GoKawiilWith almost every novel I read, I go through the same arc. At first the novel bores me. Then, suddenly, it becomes the most interesting thing in the world. Suddenly, I have made it through the part that was creating my investment in the novel—and now it is all payoff. Now the novel is not just something whose artistry I can appreciate, but something I first order want to keep reading.
I call this point in a novel its volta. The term comes from poetry, where it denotes a shift that sonnets exhibit between their opening octave and concluding sestet or between their first 12 lines and final couplet. At this juncture, the speaker of the poem adopts a new perspective on whatever he has been discussing. (In Italian, one meaning of volta is “turn.”)
Rather than a shift in perspective, the volta in a novel is a shift to visceral enjoyment. Even as someone who loves novels, I rely on my expectation of a volta to keep me going. I push through unpromising beginnings, even middles, trusting that eventually, something will click, and then reading will become not just easy but compulsive. If you told me before I started a novel that there wouldn’t be a volta (as occasionally there isn’t), I would never open it.
But what causes the volta to arrive? To help me with this essay, several of my friends agreed to read the same novel, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, and then tell me when they had experienced the volta while reading it. For one, the volta arrived after just 20 pages. For another it was triggered around page 75, after a disclosure made by a character who briefly takes over narrating the novel cast the previous events of the story in a new light. I experienced the volta a little later, when the return of the usual narrator made it clear to me how the plots of the novel were on a collision course.
Unlike the volta of a sonnet—which a teacher could fairly ask you to mark with a pen—the volta of a novel is subjective. It arrives for people at different moments depending on their sensibilities as readers. But the volta is also a near universal part of novel reading. Based on the (admittedly anecdotal) evidence I have gathered, most readers of most novels experience a volta at some point.
We are living amid panic over students not reading novels. Students, many fear, lack the cognitive skills necessary to comprehend long narratives and the attention spans necessary to stick with them. Among the things accused of causing these deficits are smartphones, Covid, the decline of phonics-based reading instruction, and schools “teaching to the test” by assigning excerpts in place of complete texts.
All may deserve blame. But I suspect that the reason students are not reading novels is not only that they find novels difficult and boring. It is also that they don’t realize that novels are supposed to feel this way, at least at first. They don’t know about the volta. Lacking this knowledge, why should they persist?
Without assuring others that the volta will make them glad they read a novel, we can use the volta to foster curiosity about what reading a novel will reveal.
The volta first explicitly came up for me in a conversation with a friend. We discussed the different factors that could instigate the turn, and how frustrating it could be to wait around for it. Both of us related to the volta as something we took for granted about the process of reading novels. Nobody had ever told us to be on the lookout for the volta. We had just assimilated its existence through years of reading.
If you are reading this website, then it is likely your relationship to the volta has been similar. But if you didn’t get into novels at a young age—and organically discover that, at some point, a switch would flip, and then you couldn’t stop reading if you tried—there is no reason to intuit that this is how novel reading goes. On the contrary, it seems logical to intuit the opposite—to conclude, after not enjoying novels right off the bat, or even after 100 pages, that novels aren’t for you.
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