Once Is Not Enough | Techniques

Once Is Not Enough Techniques

Once again Susann uses multiple, shifting third-person point-of-view to tell her story. The story is seen mainly through the eyes of January Wayne, but also through David Milford's, Dee Granger's, and Karla's eyes. Susann no longer sets off the changes in narrator under chapters bearing the appropriate character's name. She will shift for a page or two or as many as she needs to tell her story. The reader is never in doubt as to who is narrating. There is a confidence to her use of the technique though she loses something of the little distinctiveness the different narrators had in Valley of the Dolls.

This novel has the strangest ending of any of Susann's novels: January is carried off by a beautiful alien from another planet. It is quite an unexpected denouement given the realistic texture of the rest of the book. Yet subtly, in her own...
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