Point of View

My Dark Vanessa is a first-person memory narrative in which the narrator, the adult Vanessa, looks back on events from her adolescence. But this is not a traditional frame narrative. Unlike other more traditional narrative point of view constructions, this novel does not provide a reassuring adult frame through which the confusions, misdirections, and questionable choices of the teenager are evaluated by the wiser, more tempered adult narrator. This is not a “looking back at my misspent youth” first-person narration. Point of view does not provide reflection and distance. The chapters shuttle between adolescent and adult Vanessa without intrusive authorial commentary. As Vanessa becomes entangled (or as she sees it, involved) with Strane, those events are related in an unnerving kind of “you-are-there” documentary immediacy, the implications of each decision, each encounter emerging from the experience itself. The events are related in a strict immediacy...