But there was no way of explaining this in an ordinary novelistic plot. The early Christians, the radical gay activists of the 1970s, the Bauhaus idealists of 1920s Germany all wanted to spread their word, and all succeeded. Writing my new novel, The Emperor Waltz, I wanted to find a way of writing a novel that showed how people at very different times dealt with similar circumstances in similar ways. Why not put the life somebody lived in 1941 next to an unconnected life in the 1990s, and call it a novel? More of a whole than a volume of short stories, more expressive of separation and the whole breadth of society and history than a traditional novel can be, these forms lack only a convenient name.
Writers have always been acutely aware that similar experiences might be brought into comparison without the mechanism of a traditional plot. T he novel of unconnected narratives is older than you might think.
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