What Happens When You Fail to Suspend Disbelief?

Unless you're writing myth or satire, it's never good for readers to find your situations and character choices preposterous

Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash

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Hi Everyone,

In my current retreat from news and politics, I’ve been watching a lot of series television and, so, recently joined the legions watching Disclaimer . If you haven’t heard of it, the Alfonso Cuarón miniseries stars Cate Blanchett as Catherine Ravenscroft, a middle-aged wife and mother whose past assaults her in the form of a deranged man, played by Kevin Kline, who claims that Catherine seduced his late son just before the boy drowned. As Inkoo Kang writes in her New Yorker review of the miniseries:

“Revelations emerge apace—about Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft, about the young man who drowned, and about the mysterious figure who won’t let Catherine forget her small but crucial role in that death—and yet none of these details make the characters more believable…The conceit, pulled from Renée Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, is at first pleasingly retrograde, then turns remarkably stupid.”

I couldn’t agree more, though the word that comes to my mind is “preposterous” rather than “stupid.” I bought into the story, which fractures POV to create the illusion of complexity, until the main character’s actions became so idiotic that I no longer believed or cared what happened to her. The plot — and it was the fault of the underlying plot rather than Blanchett’s performance — had failed to keep my disbelief in suspension.

This all reminded me of an annotation I wrote many years ago, about William Trevor’s novel The Story of Lucy Gault, for my application to Bennington’s MFA program. Rather than spoil Disclaimer for you, in case you still plan to watch it, I thought I’d revisit that anno, because I strongly believe that any storyteller’s first responsibility is to suspend disbelief. And yet writers test that suspension all the time, risking “remarkably stupid” falls. Renée Knight was a debut novelist when she wrote Disclaimer, so maybe she didn’t know what she was doing, but William Trevor, a literary master if ever there was one, surely did. Why did he willfully play with my disbelief as a reader? And can I make a better case for him now, after two decades in the MFA trenches, than I could before I entered them?

I’ve revised my original annotation in an attempt to answer these questions. Whether you write memoir or fiction, I hope it provides you with some useful food for thought.

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How many degrees of unreality are too many?

In William Trevor’s tenth (!) novel, Fools of Fortune, the main character observes, ‘’We Irish were intrigued, my father used to say, by stories with a degree of unreality in them.’’

Six novels later, in The Story of Lucy Gault, Trevor puts that intrigue to the ultimate literary test, asking implicitly, just how far can you push your reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief before the spell of fiction breaks?

All stories test this line, of course. Every reader knows that fiction is made up, and most are almost as skeptical about the veracity of memoir. So writing begins with disbelief; it’s the author’s job to suspend that disbelief quickly and effectively enough for the reader to be fully drawn in to the world of the story — hopefully, to experience its deeper truth. Many books include fantastical or magical or foreign elements that challenge the reader’s disbelief, but those books succeed by constructing characters so convincing in their actions and true in thought that the reader buys into their world.

The Story of Lucy Gault more than demonstrates Trevor’s mastery of realistic observation. Phrases like “stiff as card” or “freckles spreading on the backs of” old hands help to set a visual stage and evoke the period of 1920s Ireland. But to his convincing observations of landscape and human intimacy, Trevor adds character choices that run the gamut from dubious to utterly preposterous. And it’s this combination of realism with unbelievability that makes his gamble dicey.

In a conventional myth or fable, characters can defy belief with impunity. Gods make up their own rules. So do witches and centaurs. Children in the woods of a fairy tale can enter a foreboding castle or hovel that would send any real child screaming in the opposite direction. In a fable, the omniscient narrator never lets us forget that there’s a mythic presence pulling strings beyond the page. Scenes tend to be sketched like backdrops, dialog sounds arcane, and every description is designed to feel both symbolic and unreal.

A similar rule applies to satire, where characters are expected to be larger-than life, one-upping themselves with every move. It’s not funny if they don’t do something more outrageous than anyone would consider in real life. It’s not clear who or what is being mocked, unless the evidence is hyped. And that exaggeration extends to wardrobe, accents, and facial expressions. Satire may get to the truth of the matter, but absurdity is its vehicle.

Trevor’s unorthodox combination of fabulist elements with realism makes The Story of Lucy Gault a kind of literary dare.

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