Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s debut novel, Glassworks, was was longlisted for the Center for Fiction and VCU Cabell First Novel Prizes and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Apple, and Good Housekeeping. Her new novel is Mutual Interest. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and lives in Brooklyn with her partner.
At Electric Lit Wolfgang-Smith tagged eight "contemporary novels that use omniscient narrators in a fascinating way." One title on the list:
Too Like the Lightning by Ada PalmerRead about another entry on the list.
This first book of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota quartet is as much philosophical thought experiment as it is science-fiction epic, including in its narrative voice. Palmer writes in a self-consciously neo-Enlightenment style, matching her far-future setting in which a utopian (or is it?) Earth has reorganized its society around the aesthetics and ideas of the eighteenth century.
The narrator of Too Like the Lightning is in fact not omniscient, merely overambitious and highly unreliable—but Palmer invites the reader to interrogate the difference, if there is one.
Mycroft Canner, a convicted criminal living out his life in service to whoever may need him, prostrates himself before an imagined in-universereader he addresses directly in frequent, often argumentative asides. It is Mycroft who affects the high-omniscient style in which Palmer writes, and though the book is theoretically his memoir, he often narrates scenes for which he was not present—some he claims to have heard summarized by characters who were present; some he imagines, wholesale; for others, muddying the stylistic waters still further, he passes the pen to secondary (often reluctant) narrators.
This is a novel of big swings, one that will give any book club enough to argue over for hours. I can’t promise the intrusive, patchily omniscient style will be at the top of your list of controversies to litigate, but hey—it depends on your crew!
The Page 69 Test: Too Like the Lightning.
--Marshal Zeringue
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