Of course I was already familiar with that saying by Mies van der Rohe, “Less is more”, but I hadn’t appreciated just how sensual less could be, how rich and voluptuous.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, the author of The Girl Before, as well as multiple other fiction titles under other pseudonymous names, explained the use of a pseudonym as two fold. 1) The initials, JP, do not identify the author as either male or female, thus discouraging a judgement of narrative content and viewpoint based on gender, and 2) the pseudonym discourages comparison of the novel at hand with other novels by the same author, thereby discouraging comparative evaluations and expectations.
Of course, one can discover the identity and true gender of the author easily enough, and one may thereby determine which other books the author has written; but many readers will not bother with this sort of research, counting the brief, gender-neutral bio at the end of the book sufficient enough, and even those curious enough to find out the facts will still, I think, retain an impression of the author's intended anonymity and freedom from gender judgements. In other words, the author makes the statement from the outset that this book is by someone named JP Delaney, who has ideas and designs of his own which are quite apart from the ideas and designs of narratives written by the same author under different names.
I find this an interesting and reasonable sort of tool for an author to employ. So often, the novel by a woman becomes instantly 'a woman's novel' and the content is thenceforth filtered through the reader's impression of how women tend to think or feel, and, of course, vice versa for the male author. Similarly, a writer who has written one or more books will be with each new effort weighed against the previous efforts. The author of Gone Girl, for instance (Gillian Flynn), will be expected to write something like the very popular Gone Girl. One may become cornered, in a sense, by his own established identity, with the reader expecting to 'read something like this author always writes', and the author feeling that he must satisfy those same expectations.
Aside from all that, The Girl Before, as far as I've read, is an excellent and inventive psychological mystery, which itself has something in common with the author's demand for a blank canvas in its exploration of minimalism in architecture and in life and experience. I'll say no more for the time being, except that the novel promises, as I reach page 70, to be well worth the read.
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