequently. Brontë sets up the frame in the first lines of the novel:

The “I” here, we learn, is a Mr. Lockwood, and he soon shows himself to be spectacularly obtuse—as blind to his own nature as he is to the social cues of the people he meets. Despite describing himself as a solitary misanthrope and receiving a chilly welcome from Heathcliff, Lockwood decides to visit him again the very next day and must spend the night due to a snowstorm. During the night, he discovers Cathy’s childhood diary, and we get a few snippets from that before he dreams of her ghost outside his window in the storm.

We soon encounter our next narrator, the housekeeper Nelly Dean, who relates the whole saga of Heathcliff and Cathy to Lockwood while he is recuperating from an illness brought on by his ill-advised visit. Nelly takes over the first-person narration, with infrequent references to Mr. Lockwood as “you.”

The Heathcliff and Cathy saga is the central story. Nelly Dean is a direct witness to the events of the story. She tells them to Lockwood, who writes down the story, along with his own experiences and observations, for an unspecified audience. As readers, then, we experience the story through these narrative layers: Nelly’s interpretation of what she sees and chooses to tell Lockwood, then Lockwood’s possible shaping of what she tells him. We never get direct access to the interior thoughts of Heathcliff or Cathy.

On the teller side, Brontë leaves clues, some subtle and some overt, that neither Lockwood nor Nelly can be trusted as entirely reliable narrators. Each of them interprets the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy through their own moral framework and class positioning, which are quite different. Brontë allows Lockwood, in particular, to expose his own flaws through his first-person narration. And Nelly isn’t always an aloof narrator; she sometimes intervenes in the story itself, and her motives are hazy.

On the listener side, Brontë positions us as voyeurs. Lockwood encounters the present-day Heathcliff, reads Cathy’s diary, and tries without success to put the pieces together. Nelly quite willingly gives him the whole tragic story, sewing placidly as she does so, with occasional pauses to bring Lockwood hot gruel to “drive out” his cold. The implied reader—that’s us—reads this thirdhand gossip via Lockwood’s written record. By adding these frame layers around the Heathcliff and Cathy saga, Brontë forces us to confront our own voyeurism. The Heathcliff and Cathy relationship is a train wreck, and Brontë shows us that we don’t want to look away.

Why use a complex craft tool like a frame narrative? It’s the perfect vehicle for introducing metacommentary, for showcasing an unreliable narrator, or for managing a complex and dramatic backstory that stands apart from the frontstory. In the case of Wuthering Heights, Brontë was tapping into the vogue for novels that read like “found” stories, a tradition that reaches all the way back to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which many eighteenth-century readers took for memoir. Fargo leans into this aspect as well, especially with her documentary interludes, which are so spot-on we can almost hear them. (The audiobook version heightens this effect by including the real skating commentator, and former Olympic skater, Johnny Weir among the cast, voicing the character of Ellis Dean in the documentary segments.)

Now, let’s see how Fargo plays around with narrative layers in The Favorites because I think the clever ways she updates them are perhaps the most successful part of the novel. To start, Kat gets the first words:

That “worst day,” we soon learn, is Kat and Heath’s 2014 Olympic ice-dancing performance in Sochi, Russia. On the listener side, Fargo is creating an implied 2024 reader/viewer here—the “you” Kat addresses already knows the basics of what happened that day. And the relationship between our narrator Kat and that 2024 implied reader is antagonistic. The present-day reader—you, me—is drawn in by the secret: What do those fictional 2024 readers know that we don’t? What did go down at that Olympics? Fargo explicitly names and challenges the voyeurism of our attention in a way that Brontë only hinted at.

On the teller side, are we also a tiny bit suspicious of Kat as a narrator? How truthfully will she tell her own story? The next lines only increase that tension. Kat warns, “Don’t fool yourself into thinking you know me” and reels off a list of names she’s been called: “a bitch, a diva, a sore loser, a manipulative liar. Cold-blooded, a cheater, a criminal. An attention whore, an actual whore. Even a murderess.” But, she declares, “I don’t give a damn anymore. My story is mine, and I’ll tell it the same way I skated: in my own way, on my own terms. We’ll see who wins in the end.” Brontë never gives Cathy the power to narrate her own story, so it feels significant that Fargo opens the book with this declaration from Kat.

However, Kat’s declaration is immediately undercut when we turn the page to find ourselves in the opening scene of a documentary. A narrator solemnly intones, “They were an obsession. . . . Then a scandal” over visuals of Kat and Heath. We also hear the voices of four interviewees. The first two are wonderful nods to Brontë’s frame narrative: sports commentator Kirk Lockwood and former ice dancer Ellis Dean. Lockwood is still positioned as a teller, though his status is somewhat diminished—he’s one teller among many. Nelly, now Ellis Dean, starts here as a teller but will become more of an actor in the story—Fargo’s sly commentary on Nelly’s role in Wuthering Heights.

In addition to the dramatic pronouncements from everyone on the page, from the documentary narrator to Kat herself, Fargo also entices readers with a few clues about what happened in Sochi, the most dramatic of which is a shot of “bright red spatters” staining the Olympic rings on the ice.

Both Kat’s short chunk of narration and the documentary are positioned as a prologue. When we move to part one, chapter one, we find ourselves in the first person, past tense: “Once I was satisfied, I handed him the knife. Heath stood up on his knees, and I stretched out on the warm spot he’d left on the bed, watching him.” We discover that this is sixteen-year-old Kat, circa 1999, but our 2024 narrator Kat is still present in flashes. For example, we learn that they are about to travel to Cleveland for their first National Championship: “I was certain the competition would change everything for us. I was right. Just not in the way I imagined.” Our narrator, 2024 Kat, knows the what, how, and why behind these declarative sentences and so, presumably, do the fictional 2024 readers, the ones Kat explicitly addressed in her prologue. Only we, the present-day readers, are in the dark—and that information gap stokes tension and pulls us into the story. We want to find out what everyone else already knows.

After chapter one, we find ourselves in the documentary once more, which gives us some background about Kat’s start in skating and how hard it is for female ice dancers to find male partners. This pattern continues as the novel unfolds, with the documentary interstitials appearing every few chapters. More and more commentators are gradually included in these segments and, not too far into the book, we also see these same commentators pop up in Kat’s narrative as characters.

At the beginning of the novel, Kat is positioned as an unlikable and possibly unreliable narrator, while the talking heads in the documentary seem to be sharing the truths that we haven’t witnessed for ourselves. By the end of the book, we know that some of these interviewees have their own agendas, their own roles to play in the plot, and we realize their commentary may be just as self-interested as Kat’s.

The key difference between Wuthering Heights and The Favorites: While Brontë nests her narrative layers, Fargo makes hers compete. Brontë’s frames sit one inside another; Lockwood’s record encloses Nelly’s account. While each adds a layer of interpretation, they don’t disagree with one another about the essential facts of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship. In The Favorites, however, Kat’s version and the documentary’s version of events contradict each other, and the gap between them is one of the engines of the novel. Brontë makes us voyeurs; Fargo makes us sleuths, forced to decide which version of Kat’s story is true and whether we think she’s won in the end, as she declares in the prologue she will.

Fargo uses these narrative frames as a nod to her Wuthering Heights source material, and I think they add real richness to her retelling, allowing her to dig deeper into themes like the toxicity of fame and fandom. So, is a frame narrative right for your story? It could be if your novel features an unreliable narrator or a complex backstory. The potential downside is that a frame narrative can distance readers from the central plot and characters of your novel and, most importantly, can bury the hook of your premise.

It’s not a tool that is right for every novel, but it’s at least worth a thought experiment to consider these questions: Who would your frame narrators be? Older versions of current POV characters or protagonists? An antagonist? A secondary character who might have a lot to say about the protagonists? What form would your frame narrative take? A documentary, like Fargo uses? A journal and a storyteller, like Brontë uses? Even if you ultimately decide a frame narrative isn’t right for your story, the thought experiment might teach you things you didn’t yet know about your characters or your story world.

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