Book Review: The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley

Sometimes when you start a blog or a newsletter, you think you’ll have nothing to write about. Then, life keeps handing you material. So it is with this book: The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley.

I liked the description: “The story of a solitary green notebook that brings together six strangers and leads to unexpected friendship, and even love.” Also, it was endorsed by Sophie Kinsella, who wrote the enjoyable Confessions of a Shopaholic series. Light interesting fare. It did not disappoint.

The Authenticity Project has a book within the book – the green notebook – which one solitary elderly gentleman begins because he is lonely. Julian writes a heartfelt story about his own loneliness and dares anyone who finds the book to write their own. Soon, the little secret-holder finds it way to Monica, a local café owner, then Hazard a former banker, boozehound, and cocaine addict. After that, Hazard takes it to Thailand where he gives it to Riley, an adventurous young Aussie, who finds the book more trouble than it is worth. After Riley, the book finds its way to Alice, a burned out new mom and Instagram influence, then Lizzie, a good-hearted snoop and local busybody. They all find themselves at Monica’s café in real life where the book works a certain kind of magic, allowing them to become more fully themselves.

Clare Pooley is truly gifted at pacing. Before the academic and non-fiction writers tune out, let me tell you pacing is a tool every author needs. Many writers tend to think of pacing in terms of fiction: how long a fight scene is, how intricate a love-making scene is, or when to break up thinking with action. In non-fiction writing, pacing is crucial since it helps determine the flow of a document: how to balance story-telling with analysis, how to turn a literature review into a story and an argument into an action scene, when to switch from the opening gambit of your chapter to its major argument, how to create the denouement of an academic text, how to weave the cast of characters in your qualitative study into the narrative of your argument.

Let me share a few notes from Pooley’s work.

Pooley is a wizard at perspective. She opts for a limited third-person perspective. This means the narrative is told by a narrator that is not one of the characters, but the narrator is limited by the character from whose perspective they narrate. Examples include the Twilight series, the Harry Potter series. You know what Harry is thinking, but you don’t know what Hermoine is thinking, only what Harry understands of Hermoine’s actions and words. In Pooley’s case, she allows the narrator to give you the person’s innermost thoughts, but you have the advantage of the narrator to create some distance. The distance between the narrator and the character helps create distance between a reader and the characters. This becomes particularly useful in a book about secrets because the reader’s engagement is based, in part, on their relationship to the secrets kept.

Every perspective – first person, second person, omniscient – has a few pitfalls. For limited third-person perspective, one can get a bit tired of the particular character and, since the character’s limited knowledge can be rather obvious, some readers crave another perspective. Pooley does not disappoint: she hops between Julian, Monica, Hazard, Riley, Alice, and Lizzie and others. This isn’t confusing because Pooley makes each character distinct. The additional up-side is that she can move within a scene and across time in a way that would be natural for the character involved. In that way, she can keep the plot moving along, while keeping the relationships between the characters interesting.

In addition to manipulating perspective, Pooley also keeps the scenes short when necessary. She understands that a long dialogue is often not necessary, especially when action communicates between the words. Short scenes are incredibly useful in a novel because they can be (depending on the author of course) memorable and the drive home information about characters. When Pooley extends a scene, there is also a purpose to it: usually to prolong the character’s (and therefore the reader’s) confusion, fantasy, wandering, wondering, or concern. The longer scenes tend to have an emotional resonance, different from the shorter scenes. In grammatical terms, this means that the shorter scenes are more noun and verb heavy to emphasize agents and actions, whereas the longer scenes take precise advantage of adverbs and adjectives to create mood.

For a relatively light novel, I was happy to see such attention to craft. I recalled Matthew Selasses’s words about pacing: if you instruct creative students to write ten pages at a time, they will think in ten-page increments. I cannot help but wonder if the same is true for academic and non-fiction writers. I have struggled with pacing books or articles because I cannot figure out how to speed up a literature review, or slow down an analysis, while – and this is key – still providing all crucial information.

From now on, I plan to take a few lessons from Pooley’s work: shift perspective, and make every part of speech count.

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