Review: The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, by Brian Gingrich

In The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel, Brian Gingrich reframes classic problems of narrative structure, arguing for pace—and not reference as such—as a master concept in the emergence of British realism. The book ranges from a comparativist discussion of the late eighteenth-century novel through the heightened moments that structure “epiphanic modernism” (p. 159). Offering a structural analysis of the way realist narrative manages temporal flow, Gingrich makes the case that realism as it emerges in the late eighteenth century is foundationally based on a tension between “scene” and “summary.” Gingrich highlights these terms from Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse, pointing out that they were demoted from a place of prominence in Mieke Bal’s Narratology in 2017. Gingrich recovers these terms in order to explain pace, which he identifies as a fundamental rhythm of narrative: enacted scenes are interspersed, to varying degrees, with summaries that transmit compressed...