Theme Authors and Approach Authors
I don’t decide whether an author’s work is “for me” until I’ve read two or—if the author has a fantastic reputation among people whose taste aligns with mine in general—three of the author’s books.
After three tries, though, if I still haven’t had a novel resonate, I won’t read another from the author’s oeuvre.
In my reading life, especially given that I do often read work by the same authors, I’ve noticed that authors tend to fall into two macro categories when it comes to themes and subjects:
Authors who cover the same theme or subject from different vantage points.
Authors who address different themes or subjects in most of their books, though typically via a similar style or approach.
Authors Who Focus on a Theme or Subject
Some authors circle around the same theme or subject across most—if not all—of their oeuvre.
Some of the writers I’d group in this category write about their focus subject exclusively, albeit via different overall plots or story trajectories, different characters, different points of view, and (resultingly) different perspectives and to different emotional effect. These writers touch on their subject of choice in some works as the main angle and in others as a prominent subtheme or recurring element essential to the overall narrative.
I’d give Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in 2022, as one example in this grouping. Her stream-of-consciousness, diary-style novels based on her life fall into the fictionalized autobiography or “autofiction” category. As these novels have basis in her own experiences, they necessarily examine different significant and influential moments in her life and development from different angles and across different time periods across her different tomes.
Miriam Toews fits into the same group in my mind, as her novels examine from different angles and perspectives the predominant themes of growing up and getting away from restrictive religious sects, mental illness across generations in a family, and suicide and suicidal tendences.
Authors Who Vary their Thematic Focus
Other authors have similar tics or stylistic quirks across their novels, may have the same worldview across their oeuvre (e.g., liberal, conservative, etc.), may write within the same overarching genre, and may even have some subthemes pop up as side mentions not critical to the plot or point here and there more than once across their books—but they by and large approach different themes and subjects.
For example, I’d place T. C. Boyle in this category. You can certainly find recurring elements or positions in his books and his approach and writing style have evolved but not drastically changed across his career, but the books in his oeuvre vary in plot and main theme, from examining the American love for wellness diets and untested health cures touted by charismatic “gurus” in The Road to Wellville to the look at middle-class values and how they intersect with questions around immigration, poverty, and the environment in The Tortilla Curtain.
John Irving fits this category as well, in my thinking, as he may have recurring tropes—wrestling, New England, transgender secondary characters—and his maximal style remains across his oeuvre, yet the plots and subjects of his books vary from orphans and abortion in Cider House Rules, the vagaries of fate in The World According to Garp, and the interactions and relationships between fathers and sons in Last Night in Twisted River.
My Restless Mind Prefers Different Themes
Unless I have strong interest in a specific theme or subject, I rarely feel compelled to revisit it from multiple angles, especially from the same author. The Toews books, for example, I intensely appreciated and admired—but I don’t feel compelled to read another after having read All My Puny Sorrows and Fight Night.
However, if I like an author’s style and the author brings it to different themes and subjects, I’ll return to that author eagerly. When I reflect on the cases in which I’ve read three or more of an author’s books, the writer has fallen in this category.
Do most authors fall into one bucket or another? I don’t know. I can easily understand why so many authors do return to subjects that compel them and into which they have experience and insight. Coming up with a new theme that interests you for each book—and interests you enough to provide the momentum needed to research and analyze and then to write and revise and finish an entire novel—is no small feat.
As a writer, I’ve so far found that I fall into the second category: None of the books I’ve started or finished have the same theme or subject. This has meant that each book requires extensive question-building, research, planning, and thinking—but my mind finds hovering around the same subject simply too boring.
Do you see this same division between types of novelists? And if so, do you prefer one category of writer over another?