All fictions are closed worlds, smaller than our own, and so it is not surprising that novelists are often drawn to represent very small worlds - boarding houses, hotels, a plague-sealed town, a single day in a prison, a bare room. These reduced spaces intensify the fictionality that made them: they are as bound as a book. Depending on the intensity of the reduction, plot slows down to an agonising verisimilitude, because the writer needs both to entrap the reader and to persuade the reader that this entrapment is abnormally normal. Thus Ivan Denisovich has an ordinary day in his camp; Hamm and Clov bicker; the father and son in the post-apocalyptic landscape of The Road drink Coke, pitch their tent and cook dinner; the clone-donors in Never Let Me Go squabble over a stolen geometry set. All of these texts belong, really, to prison literature, in which the smallest detail - a breadcrumb, a passing bird, a drop of rainwater - is tortured, from desperation, into a swollen effigy, many times its normal size.

LRB 21 October 2010 | PDF Download