Like an intoxicating spice, second-person POV demands to be an integral ingredient if used at all, not a stylistic flourish.
Hello Loreates,
I just finished reading Alice McDermott’s Absolution, which uses a second-person form of address that’s distinctive, clever, and intriguing. I wanted to unpack the reasons why this stylistic approach worked so effectively, and I thought you might like to join me in this inquiry. If you’ve ever considered experimenting with second-person POV or wondered whether it might work for your novel or memoir, please read on.
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Who are “you” in a second-person story?
Full disclosure: I generally hate second-person novels. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Erin Morgenstern’s Night Circus come to mind. Both these books conflate “you” and the narrator, as if the narrator were mentally projecting responsibility for the plot onto the reader. There’s a psychological explanation that might justify this device as a means of signaling an unreliable narrator, but as a reader I find this version of second-person to be annoying, false, tedious, and pretentious, as well as strangely insulting. I couldn’t finish either of these books, or even get much beyond the opening pages.
Yet there’s another type of second-person novel that pulls me in with the same power that those others push me away. Alice McDermott’s Absolution is an intriguing variation on this approach. It harnesses the same draw as epistolary novels (the ones that are told through a series of fictional letters or messages; think The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society or Where’d You Go, Bernadette). It’s also the approach taken by Isabelle Allende in addressing her daughter Paula as “you” in the memoir Paula. But McDermott’s strategy is wilier.
