Chapter 11 Structuring

Central Crime Zone’s Jon Jordan suggests that, “in honor of the wonderful world of high finance,” bloggers should post “the first line of Chapter Eleven in the book you’re reading.” This turns out to be a more difficult assignment than I would have imagined, as the book I just began, Jonathan Rabb’s new historical crime novel, Shadow and Light (the sequel to Rosa, one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2005), doesn’t have an easily identifiable Chapter 11. Its numbering only goes up to Chapter 5.

I’ve also just started reading T. Coraghessan Boyle’s wonderfully composed new novel about architect Frank Lloyd Wright, The Women. But that has no Chapter 11, either. Its Part I ends with Chapter 9, and then the numbering commences again in Part II. However, if I count the second chapter of Part II as the 11th chapter, then this is its first line (on page 208):

She was sunk in the sofa in Norma’s sitting room--or living room, as they call it here--taking a cup of tea and idly shifting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle round the end table for lack of anything better to do, when Norma came in with the mail.

Having not read anywhere close to that far in The Women, I don’t know who Norma is yet, or who the “she” reclining on her sofa happens to be. I look forward to finding out.

Better to refer back to two other books that I just finished over the weekend. The first completed was Devil’s Garden, Ace Atkins’ brand-new novel about Dashiell Hammett’s involvement, during his time as a Pinkerton detective, in the evident 1921 frame-up of big-screen funny man Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle for the murder of a wannabe actress in San Francisco. Chapter 11 in that story begins with the entrance of Arbuckle’s estranged wife:

When Minta arrived at the Hall of Justice it was early morning and Roscoe had been asleep on his bunk, dreaming of the dusty town where he’d lived as a boy in a little hotel closet alone, scrubbing floors and cleaning spittoons and falling in love with this nineteen-year-old singer who smelled of lilac and taught him to harmonize and dance.

The second novel on which I just turned the final page yesterday, The Ignorance of Blood, the fourth and apparently final installment of Robert Wilson’s series about Spanish Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón (a series that began with The Blind Man of Seville, another January Magazine favorite, back in 2003), kicks off its own Chapter 11 in the middle of a kidnapping:

“I’m not going to talk to anybody except Javier,” said Consuelo, not loudly, but with such an edge to her voice that all the men stood back from her, as if she’d just unsheathed a sword.

The speaker, by the way, is Falcón’s on-again-off-again lover, restaurateur Consuelo Jiménez.

Feel free to apply this test to your own latest reads. I’m not sure it tells you much about them, but it may give you the chance to discover--or rediscover--some fine prose.