Circling the Heart of Things

The novel The Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead comments on ways in which we tell stories and prompts the reader to question: How do we find the “truth” we crave amongst sometimes conflicting and always incomplete narratives about our lives and our world?

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Human beings tell stories to make sense of our world, say the narrative theorists. 

But do stories tell the truth about the world? Do we have enough information to reconstruct accurate pictures of the past? Is memory reliable? Can we transcend our personal points of view? Can stories help us apprehend the “truth” of existence? Is there actually a truth anyway?

It would seem that the answer to these questions is no, if we use as evidence the structure of the novel The Great Circle, which tells the story of pilot Marian Graves by stitching together a patchwork of oft-conflicting narratives told from myriad perspectives in a variety of genres. Episodes from Marian’s life are recounted in third person, as are sections dedicated to her brother Jamie and her friend/lover Caleb, among others. These are interspersed with excerpts from Marian’s and others’ journal entries. Also scattered throughout the novel are various “brief and incomplete” biographies. 

Added together, these patchworked elements create the semblance of a life story. But to complicate matters, in Russian-nesting-doll-like fashion, selections from the novel within the novel imagine Marian as wholly different from her other portrayals, and the film based on this meta-level novel adds further complexity. Finally, Hadley, the actor who plays Marian, is the star of her own complicated story that involves searching for information about the woman she embodies on screen. Where amongst these competing narratives is the truth about Marian’s life? By the end of the novel, Shipstead drops enough scraps of information for Hadley, and the reader, to construct an explanation of what “happened” to Marian. But there are gaps in the biographical narrative. Questions aren’t answered. Issues aren’t resolved. The reader is unable to see the whole picture.

Clearly, as Marian is a fictional character, no truth about her life exists, but the reader nevertheless craves narrative fidelity, and the novel’s inconsistencies and unanswered questions jar them into asking whether it’s possible to arrive at any truth about anything at all. Because, just as the reader strives to construct a comprehensive story from scraps of narrative, we human beings long to perceive existence in its entirety despite our limited capacities and perspectives. 

Shipstead’s story illustrates this conundrum not only in form, but also in content. Her characters strive for truth, or completeness—they reach for the impossible, yearning to comprehend the whole of things, casting themselves in the direction of infinity. Jamie bends perspective in his landscape paintings in an effort to capture more and more of the horizon. Marian, desiring an unobstructed view of the globe, sets out to circumnavigate the world. Hadley experiences dazzling psychedelic-fueled perceptions of Los Angeles brimming with beauty and chaos. 

But while these characters strive for completion, they remain tragically limited. They want to encircle the whole of existence, but the circles they traverse follow defined paths through time and space. The universe spills out beyond the frames of Jamie’s canvases. Entire continents float out of reach of Marian’s flight path. Hadley intuits the city’s seething wholeness, yet she can’t articulate it. Humans desire freedom but are weighed down by physical and social circumstances; her characters crave the infinite but, with the exception of a few transcendent moments, are trapped in finite bodies and minds.

But then there is the novel itself. And a skillfully architected novel (such as this one) holds the potential of transcending the very stuff it’s made of. The Great Circle is constructed from unusual yet apt metaphors, unique voices, complex characters, gorgeous descriptions, impeccably researched historical detail, compelling narrative, and clean direct prose. And from the amalgamation of these disparate technical elements, the sublime totality of the novel arises.

Shipstead tells the reader that a complete story is impossible. Yet, through her craft, she paradoxically allows the reader, like the characters in her novel, to apprehend existence—to see “into the heart of the universe”—for just a few brief, illuminating moments. 

So can narrative tell the truth about the world? In the case of The Great Circle, in its own beautifully incomplete and circular fashion, the answer is absolutely yes.