Lost at the beginning

The plot of a typical novel has four parts. Jane Smiley calls them exposition, rising action, climax and denouement. These are usually easy to identify in any novel you are reading. You are first introduced to the key characters and the situation at the beginning of the story. Then things start to happen.  Then comes the resolution. Finally comes the summing up, the return to normalcy, or the "happily ever after" perhaps.

Lately, perhaps because growing older has made me impatient, I have been having trouble with the first part, the exposition. It seems that I start novel after novel and abandon it after 50 pages or less. Not only don't I know where the story is going, but I find that I don't even care. I don't like the characters. Their situation doesn't interest me. Or I simply don't understand what is going on. I don't read novels to be bored. I want to care early on about what's going to happen next.

Just the other day I abandoned Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers. The book actually contains two novellas with the same characters. Not that I got very far into the first story. The monk is called Dex, but I jumped ship before the robot came along. Mostly I was turned off because Chambers gives Dex plural pronouns. He was always "they." I just didn't care what happened to Dex and "their" robot." I didn't like being confused. I turned to what I hoped will be a more interesting novel. It is.

And so it has gone too frequently. It is not that I necessarily want the action to start earlier. I loved When the Cranes Fly South despite the fact that there is hardly any action at all through the entire novel. But I liked the main character and wanted to know what would happen to him.

Some novelists begin their novels at the end, giving us a taste of the climax before going back to the beginning. Sometimes this works, but usually I prefer stories in chronological order. Save the climax for the climax. Even so, novelists need to do a better job of making their expositions interesting enough — or their characters interesting enough — to keep readers, including old and impatient readers like me, hanging around.