CHAPTER THREE

Counterpointed Plotting

A lot of fictional stories are battlegrounds.

Indebted to the melodramatic imagination, literary stories often involve dynamics of power: who has control over whom; who abuses it; who uses it wisely. Stories of victimization grip us. We know that abuse from those in authority (teachers over children; a coach over players; a mother over a son) does all too often happen. When I was twelve years old the story “The Test” by Angelica Gibbs had a profound impact on me. A twenty-seven year-old African American woman needs to get her driver’s license for the job she has with a privileged white family. During the road test, the examiner “tests” her, making a series of derogatory remarks such as, “Old enough to have quite a flock of pickaninnies, eh?” The commentary escalates, until Marian, no longer able to take the degradation, pushes back with a “damn you,” and the examiner fails her, “[making] four very black crosses at random in the squares on Marian’s application blank.”

This story was originally published in the pages of The New Yorker in 1940 and I don’t think a month goes by where I don’t think about that story. It was a game changer for me. The extent of that kind of meanness, that kind of abuse of power, and racial targeting I was not aware existed until Gibbs showed the way.

Years later Sandra Cisneros does her own variation on this theme in the powerfully poignant “Eleven” where a white teacher, Mrs. Price, singles out a Latina girl, Rachel, on her birthday, making her claim ownership of a red sweater, “all raggedy and old” that clearly isn’t hers and has a “sleeve that smells like cottage cheese.” The teacher’s assumptions are based on class: this sweater “all stretched out like you could use it for a jump rope” must belong to one of her not-so-well-off kids. She embarrasses Rachel, and when the truth is revealed that it’s not Rachel’s sweater, Mrs. Price fails to apologize.

That narrative loose string still haunts me everytime I re-read “Eleven,” the failure of an authority figure to acknowledge and empathize with one of the students in the classroom.

Perhaps American writers, because we are a relatively young country, often tell stories of lost idealism, the veil of innocence being lifted to reveal what’s underneath: corruption, decay, unkindness.

But battleground stories aren’t the only stories to tell.

Charles Baxter, inspired by the work of the American stage, champions, in Burning Down the House, narratives of counterpointed characterization. Here the focus isn’t on some kind of end game: who’s going to triumph, who’s going to lose? Who’s the protagonist, who’s the antagonist? But instead these narratives spin around the connections and disconnects between two people, and ultimately we’re asked what’s emerging here? What’s leaking free from the armor almost all characters wear?

In theater, acting is often seen as structured improvisation. Actors have a script, but how they say what they say changes moment-to-moment depending on what their scene partner is giving them. Similarly in counterpointed character stories, the writer needs to follow the impulses of what each character puts forward, and that will form the basis of the story’s narrative arc. The end game isn’t so much to win, but to be understood. Life isn’t always a contest.

I love these kinds of stories.

In Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) the narrative has its fill of high-octane melodrama: a businessman, promising to bring a much-needed factory to Sparta, Mississippi, is murdered; a group of rednecks with a Confederate symbol on their car track and plan to possibly murder Virgil Tibbs; a white man Endicott (a plantation owner and resident bigot) slaps Tibbs in the face and Tibbs slaps him back; and a final arrest and shooting occurs on the pre-dawn streets. But underneath these pyrotechnics is a character-driven story as two men (one Black, one white; one big city Northerner, one rural country southerner; one college educated and nuanced with forensics, the other two-fisted and full of street smarts) tangle with each other, argue, but find connections among all their moments of disconnect, discovering a common humanity.

Sheriff Gillespie begrudgingly learns to lean on Virgil’s talent to help save the town and the promise of a new factory; and Virgil, in his pursuit of the bigoted Endicott, becomes painfully aware of his own prejudices and biases, and a need to respect those less talented than him. In the end the men admire one another, and in a wonderful flipping of the Pullman conductor archetype, the white sheriff (played by Rod Steiger) carries the bags of the Black detective (played by Sidney Poitier) to the train.

A perfect ending to what the true journey of the characters within the larger plot is all about.

Endings

Speaking of endings, whether it be a battleground story or one driven by counterpointed characterization, they should grow organically out of the journeys our central characters take. Moreover, they should illustrate subtle change, change that’s believable within the range of possibilities for the protagonist in the given circumstances of the story.

Over the years, as an editor and reader of fiction, I’ve come across many satisfied endings to stories. Here’s a list of “moves” I’ve seen again and again, resolutions that grow from the crisis and turmoil a lead character is placed in and subjected to:

The precipice, freeze-frame ending (a personal fave of mine): A character ends in the midst of things. Stories often begin in the midst of things so why not end in them? A character picks up a rock, ready to throw it, end (Raymond Carver’s “Viewfinder”); an ex-school teacher holds a pen over a blank page of a Yearbook, thinking of what to say to a woman whose life, in some ways, he tried to destroy (Tom Perrotta in Election);
Image/resonance (the lyrical poetry move): A story concludes with a powerful image that resonates back to the emotional shores of the story;
Dialogue (perhaps double-voiced): A move that creates poignancy or a kind of haunting call back. In my story “Ossining 1919” adolescent James Cagney ends things by saying “Ready.” As the catcher, he’s telling the umpire after a fracas at home plate and adjusting his mask that he’s ready for the game to continue, but he’s also telling readers he’s ready for a vision he’s just had about being an artist and moving ahead without his father;
Situational irony: In Susan Jackson Rodgers’s collection The Ex-Boyfriend in Aisle 6, a woman, alone, is aware of a dark presence outside, an ex bent on hurting her, and she arranges in neat rows the spices in her spice rack, seeking order in the chaos;
Revelation/epiphany: The classic Joycean move in which a character has an intense, religious-like feeling or insight, and comes to knowledge (often an unveiling, discomforting discoveries for youth);
A false insight: A kind of anti-epiphany story in which the lesson to be learned goes haywire and the character learns a lie (Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” in which the boy knows he’ll never die is a thwarted coming-of-age story);
The Inflation/deflation ending (hope vs despair: here’s what I wish for vs. here’s what I know is true): Many chapters in Anthony Doerr’s All Light We Cannot See end on this melody line. Julie Orringer in “Notes to Sixth-Grade Self” inverts or at least plays with this paradigm:

He looks down into his lap and you understand that the boy is him. When he raises his eyes, his expression tells you that despite the dress, despite the hybrid peas, things are not going to change at school or Miss Maggie’s. He will not take walks with you at recess or sit next to you at McDonald’s. You can see that he is apologizing for this, and you can choose to accept it or not.

Get to your feet and pull yourself up straight; raise your chin as your mother has shown you to do. Adjust the straps of your sandals, and make sure your halter is tied tight. Then ride bikes with Eric Cassio until dark.

Narrative telling: Not quite an epiphany, but a moment where the writer tells us something significant instead of showing us;
A musical coda or rhyme back to something (an image/sound/action) used earlier: In Joyce’s “The Dead” the snow tapping at the window echoes back to the action of Michael Furey throwing rocks at Gretta Conroy’s window;
The non-ending ending or the here we go again ending, as the quarrel or conflict continues (see Dorothy Parker’s biting “Here We Are”).

Counterpointed Plotting and “the Intelligent Mistake”

Doubling is a classic plot feature to Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mysteries with their proliferation of two guns and a cache of switched identities complicating the narrative’s causality. But in these cases, as in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot sagas, our protagonist remains untouched: calm, always in control, extremely confident. All three men are fixed in their personas and inflated egos.

By contrast Georges Simenon nuances this doubling of plot components by layering within them Inspector Jules Maigret’s character choices. The first choice is not always the best choice. Maigret, a man of the people who enjoys dropping into a bistro for a beer in the middle of a case or slipping “a long while under the bubbles of the bath water,” is fallible, vulnerable, and capable of change.

In his essay “Dysfunctional Narratives,” Charles Baxter describes the intelligent mistake as a narrative device where a character makes an error in judgment that seems reasonable, but his error drives the plot forward. These mistakes reveal character biases, create tension (how to right the wrong?), and often lead to a moral reckoning.

In Maigret’s Madwoman (translated by Sîan Reynolds) Maigret refuses to take an old woman’s concerns seriously. He believes that Madame Antoine de Caramé may be “touched” or somewhat senile. She claims that someone has been breaking into her apartment while she’s out at the park in Tuileries. She can tell because, upon her return home, things aren’t where she left them and square-angled paintings are now canted. And no, she informs Maigret, she doesn’t have a cat upsetting the apartment’s mise-en-scene.

A failure to act was Maigret’s first mistake. Now, racked with guilt over her murder, he throws himself completely into investigating her death. The “goodness” apparent in her eyes informs his second mistake, a misreading that affects how he treats others. He initially dislikes Madame Antoine de Caramé’s niece, Angèle Louette, because he catches her in a series of lies and disapproves of her strong dislike for her aunt. But when we later hear Angèle’s story, the reasons for her anger—her comfortably-living aunt had refused to lend so much as a helping hand when the unwed Angèle was pregnant—we understand the circumstances behind her feelings and why Simenon qualified the apparent “goodness” of the old woman’s eyes with a “seem to shine.”

Ultimately, Maigret’s Madwoman case hinges on a series of doublings crystallizing into two prime suspects: Angèle and her lover, Big Marcel. As Maigret targets each he eventually confronts his errors in judgment and discovers that they are not based on mere logical step-by-step deductions: “she was tall and heavily built, with man-sized shoulders”; “The niece is massive, built like a man”; “She wasn’t beautiful, had never been pretty. And as she got older, she was starting to put on weight.” Because the woman is not traditionally “feminine,” and she’s assertive and aggressive, Maigret’s perspective is skewed and full of biases.

Maigret’s change in outlook depends on a foil, his wife, Madame Maigret. During a dinner time conversation she functions as the emotional counterweight to Maigret’s professional detachment. She empathizes with the suspect’s more aggressive, nontraditional femininity. When she hears that a nickname for Angèle is the pejorative “Gendarme,” she challenges her husband: “Is that what you call the poor woman?” Maigret responds by saying the woman is “charmless,” and Madame Maigret, pushing the narrative’s moral compass, pursues her woman-to-woman perspective, accessing insights that remain invisible to her husband: “Yes, certainly . . . Because men didn’t come courting her, she had to resign herself to taking another approach with them.”

Her challenge spins the climax toward a moral reckoning. Maigret goes into the final interrogation with Angèle with a kinder heart, wondering how he might have treated her if she’d been pretty. Simenon: “Maigret looked at her differently from the previous times, feeling a little awkward, perhaps because he was remembering his wife’s words from the evening before.”

He’s now in the realm of uncomfortable self-examination, starkly questioning himself, and coming to terms with his misjudgments. Angèle, too, chastens Maigret into further self-recognition by asking “Why do you hate me?”

That questioning by Madame Maigret and Angèle of Maigret’s personal prejudices finds its answers in the novel’s final doubling. One of Maigret’s Madwoman plot lines centers around comments over inheritance. Earlier, Angèle’s son, whom Maigret takes a liking to because he’s straightforward and honest, says about his mother’s relationship to his grand Aunt, “She couldn’t stand her. I’ve often heard her say with a sigh: ‘When’s the old bird going to hop the twig?’” A concierge later informs Maigret that Angèle had said, “But luckily one day, I’ll inherit from my aunt!” Does this make her a prime suspect for murder?

After Maigret has broken Angèle with the news of her lover’s execution by the French mob, she collapses, and in a completely vulnerable state tells her story without subterfuge. She wasn’t an accomplice in the murder, but she muddied the details of the case to obscure the suspicions placed on her lover, and the reason she told him about the inheritance had nothing to do with plotting a killing but with a desperate attempt “To try and hang on to him.”

Maigret, moved by this confession, rips up the arrest warrant. Big Marcel acted alone. Angèle can’t find the words, but she’ll never “forget” what he has done for her, and I suspect Maigret will never forget his errors in judgement. Simenon’s application of the “intelligent mistake” makes the investigator’s biases an essential component to the mystery, adding psychological depth, and transforming what might otherwise be a straightforward procedural plot into a character-driven journey that is a defamiliarized and compelling morality tale.

Case Studies

Case Study #4: “Garbage Night at the Opera”

Valerie Fioravanti’s “Garbage Night at the Opera” is a beautifully crafted tale of counterpointed characterization. It’s a rite of passage story. Massimo, an immigrant from Italy and a single parent, wants to educate his daughter Franca on an aspect of his cultural heritage: they’re going to see a production of La Bohème at the Metropolitan.

The narration informs us of Massimo’s other attempts to keep his past alive: To recapture the beauty of Ventozza, the town he hails from, Massimo ran “a creeping vine along his fire escape to introduce some green,” but “[T]he firemen brought ladders and chopped it away with their axes. They said it was a safety violation, wrote him a ticket, and warned him not to do it again.”

Sadly, further attempts to acculturate his daughter to Italy are also thwarted. When they arrive at the Met they discover the show’s sold out and can’t purchase a ticket.

Fioravanti then flips the traditional dynamics between a father and a daughter. Franca protects him from having “security” called in. Massimo isn’t happy about it: “He doesn’t like it when she has to speak for him, but strangers often misunderstand him.”

So where’s the story going to go next, what else is going to emerge? What might it pull out from the shadows, the hiding places between these two characters?

After witnessing a so-so puppet performance in Central Park, Massimo gets lost on his way home. The “outing” for his daughter appears to be going all awry. But then two treasures are found: a discarded mahogany dresser and a thrown away bicycle with a busted rim. Franca wants the bike and Dad fights an obstreperous neighbor for her right to keep it. In a final, double-voiced moment Fioravanti writes, “They have both chosen well.”

How so? Dad plans to fix the bicycle for his daughter so that she will be able to more fully participate in childhood and become Americanized. By contrast, Franca, in carrying the bike herself, allows Dad to keep the dresser so that he can fix it, sell it, and perhaps pre-order tickets for the opera, and thus pass down some of his cultural heritage.

Case Study #5: “The Capsule”

Joseph Helmreich’s “The Capsule” is a tight little story that deals with a different kind of counterpoint, the shadow shelf. Our protagonist is suddenly pushed back into, what we later will learn to be, an irretrievable past. A time capsule has been retrieved from the Downsville Dam’s spillway.

It’s Quinn’s capsule and years ago she died in a fire that killed her and eleven other classmates. The media wants to open the capsule and our protagonist is asked to do the honors. The dramatics of the situation places him in two spaces at once: “I feel guilty talking about this to Sheila. I know that’s ridiculous; it’s twelve-year-old me and a twelve-year-old-girl. Yet sometimes I wonder if that fact itself isn’t why I try not to think about Quinn. It feels inappropriate. I was so powerfully drawn to her and when I remember her, that power returns and, as a married father of two, it feels shameful. I remind myself that I’m not perceiving her through my adult eyes, but through the eyes of myself as a child and that the feelings, too, are just being borrowed from him. But it does little to ease the discomfort. Maybe what I’m really hiding from is something more inscrutable: that I’m in love with a ghost.”

He exists in a state of doubleness. And the counterpoints are doubled: the protagonist vis-a-vis himself and vis-a-vis his memories of Quinn.

Prior to the opening of the capsule he has several retrospective backstories, remembering Quinn scraping a chalk outline with a small rock of a dead deer. She’s an enigma, eyes “radiant with mischief”; he’s trying to understand her and his attraction to her; but this isn’t going to be a simple story of coming to terms. Instead of understanding the present through the past, Helmreich, in a stunning reversal, leaves us with more questions than answers.

“The Capsule” is a powerful thwarted quest story. Sometimes the most interesting characters we can write are those that can’t find what they most want.

Exercises

One of the dangers of writing a counterpointed characterization story is slipping into stereotypes (the liberal versus the conservative; the feminist versus the traditionalist; the intellectual versus the UAW member). To avoid this pitfall choose two types to throw into a situation, and before you start writing make a list for each character that complicates who they are. Perhaps the feminist enjoys Hallmark Christmas movies; the liberal enjoys his Friday afternoons at the gun range. Seek out the contradictions; the consistent inconsistencies we are all made of. And then write. Do not reduce your character to a single truth.
Character A meets Character B at a park. B has a story to tell. A decides to listen.
Character A and Character B get into a fender bender. Rather than sit in their separate vehicles and wait for the police to arrive they talk. What emerges?
Character A hasn’t seen her father in over five years. She tracks him down to a small-town high school where he works as a janitor. She confronts him. What might they say to each other?
Character A returns to high school for her ten-year reunion. She has a job that makes her happy, is married, and seeks out a teacher (Character B) who underestimated her, said she’d never amount to much. When A meets up with B, B says she’s so proud of A’s success. “I always knew you’d make it,” B says. A doesn’t know what to say to this or do. What does she do?
A meets B at a coffee shop. A likes B but wants B to know that she wants B to be in the friend Zone. B feels differently. Write the scene.
A family member (B) arrives at A’s doorstep. They haven’t seen each other in five years. B has in tow a young child (C) and wants to take up residence for a few weeks. A is about to have their girlfriend (D) move in with them. Write the scene.
A new boss (B) calls you into their office.
Your best friend (B) decides to start dating your ex (C). How does that work out? What emerges?
You sit at the breakfast table wondering where Dad is. It’s a Saturday morning. Mom says he needed to get away for a while. Write the scene.
Junior High: A is bullying B. C (you) decides to stop it.
Junior High: A is bullying B. C (you) decides not to intervene.
Nine years old, soccer. Your best friend (A) doesn’t pick you for her team.
A has to tell B some sort of emotionally charged news.

Attributions

Maigret's Madwoman, by Georges Simenon, translated by Sîan Reynolds, 2019, Penguin Books, is used under a Fair Use exemption to U.S. Copyright law.

“Notes to Sixth-Grade Self,” by Julie Orringer, 2000, The Paris Review (https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/6793/note-to-sixth-grade-self-julie-orringer), is used under a Fair Use exemption to U.S. Copyright law.

"The Test," excerpt by Angelica Gibbs, 1940, The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1940/06/15/the-test), is used under a Fair Use exemption to U.S. Copyright law.

Fiction: By Grant Tracey