Abandoning the Map

Inciting incident, rising action, climax, denouement: these are terms that might make anyone with an advanced degree in literature roll their eyes. Freytag’s Pyramid, a basic diagram for plot structure that resembles a lopsided triangle, has been drawn on so many middle school chalkboards that it is easy to sneer at. Surely we have moved beyond such simplistic ways of telling stories. Yet a large portion of contemporary fiction follows a version of this model, for the simple reason that it works, providing narrative tension and emotional payoff.

Two recent novels demonstrate the promises and the hazards of throwing conventional structure to the wind. Neither Romane Bladou’s Atlantique Nord (North Atlantic) nor Daniel Grenier’s Héroïnes et tombeaux (Heroines and tombs) could be accurately described as experimental. They have identifiable characters and plausible...