I’m sixty-four years old and part of a huge wave of Baby Boomers who are reasonably healthy, reasonably wealthy, and likely to be around for another two or three decades. As a group we’re notoriously demanding. I won’t ask that younger Americans accede to our every wish, but there is one thing I’d like to see more of: character lists at the beginning of novels.
Jilly Cooper’s 2006 comic novel Wicked! runs to 1,100 pages and includes a sixteen-page list of characters at the front of the book. Dorothy Dunnett’s 1986 historical novel Niccolo Rising opens with a four-page character index that lists more than one hundred names. Wesley Stace’s 2005 novel, Misfortune, a tale of adventure set in Victorian England, opens with an illustration of a tree whose many branches represent several generations of the Loveall family. Maia by Richard Adams, The Cazlett Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard, Advice and Consent by Allen Drury – all these and many others begin with a character list. Such lists have long been a staple of fat family sagas, fantasy cycles, and massive historical novels. A certain type of reader – and I’m one of them – feels a thrill upon opening a novel and discovering a long list of fictional characters.
For most of my reading life these lists were not entirely necessary but greatly appreciated. But now that I am sixty-four years old, I find myself not only needing these lists but also wishing they were mandatory. My memory is no longer as strong as it once was, and I often find myself a bit lost even when I pick up a short mystery novel that I have been reading for only a day or two and which is populated by only a small handful of major characters. I also find myself wishing that every novel had chapter titles that vaguely described the action of said chapter. We find titles like this in David Copperfield (“I Return to the Doctor’s After the Party”), in John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (“The Laureate is Exposed to Two Assassinations of Character, a Piracy, a Near-Deflowering, a Near-Mutiny, a Murder, and an Appalling Colloquy Between Captains of the Sea, All Within the Space of a Few Pages”), Philip Lee Williams’s The True and Authentic History of Jenny Dorset (“Matthew Dorset surprises us by announcing that he will study to be a clergyman, and his father arranges for his education to take place in Boston”), and many others. Novelist and poet Vikram Seth provided chapter titles for his massive (1,488 pages) 1993 novel A Suitable Boy that not only synopsize the events of the chapter but also rhyme (“Browsing through books two students meet one day; a mother mopes, a medal melts away.”). When you pick up such a book after a day or two away (or even a week or two), you can quickly remind yourself of where the story is by reading one or two previous chapter titles. They act like those brief refreshers that often precede TV episodes and are usually introduced by the words, “Previously on Dexter (or The Good Fight or Succession or whatever”).
I’m not convinced that my need for these devices is entirely due to a weakened memory. It may have more to do with the fact that contemporary pop-culture consumers are probably following more long stories than any other cohort in history. Game of Thrones, Outlander, The Lord of the Rings – you may be reading these book series or you may be following them on TV. Meanwhile you may also be reading various standalone novels, such as Stephen King’s 11/22/63 or Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, both of which are massive (849 pages and 1024 pages, respectively) and contain numerous characters. Or you may be following those two stories in their made-for-TV formats. My wife and I are following at least a half dozen TV dramas at any given time (The Sinner, Only Murders in the Building, The Watcher, The Staircase, The Undoing, Mare of Easttown). We are also both avid novel readers. Thus, the names and fates of dozens of characters are generally lodged somewhere in our memories at all times. The TV stories are easy to catch up on because of the aforementioned “Previously on” device. With novels, however, it isn’t always so easy to catch up on the plot and the characters’ relationships to each other.
America’s population is aging. The average American is nearly forty years old these days. Currently, about seventeen percent of Americans are sixty-five or older. In 1950, only eight percent of Americans were in that demographic. By 2050, the figure is expected to reach twenty-two percent. What’s more, Americans today are consuming much more popular culture. In 1960, only a couple of dozen scripted programs were available on American TV each week. In 2020, the number of scripted English-language TV programs across all platforms was 559. In 1960, no one in America had regular access to scripted Korean-language TV shows, or Japanese or Swedish or Italian TV shows, for that matter. Nowadays, Americans regularly tune in to programs such as Squid Games or The Chestnut Man or Crash Landing on You. Meanwhile, about 275,000 books are commercially published in the U.S. each year. That’s about a ten-fold increase from the 1950s. As both an avid reader and an avid TV viewer I sometimes have trouble keeping track of the players without a scorecard.
Not only are Americans living longer, they are working longer as well. Many of us over the age of sixty are still busy working as bakers, warehousemen, accountants, lawyers, and plumbers. When we come home from work, our heads are full of recipes, numbers, facts, and case-file names. Given our ages and the amount of pop culture we baby boomers consume, I don’t think its unreasonable for us to ask America’s publishers to provide, at the very least, an index of characters at the beginning of every novel. We need this not because contemporary fictional characters are less memorable than those of previous eras, but because there are just so many more fictional characters in my head these days than ever before. I could use the list whether I am reading Dickens or Grisham, Tolstoy or King.
Facebook keeps a list of all my friends, and Twitter keeps a list of every journalist I follow. My web browser keeps a list of all my favorite sites. All I want from America’s publishers is a list of the dramatis personae prominently featured at the front of every novel. And perhaps a one-sentence (spoiler free!) synopsis of each chapter, in case I lose the plot.