As I did in my Novel Study book, I’m going to analyze the opening of every book we read because those first few pages are the most important of the book. The author is luring the reader into the story while at the same time teaching them the rules of this book. There is a lot of work to be done and many different ways to do it.
I started Novel Study by looking at the cover of Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House and we’re not going to get much further into this month’s book, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. The cover is, indeed, arresting: a politely beautiful oil painting of a forest scene marred by a hyper-realistic thread of viscous pink fluid dripping down the surface.
But what I really want to discuss is Moore’s choice to include a table of contents for her novel, which is a bit unusual. Here it is, in full:
I: Barbara
II: Bear
III: When Lost
IV: Visitors
V: Found
VI: Survival
VII: Self-Reliance.
The table of contents is the first bit of text we see after the copyright page, coming before the dedication, two epigraphs, and then what looks like a hand-drawn map of the Van Laar Preserve, where the story is set. (I’m always thrilled to discover a map at the beginning of a book!)
I discussed epigraphs and maps (and front matter in general) in Novel Study as part of my analysis of NK Jemisin’s The City We Became.
A table of contents is another kind of map—a story map. Moore didn’t have to include it; she could have simply let readers encounter the part titles as they occur in the text. Mick Herron does this, for example, in The Secret Hours, where his part titles orient the reader in place and time (“Devon, Soon”; “Berlin, Then”). Similarly, Jesse Q. Sutanto’s clever part titles in Dial A for Aunties—“Part 1: Girl Meets Boy,” “Part 2: Girl Finds Boy”—orient us in the story and are a playful reference to standard rom-com tropes that help readers anticipate what is to come, but she doesn’t include a table of contents.
(Of course, if you are reading an ebook, you always get a table of contents, but depending on your default settings, the book will likely open right to the first page of chapter one. I always go to the cover first and page forward because I like to read any front matter clues, like epigraphs.)
In God of the Woods, the part titles immediately raise questions if we stop to think about them: We know from the book description that not one but two children are missing: Barbara, as well as her older brother. Are we going to be in Barbara’s point of view in the part bearing her name? Or perhaps in the part named “When Lost”? Is “Bear” a person or a… bear? Does “Found” mean what we think it means? If so, which of the two children is found? What guesses do we make about the end of the novel based on the titles of the last parts, “Survival” and “Self-Reliance”?
The only way to answer these questions is to start reading! (Don't worry: I'm not going to reveal anything past the first few chapters of the novel.) After a title page for part one, “Barbara,” the first word we encounter is a chapter title, “Louise,” followed by a time stamp, “August 1975,” and these first two sentences:
The bed is empty. Louise, the counselor—twenty-three, short-limbed, rasp-voiced, jolly—stands barefoot on the warm rough planks of the cabin called Balsam and processes the absence of a body in the lower bunk by the door.
So we are in Louise’s point of view, and by the end of the first page, we know that the empty bed belongs to Barbara. Moore has fulfilled the promise of the book description and plunged us right into the story.
By the end of this first chapter, we know more about Louise, and her counselor-in-training Annabel, than we do about the missing girl. And we also know more about what happened the night Barbara goes missing than the authorities are going to be told. Both Louise and Annabel were out partying in the woods, and Louise’s first move is to collect the evidence and tell Annabel to hide it. She’s certain, however, that Annabel will “fold immediately”:
She’ll cry on the shoulders of her mother and father, who probably didn’t even understand the poem they named their daughter for, and she’ll be comforted by them, and resume her ballet lessons, and next year she’ll be pipelined into Vassar or Radcliffe or Wellesley by her prep school, and she’ll marry the boy her parents have chosen for her—already, she has confessed to Louise, they have one in mind—and she will never, ever think of Louise Donnadieu again, or the fate that will befall Louise, or the trouble Louise will have, for the rest of her life, getting a job, getting housing, supporting her mother, who for seven years now has been unable or unwilling to work.
This passage introduces a tension about class status that will emerge as one of the central themes of the novel. It’s also a master class in the use of tone, syntax, and detail. Notice that this passage is one long sentence. Moore is able to keep piling on the details by adding parallel clauses—another “and,” another “or”. The repetition of the grammatical structure prevents us from getting lost amidst this pile of words. (For more on “cumulative sentences” and how to write them, see my review of Brooks Landon’s Great Sentences.)
Chapter two shifts us to a new POV character and a new time: Tracy, two months earlier, June 1975. Tracy, we learn, is new to Camp Emerson. She opens the chapter by telling us about the camp rules, the most important of which is “WHEN LOST SIT DOWN AND YELL.” Notice the connection to the title of part three? Moore makes sure we remember it by ending the chapter with another reference to it, one that drags us much further forward in time than we’ve been yet, maybe even to the present day:
Then [the counselor] formally dispensed the Three Rules of Camp Emerson like a dutiful town crier—including the final one, the most important, a phrase that would echo in Tracy’s head for days, for weeks. For the rest of her life.
When lost sit down and yell.
Tracy had difficulty imagining how lost she would have to be before the option felt correct. Her voice, it seemed, had been continuously decrescendoing since birth, so that by age twelve, she could scarcely be heard.
Very, she decided, at last. Profoundly, irreversibly, lost.
Notice how Moore is expanding the meaning of “lost” here, making it metaphorical and symbolic as well as literal? That expansion of meaning makes us wonder how literal any of these part titles might be.
This second chapter is also important because Moore uses it to establish Tracy as one of the most important of all of the many narrators / POV characters we meet in the book. We’ve already seen that class status is going to be a prominent theme in the book. Tracy’s class status is in flux, thanks to the recent divorce of her parents, so we get the sense that she may be less blinkered than some of the other narrators we meet, more able to see clues and subtext delivered from characters on either side of that class chasm.
More also, very cleverly, plants a passage in this chapter that makes us immediately see Tracy as our ally:
What she had wanted to do with her summer was simple: she wanted to spend all day in the living room of the Victorian in Saratoga Springs that her family had rented each racing season for a decade. She had wanted to lower the blinds halfway and open the windows halfway and point all the fans in the house in her direction and lie on the sofa, only rising to prepare herself elaborate snacks. And she wanted to read: reading was the main thing.
Tracy is our people—a reader just like us. We’ll see if this is a trick, a way for Moore to misdirect our attention or sympathies to prepare us for a surprise later on.
I haven’t read much past part two yet, so I’m just speculating, but based on the opening chapters—the way characters refuse to see certain things, withhold information, or outright lie—I’m guessing that Moore might be playing the same game with us, the readers, on the story level. Dangling these part titles in front of us before we’ve started reading might be her way of dragging us fully into the experience of the story, of being lost, surviving, and finally learning self-reliance.
And about that self-reliance. It’s the name of the last part of the novel, but it’s also, we learn in chapter three, the name of the family home both Barbara and her brother disappear from…
I’m excited to keep reading further and discover what’s literally real and what’s metaphorically, deeply real in The God of the Woods.
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