The Problem with Prologues

New novelists are often told not to write prologues. Rarely are they handled well, they are told. But the new writer sees prologues everywhere, most often in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, although they pop up fairly often in mainstream commercial novels as well. The new writer naturally asks, if they can do it, why can’t I? The answer usually given is that these are experienced authors who know how to do it.

The problem with this answer? They can’t do it either. They’re just allowed to get away with it by timid, inexperienced, or overworked editors. One of my favorite novels, Nobody’s Fool, by Richard Russo, has a prologue. What it actually is though, is an information dump, an easy way to get background out before the beginning of the novel. It is lazy writing. In Nobody’s Fool, most of it was unnecessary and what was necessary could easily have been worked into the novel. But at least the prologue in Nobody’s Fool was relatively short, five pages or so as I recall. I tolerated it and the rest of the book was well worth the initial annoyance, so I tracked down one of Russo’s most loved novels, Empire falls. Once again, it opened with a prologue, the history of the town and it’s social connections and dysfunctions. It was far longer than the prologue in Nobody’s Fool, but I persevered, knowing what a good story lay beyond the exposition dump. And it was a good story. So I turned to Russo’s latest, Bridge of Sighs, expecting another good story from the chronicler of small-town, upstate New York life. I never did get to the story. This Mother of All Prologues was chapter length, at least. And like most prologues I have read, it was written in a distant narrative voice that did not engage me as a reader. I just could not slog through it. I closed Bridge of Sighs mid-prologue, never to open it again.

Last week a friend gave me the John Grisham novel The Chamber. I wanted to find out how commercially successful authors handle the beginnings of their novels, so I read the first chapter. It was a prologue. Sure, it was called chapter one, but it had all the earmarks of a prologue: info dump, characters not introduced or introduced only superficially, no dialog, no scene, too much narrative distance. While it was competently written, I did not care. Grisham wasted an entire chapter with a structural error that lost me. As it is a legal mystery/thriller, he could have easily sprinkled the facts throughout the book more effectively, say as part of the trial, and introduced the main character early and in a way that involved me emotionally. He did not. The experience was akin to reading a newspaper account of the action.

Readers will put up with a lot once they come to like a certain writer. The feedback loop that rewards a well written book with good sales and tanks a bad book, gets broken when an author becomes a franchise. Grisham fans or David Baldacci fans or Patricia Cornwell fans will keep buying their books, but begin to skim the parts that bore or lose them. And they easily forgive these literary transgressions and come back again anyway. That does not mean that each and every book by such authors is well written. Many aren’t. Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, these authors have come to “depend on the kindness of strangers.” A new author cannot count on similar good will. They must write a good book, without the clumsy, lazy and boring prologue.