25 Books in 2020: #4, Small Admissions

Small Admissions is a charming, lighthearted novel that uses creative experiments, especially with point of view, to tell its story.

Set in the uber-competitive world of New York City private school admissions, the story employs both first-person and omniscient points of view. It follows twenty-something Kate Pearson–no, not Kate Pierson–as she tries to get her life back together after a breakdown. (This theme attracts me magnetically, I guess). Over the course of a year, Kate struggles to stay afloat in her new job. At the same time, she must survive the well-meaning attempts of friends and relatives to chart her course for her.

Techniques that work

Forms and artifacts of communication

Author Amy Poeppel uses a few techniques I’m going to pin to my mental corkboard and use in future projects. First, she creatively experiments with forms of correspondence like emails, postcards, thank-you notes, and text exchanges to tell parts of the story. Poeppel replicates Maria Semple’s technique from Where’d You Go, Bernadette to equally delightful results.

I love this technique. Of course, people communicate differently in their formal and informal writing than they do in their personal dialogue. That also differs from their internal thoughts (the vehicle through which most novels are written). Writers can exploit this variation to reveal angles on a character’s personality, particularly to comic effect. If you’re struggling to get to know a character, try writing emails from their perspective to overcome that block.

Point of view and slow discernment

Have you ever started talking to a stranger at a party and it slowly dawns on you that your conversation partner is slightly nuts? Maybe you then go to talk to someone else. And maybe you learn that they, too, are nuts in their own special way? What is going on with these people? That’s the feeling I got as I followed the opening chapters of Small Admissions.

This effect–which is intriguing, not bewildering–results from Poeppel’s unique approach to point of view. In fact, I argued with myself over the technical description of the point of view she employs in the novel. It’s first person for Chloe, but otherwise omniscient as it jumps around, chapter by chapter, to different characters’ perspectives. So technically, the whole book is omniscient, I guess? When it lands on a new character, it really zooms in, so it feels like third-limited. It doesn’t really matter. Poeppel’s creative experiment is definitely unconventional, but it works. That said, don’t try this at home. This is pro-level stuff.

All the characters add their own distinctly quirky flavors to this mix. Poeppel then slowly drizzles in the facts surrounding Kate’s breakdown. Because the perspective shifts, I found myself unsure of precisely what story I believed until I was well into the novel. If that sounds like a distracting experience, it wasn’t. It came across as a puzzle, similar to that of (say) trying to discern a person’s real character from an essay they might write about themselves, compared to letters of reference. Or perhaps the reader is a therapist, and all the characters get a spell kvetching on the couch. Not that the characters are unreliable, exactly. However, they are driven by their own agendas and view Kate’s dilemma as it serves their own needs. The one thing they have in common besides Kate’s friendship is an ability to make her crisis all about them. Lucky gal, Kate.

This technique is, interestingly, a variation of the communication-artifact device. By getting fragments of the central story line from different perspectives, we slowly discern who the characters are by what they choose to reveal, hide, or reframe.

Parallel dramas

If Kate thought she could escape egocentrism and drama by going to work, well, she had another think coming. As she considers 10-year-old applicants for her elite private school and tries to avoid becoming emotionally invested, she meets psychological train wrecks and delusional prima donnas. Oh, these people. Poeppel nails these characters’ sense of entitlement in a way that is entertaining without enraging.

What I found most delightful and endearing in the story was this: As the reports on and around Kate filter in, they reveal that everyone in her life is a mess. When the dust settles, the one who had the breakdown may be the sanest one of all.

Fiction writing lessons from Small Admissions

Use artifacts of communication to reveal character with humor.

The ability to successfully replicate an experiment gives proof that the technique or method works. In a future project, I’m going to use different artifacts of communication—letters, emails, postcards, texs—to reveal character creatively and comically.

Creative experiments in point of view can reveal character in unexpected ways.

Telling a story through multiple points of view is a variation on this concept. Using different characters’ voices to share, obscure, or reframe the same points provides an interesting angle on their character development. At the same time, this technique draws the reader into the story by giving them a puzzle to solve.