The omniscient, intrusive narrative voice was common to many novels dating to and before the early 1900s: the sweeping perspective of a narrator who functions almost as a god, able to show us anything—and who often interrupts the story at hand to make wry comments at the expense of the characters and the society in which they function.
I took on such a voice for my second novel, Mutual Interest—from the very beginning the style felt like a natural fit for this book, a queer pastiche of these classic “novels of manners,” set at the turn of the twentieth century. I found this type of writing to be an instant joy: I loved having the freedom to dive into secondary characters’ heads (muddying the question of whether they were, in fact, secondary); I loved having unlimited scope and scale for what counted as “backstory;” I loved the sense of playful conspiracy such a voice cultivates with the reader, and the opportunity to express both mockery and affection for my characters.
As so often happens, I also found that this craft choice raised new questions; questions that have deepened and changed my relationship to the omniscient narration wherever I encounter it. Questions like: Where does the book begin and end—that is, what defines the shape and limits of the story, when they’re not inherent to the point of view? What does “all-knowing” really mean? How does an omniscient narrator decide when to interrupt the action (and when to shut up)? And, last but not least: who, exactly, is talking? (And does it matter?)
Having had to tackle these questions in my own novel, I am now even more interested in how other authors have answered them. Here are 8 contemporary novels that use omniscient narrators in a fascinating way:
Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet
Jennine Capó Crucet’s Say Hello to My Little Friend defies reductive description, but one of its many pleasures is its all-knowing, even elemental, narrator. I have heard Crucet describe it as a voice that “can go anywhere water can go”—a fascinating way to define the limits of omniscience, without in fact limiting it much at all (especially in Miami, at this late stage of climate change).
Crucet’s protagonist, Izzy, is experiencing what he sees as a very individual struggle. But from the reader’s perspective—and the narrator’s, and Lolita the orca whale’s as she swims in her cramped tank at the Miami Seaquarium—everything is connected, and there is no scale but the global. Crucet takes partial inspiration from Moby-Dick and uses some of Melville’s same techniques—including cataloging and digressions—to create a unique and thorough history of a place both doomed and thriving, depending on your perspective(s). This is a book that reads like a flood, one sweeping its characters along, some of them more aware than others of the currents through which they swim.
Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg
The narrator of Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates is a queer elder, recently bereaved, who begins by eavesdropping on the novel’s main characters in a coffeeshop—and who, when the protagonists return home and close the door, literally melts through the wall of their house and continues narrating, both the forward action and both their backstories. She does return in scene, late in the book, but for the most part—and starting long before she ever meets them—her role is to tell Leah and Bernie’s love story.
This device is catnip for those of us interested in experiments with omniscience. I was fascinated by how this one speculative element complicated Eisenberg’s novel, adding the layer of an interstitial eye, witnessing and interpreting. The fantastically omniscient narration lets the story be strange and familiar at once, told by someone who is both an ancestor and a stranger, and it lends a sense of jaded retrospection to what is also quite a youthful bildungsroman—a poignant combination. Perhaps especially in this novel of queer community, Eisenberg’s unique narrative voice draws attention to the way different generations can be simultaneously awed and inspired by as well as jealous or judgmental of one another.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
This first book of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota quartet is as much philosophical thought experiment as it is science-fiction epic, including in its narrative voice. Palmer writes in a self-consciously neo-Enlightenment style, matching her far-future setting in which a utopian (or is it?) Earth has reorganized its society around the aesthetics and ideas of the eighteenth century.
The narrator of Too Like the Lightning is in fact not omniscient, merely overambitious and highly unreliable—but Palmer invites the reader to interrogate the difference, if there is one.
Mycroft Canner, a convicted criminal living out his life in service to whoever may need him, prostrates himself before an imagined in-universe reader he addresses directly in frequent, often argumentative asides. It is Mycroft who affects the high-omniscient style in which Palmer writes, and though the book is theoretically his memoir, he often narrates scenes for which he was not present—some he claims to have heard summarized by characters who were present; some he imagines, wholesale; for others, muddying the stylistic waters still further, he passes the pen to secondary (often reluctant) narrators.
This is a novel of big swings, one that will give any book club enough to argue over for hours. I can’t promise the intrusive, patchily omniscient style will be at the top of your list of controversies to litigate, but hey—it depends on your crew!
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Written in 1922, The Enchanted April is an outlier on this largely contemporary list. Its omniscience may also be less remarkable, given the style of the time. But the novel—which follows a foursome of barely-acquainted Englishwomen, rife with interpersonal conflicts, as they economize on their Italian vacation by sharing accommodation—feels strikingly modern, and Elizabeth von Arnim’s unique use of fizzy omniscient narration is certainly part of this feeling. She dives deep into the judgmental interiority of each of her protagonists, whipping up tension, affection, and biting social satire at once.
In her comic treatment of the form, Von Arnim also makes glib, masterful use of one of the omniscient narrator’s most astounding powers: withholding information. I will never forget my experience of reading this book for the first time and, at a crucially dramatic moment, being slapped with the sentence: “What Mrs. Fisher said to him that morning in her first shock will never be known.” I physically put the book down and exclaimed aloud, “Why not?!” There is an immersive pleasure in being toyed with, alongside the characters, by such a narrator.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
In The Fraud’s opening pages, Zadie Smith’s omniscient narrator gives us equal access to the perspectives of two characters conversing across an 1837 London threshold. Having established that such certain and thorough understanding is possible, the narrator then withdraws somewhat, conspicuously declining to extend such bridges of perspective for large sections of the book. But Smith continues to tantalize with glimpses of an omniscient “ultimate reality” in this novel of authenticity and fakery, truth and imposture, rendered in prose that gestures stylistically toward its nineteenth-century literary setting (and therefore is often at least flirting with omniscience).
Most characters in The Fraud flatter themselves that they alone “see all” and struggle to make themselves understood, advocating for individual versions of the truth that seem at times irreconcilable, at others so universally accepted as to be unconscious—“everywhere, like weather.” Smith is interested in how “ultimate” reality in fact varies by perspective, and even her narrator is not unbiased.
This is omniscience made visible in its frustration: a novel in which each person is “a bottomless thing,” living by a kind of internal narration that functions as “[their] discreet, ironic and yet absolute God.”
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
Ragtime is so memorably epic in scope and scale that I’m always surprised to find, picking it up again, that it’s only about 250 pages long. But that’s one thing about high omniscience, used the way Doctorow employs it: it can save you a lot of time. Here, those 250 pages are sufficient to cover a decade in the lives of three wildly different and complexly interwoven families, with a plot that covers just about anything you could think of, including a plot to blow up the Morgan Library and an expedition to the North Pole.
Ragtime’s narrative voice calls to mind a god operating a busy telephone switchboard, or perhaps pointing out local sites of interest while motoring down the highway at 90 miles an hour. The modern reader might recognize a tinge of Forrest Gump, with historic figures like Harry Houdini, Booker T. Washington, and Emma Goldman coming into unlikely contact with Doctorow’s fictional cast. But a narrator this confident can render anything realistic—even including one character’s intermittent psychic visions of the future.
This is a book with a ten-thousand-foot view and a breakneck pace; omniscient narration at its most soaring and showboating. Doctorow’s pleasure in the writing is palpable and often contagious.
North Woods by Daniel Mason
This may be verging on a subgenere, something we might call “collage omniscience:” the accumulation of an all-knowing perspective (the book’s; the reader’s) through the presentation of many individual perspectives. (Once you start thinking along these lines—possibly I should say, once you start fudging the rules—the possibilities are endless.)
I have found that many novels of this type, like Daniel Mason’s North Woods, are portraits of a place or a community, with a breadth of perspective over time. (Graveyard ghosts and archival research are also recurrent themes.) This novel tells the history of a single house in New England, spanning centuries, from the settlement of the American colonies to the present day (and beyond).
There is almost a journalistic gesture towards “objectivity” here—no sign of those catty, intrusive asides from a god-narrator laughing at the characters’ foibles (though the reader may find occasional cause to do so). Mason is almost relentless in his refusal to put up boundaries around his bricolage narrative—the scale here is meant to impress, even to frighten, as ghosts stack generation upon generation and begin to crowd each other for room. This is omniscience as haunting, and being haunted; omniscience as a duty to bear witness.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
It’s clear from the first page of Andrew Sean Greer’s Less that the omniscient voice is central to the novel. We hear the story from a teasing, cheeky, highly intrusive narrator—full of obvious affection for protagonist Arthur Less, but just as obviously maddened by Less’s flaws and foibles.
As the book progresses, though, the question of who, exactly, is talking becomes more and more impossible to ignore. Tossed-in first-person asides referencing in-universe interactions with Less feel at first like they’re in fizzy, startling conversation with those omniscient narrators of bygone centuries who might intermittently use the royal “we” and log their opinions on the characters’ decisions.
Over time, things develop in a different direction.
Reading Less for the first time, it begins to feel like Greer is engaged in a craft experiment, then a very unique type of mystery novel—and finally (at the risk of spoiling the surprise) what we realize to be a truly unique po-mo rom-com.
My reading and writing interests of the last several years have led me to see all omniscient narration as an expression of love, and for this case, Less may be Exhibit A.
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