To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

 In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf continues the modernist experimentation that first hit full stride in Mrs Dalloway. That is, there is almost no dialogue, and very little action. The novel is almost entirely the internal ruminations of Mrs. Ramsey, her husband, some of her eight children, and their guests at their country place on a Scottish island. The characters into whose minds Woolf guides us see things and people, and these things and people trigger thoughts, memories, fantasies, and everything else that goes through people's minds.

As usual, Woolf is a joy at the sentence-level, but what stands out in To the Lighthouse is her attention to form. This is unsurprising and appropriate, as when narrative is obscure, form is what makes things cohere. The novel begins with a proposed trip to the lighthouse, which is ultimately thwarted by bad weather, and ends, ten years later, with a successful trip to the lighthouse. It is this frame that holds all the internal monologues together. Between those two trips, those two sections of the novel, there is a section in which the narration does not flit between characters' consciousnesses. Some have described the narrator of this section as "omnisiescient," but I don't think that's quite right. Rather, the narrator seems to be the house, which has stood empty during the war years during which Mrs. Ramsey and one son have died. We see nothing that the house couldn't have seen, except for a few scraps from the mind of the woman looking after it while the Ramseys are away.

Next up in my ongoing Woolfathon: Orlando.