Composite Narratives and Swann

Composite Narratives and Swann

This article relates to Swann

Carol Shields (1935–2003), a dual American and Canadian citizen, published ten novels and three short story collections, in addition to poetry, plays, and nonfiction. She won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Stone Diaries, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice. Swann, her fifth novel, is a composite narrative comprising four sections from the perspective of the four main characters, and a final section taking the form of a screenplay about a symposium to discuss the work of the late poet Mary Swann.

Composite narratives present multiple points of view, whether first or third person, to tell one overarching story. Two well-known examples are Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. Linked short stories, similarly, can provide a composite view of a community or a central character.

The four protagonists of Swann also correspond with each other at various points, and much of Frederic Cruzzi's segment is composed of letters he writes and receives. An epistolary structure forces readers to ponder what happens in the interstices between documents, and, like a composite narrative, helps readers develop a more rounded understanding of a character or topic by portraying different characters' lives and views in their own words. Because these letters and other documents are interspersed with long narrative sections, Swann is not a traditional epistolary novel, but it is clear that Shields was intrigued by the possibilities of the form. (Indeed, in 1991 she published a straightforward epistolary composed entirely of letters and faxes: A Celibate Season, co-written with Blanche Howard.)

In Swann, snatches of Swann's life story arise in each section: tantalizing glimpses that are sometimes supplemented and sometimes contradicted in later sections. Each character has a mental image of Swann and presents her and her work in a certain way; no one is agenda-less. While a third-person voice is maintained throughout the novel, shifting between points of view allows these different preconceptions to emerge.

Moreover, the plot of the book mirrors its structure: Just as the four main characters are trying to assemble a complete picture of Swann based on scattered objects and texts, the reader has to piece together the storyline and try to decipher Swann's character through the different perspectives. ("Biography, that old buzzard, is having a field day, running along behind them picking up all the bits and pieces," Shields would later write in her short story "Collision.")

On first publication, Swann was given the subtitle "A Mystery," which casts the main characters as investigators and perhaps crime-fighters, at least in the sense of exposing and righting a crime of omission: Swann's incidental or deliberate deletion from literary history. Mystery novels often benefit from a structure that braids together the multiple perspectives of witnesses; readers are presented with competing testimonies and invited to decide which are trustworthy. Crime novelists like Kate Atkinson, Gillian Flynn, and Lucy Foley have employed this structure in their novels.

Swann is a good example of how a composite narrative can complicate a story. The book resists the idea that a life is tidy, straightforward, or chronological; rather, Shields posits, it is a mosaic that the characters, and we as readers, construct and reconstruct as we go along.

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This article relates to Swann. It first ran in the November 5, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.