What makes a novel a novel? The word comes from the Latin novus, meaning new, via the Italian novella storia, “new story”, so it can seem a contradiction in terms when someone protests that a book “is not a novel”. The very definition suggests something original, unfamiliar – and yet one knows what the disappointed reader means. The parts don’t add up to a satisfying whole; the new story feels too disjointed or unfinished; the two or eight or 28 chapters don’t sufficiently cohere.

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday review – a dizzying debut Read more

For many novelists, however, it’s precisely a traditional sense of continuity and completion that one simultaneously resists and pursues via novel means. One way writers have gone about this is by juxtaposing narratives whose plots have no apparent (or immediately apparent) intersecting points.

Philip Hensher wrote about such parallel narratives here in 2014, and while some of my own choices fit neatly into this category I have also selected examples of “parallelism” by other means, including within a single storyline. Of course, to be parallel in the purest sense, narratives mustn’t intersect or converge at all, whereas “parallel narratives” as we’ve come to understand them do — if not plotwise then thematically, and obviously their author is always an element in common. But maybe only with the impure parallels of our art can we evoke the true parallels of our world, including the impassable gaps between art and nature, memory and reality, one human consciousness and the next. (“And maybe east and west really are eternally irreconcilable,” wonders a character in my own parallel-narrative novel of sorts, Asymmetry, “like a curve and its asymptote, geometrically fated never to intersect.”)

Through parallelism, a novelist might achieve a more realistic impression of the world’s multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple angles, multiple mirrors – whose reflections are sometimes all we have to bridge the divide. These are our antidote to what Louise Glück has called “a metaphysical claustrophobia: the bleak fate of being always one person”.





1. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter (1967)

In Salter’s surreal novel about Yale dropout Philip Dean and his affair with 18-year-old Frenchwoman Anne-Marie, the narrator’s imagining of the affair runs parallel to the affair itself. An acquaintance of Dean’s, and implicitly a version of him, the narrator “knows” things he cannot know, including, explicitly, how the lovers make love. “I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies.” And: “The more clearly one sees this world, the more one is obliged to pretend it doesn’t exist.”



2. The Joke by Milan Kundera (1967)

After playing a minor joke on a fellow student, young Ludvik is expelled from the Communist party and drafted into a branch of the Czech military reserved for subversives. The chorus of first-person accounts includes that of Kostka, whose soliloquy stands largely apart from the others and is Ludvik’s foil. The novel also pits communism against Christianity, folklore against reality, self against self. “Who was the real me?” asks Ludvik. “I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.”



3. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel … Relax. Concentrate.” So begin half of the chapters in this novel; the other half would seem to comprise the “novel” itself. But the latter don’t follow logically, one from the next; instead they read as a series of first chapters from different books, parallel to each other and to the “You/Reader” thread. By the end, “You” have decided to marry recurring character Ludmilla, and the seemingly disjointed “first chapters” are joined up in a kind of acrostic trick. “Now you are man and wife, Reader and Reader. A great double bed receives your parallel readings.”

4. The Counterlife by Philip Roth (1986)

This astonishing novel not only contains parallel narratives, in that certain characters are granted multiple lives and divergent destinies; its plotlines also brake, reverse, change lanes, and occasionally sideswipe one another, exemplifying a point Roth has been making exquisitely for years: life’s a mess. Each new chapter, each press of the reset button, seems to delight in the question sparking every fantasy or fiction: “What if?” Given the power and ebullience of the imagination behind this coruscating tour de force, one might add: “Why not?”

5. Vertigo by WG Sebald (1990)

Sebald’s first novel spans a veiled biography of Stendhal, latterday travelogues of journeys from Vienna to Italy, an anecdote from the life of Kafka and a pilgrimage to the narrator’s German hometown. Boldly discontinuous, these four narratives nevertheless have a kind of mystical coherence, owing to recurring references (Venice, Verona, Pisanello), leitmotifs (memory, dizziness), and of course Sebald’s sui generis synthesis of history, philosophy, and conversation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Truth and invention … Marguerite Duras in her apartment on Rue Saint-Benoit in Paris. Photograph: Julio Donoso/Getty Images

6. Yann Andréa Steiner by Marguerite Duras (1992)

One of the two interwoven strands here is a lyrical account of Duras’s relationship with the younger Yann Andréa Steiner; the other concerns a different asymmetrical romance observed or imagined: between an 18-year-old female camp counsellor and a six-year-old camper, also named Steiner, an orphaned Holocaust survivor. As in Duras’s other work, the narrator’s distrust of memory and the interplay between truth and invention are beguilingly conspicuous.



7. Trieste by Daša Drndić (2007)

Elderly Haya Tedeschi is waiting for her son, who was the result of an affair with a German officer and whom Haya has not seen in 62 years. Sebaldian in its assembling of prose, photographs, maps, and historical texts, Trieste is also typographically radical: staggered dialogue, columns of SS officer biographies, and a 44-page chapter listing approximately 9,000 Jews deported from or killed in Italy. Ultimately, the narration shifts to Haya’s son, who remarks of the project’s many fragments and parallel columns of humanity: “I have arranged a multitude of lives, a pile of the past, into an inscrutable, incoherent series of occurrences.”

8. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (2009)

A sex- and drug-fuelled caper at the Biennale gives way to a darker, moodier, more introspective second half that may or may not represent the first-person consciousness of the Jeff in the first half. Geoff versus Jeff versus an “I” contemplating existence by the Ganges: the ambiguities, the diptych structure, and the way the two halves alter and complement each other evoke the inconsistency and fluidity of consciousness.



Philip Hensher's top 10 parallel narratives Read more

9. NW by Zadie Smith (2012)

The most prominent parallel in this vital, fragmentary novel is between Leah and Keisha, friends who seem at once irreconcilable and two sides of the same coin. The novel winds melancholically among additional binary details and concepts concerning class, identity, and empathy: Keisha renames herself Natalie; over Prosecco, a character says, “It must be comforting being able to divide the world in two like that in your mind … Of course, I’m already divided in half”; and riding a bus, Leah imagines “a more gentle universe, parallel to our own, where people are fully and intimately known to each other and there is no time or death or fear”.



10. To the Back of Beyond by Peter Stamm (2016)

After returning home from an agreeable holiday with his family, Thomas walks out of his house and continues walking for many miles and days, leaving behind a wife and children bewildered by his departure. Stamm’s novel joins many others that tack between spousal perspectives, but his has a singularly hypnotic rhythm and dreamlike disorder that compound the marital parallel with those of reality versus fantasy and convention versus freedom.

