Every Novel Is Boring—Until It Isn’t

With almost every novel I read, I go through the same arc. At first the novel bores me. Then, suddenly, it becomes the most interesting thing in the world. Suddenly, I have made it through the part that was creating my investment in the novel—and now it is all payoff. Now the novel is not just something whose artistry I can appreciate, but something I first order want to keep reading.

I call this point in a novel its volta. The term comes from poetry, where it denotes a shift that sonnets exhibit between their opening octave and concluding sestet or between their first 12 lines and final couplet. At this juncture, the speaker of the poem adopts a new perspective on whatever he has been discussing. (In Italian, one meaning of volta is “turn.”)

Rather than a shift in perspective, the volta in a novel is a shift to visceral enjoyment. Even as someone who loves novels, I rely on my expectation of a volta to keep me going. I push through unpromising beginnings, even middles, trusting that eventually, something will click, and then reading will become not just easy but compulsive. If you told me before I started a novel that there wouldn’t be a volta (as occasionally there isn’t), I would never open it.

But what causes the volta to arrive? To help me with this essay, several of my friends agreed to read the same novel, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, and then tell me when they had experienced the volta while reading it. For one, the volta arrived after just 20 pages. For another it was triggered around page 75, after a disclosure made by a character who briefly takes over narrating the novel cast the previous events of the story in a new light. I experienced the volta a little later, when the return of the usual narrator made it clear to me how the plots of the novel were on a collision course.

Unlike the volta of a sonnet—which a teacher could fairly ask you to mark with a pen—the volta of a novel is subjective. It arrives for people at different moments depending on their sensibilities as readers. But the volta is also a near universal part of novel reading. Based on the (admittedly anecdotal) evidence I have gathered, most readers of most novels experience a volta at some point.

We are living amid panic over students not reading novels. Students, many fear, lack the cognitive skills necessary to comprehend long narratives and the attention spans necessary to stick with them. Among the things accused of causing these deficits are smartphones, Covid, the decline of phonics-based reading instruction, and schools “teaching to the test” by assigning excerpts in place of complete texts.

All may deserve blame. But I suspect that the reason students are not reading novels is not only that they find novels difficult and boring. It is also that they don’t realize that novels are supposed to feel this way, at least at first. They don’t know about the volta. Lacking this knowledge, why should they persist?

The volta first explicitly came up for me in a conversation with a friend. We discussed the different factors that could instigate the turn, and how frustrating it could be to wait around for it. Both of us related to the volta as something we took for granted about the process of reading novels. Nobody had ever told us to be on the lookout for the volta. We had just assimilated its existence through years of reading.

If you are reading this website, then it is likely your relationship to the volta has been similar. But if you didn’t get into novels at a young age—and organically discover that, at some point, a switch would flip, and then you couldn’t stop reading if you tried—there is no reason to intuit that this is how novel reading goes. On the contrary, it seems logical to intuit the opposite—to conclude, after not enjoying novels right off the bat, or even after 100 pages, that novels aren’t for you.

The solution to this issue seems obvious: Tell students about the volta. But this prescription needs some caveats due to the subjectivity of the volta. The more one hears about other people’s voltas, the more insistent this subjectivity becomes. After I discussed the volta with my PhD advisor, she asked some of her students where they thought the volta was in Jane Eyre. (Spoilers incoming.) One said it was when Helen Burns died. Another said it was when Jane and Rochester first met. She asked another group of students the same question about Far from the Madding Crowd. Some named charged encounters; some named poignant scenes focused on one character.

My friend who experienced the volta of The End of the Affair almost immediately said that the volta usually arrives for her with the first moment in a novel that ratchets up the stakes. My friend who experienced the volta with the advent of the temporary narrator shared that his typical volta trigger is a compelling character voice. A third friend who read the novel explained that, for him, the volta is always incited by sentence-level form. As soon as a novel displays a device he finds intriguing, he feels driven through the rest of it by a desire to track the device and unravel its mechanics.

There are clearly features of novels that correlate with the volta—common milestones in how stories develop that tend to induce it. Still, the variability in what triggers the volta means we should be cautious about citing it as a reason to keep reading. If a volta arrives late, or is not exceptionally powerful when it arrives, it may not be enough to vindicate someone’s choice to finish a novel. At times I’ve resented my expectation of a volta for leading me to stick with novels which, given my limited time on earth, I should probably have abandoned. Without assuring others that the volta will make them glad they read a novel, though, we can use the volta to foster curiosity about what reading a novel will reveal. I enjoyed The End of the Affair, but I enjoyed, perhaps even more, pondering what my friends’ voltas said about them.

Discussing the volta can also point up other elements of novels. When my friends and I discussed The End of the Affair, our conversation eventually led us to draw a distinction between the voltas of novels and what one of my friends dubbed their portals: the very beginnings of novels, which sometimes project you into the story with such force that for a while your reading has incredible momentum. We agreed that it is only after the momentum of the portal wears off that you really start awaiting the volta.

Another structure the volta has illuminated for me is the twist. Certain twists seem almost irresistible as volta triggers, because they produce such strong versions of the effect my friend noted, of forcing you to see previous events differently. After I reached the massive twist halfway through Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, I could not stop reading. I felt an acute need to fully uncover what had been concealed. Twists of this magnitude can be awe inspiring. However, they may trigger the volta too decisively for their own good. I know people who stopped reading Trust Exercise before they reached the twist because the part preceding the twist so effectively veils it. In its restraint, the novel fails to make readers believe a volta is imminent. 

Sometimes we are not lucky enough to have people to discuss a novel with. But a final thing to recommend the volta is that it brings a social frisson to our dealings with novels themselves. We cannot get through novels in one sitting, as D. A. Miller observes in The Novel and The Police, writing about Dickens’s mammoth Bleak House. We have—often several times—to choose to go back to them. The volta is a major reason we do go back, and back. As such, it is one of the parts of reading that makes our relationships with novels most like our relationships with people. In how many of the latter are we awaiting a turn for the better—sticking around because we believe, or wish to believe, that someday things will change?

Often it is nebulous whether such relationships will ever come to an end. Given this, the fixed periods for which the voltas of novels bind us may be a comfort. A novel we are ambivalent about at least has this going for it: as Miller notes, “we always know … its length is finite.”