The Complete Guide to POV

Third person singular present tense

Like Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984), John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) was big bright swerve of a novel towards the urgent contemporary.

A sharper tensing.

He/she/it goes.

Now this now this.

Because so much earlier, Updike’s was the more daring.

How could a whole novel be maintained in the third person singular present tense?

Well, like this —

The ball, rocketing off the crotch of the rim, leaps over the heads of the six and lands at the feet of the one. He catches it on the short bounce with a quickness that startles them.

In our heads, it’s easy to see the Hollywood adaptation. Partly because this is the exact POV in which large chunks of many screenplays are written. (But they often include ‘We see the ball, rocketing…’, and so are really first person plural present tense. Which the Complete Guide will arrive at very soon.)

Here’s the motion picture hero, Rabbit Angstrom, being crisply established with a significant action.

Who shall we cast to play him? Adam Driver?

As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke, a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack against the afternoon spring sky, setting his feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread white hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself… Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball will miss

Will it? Will it?

We’re with the action, breathlessly.

because though he shot from an angle the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. “Hey!” he shouts in pride.

Updike has had a hard time recently, critically. He’s become the American equivalent of punchbag Martin Amis — a writer who took the literary too much for granted, as a giving presence into which he could lean, from which he could suck. A writer who had it coming.

David Foster Wallace, himself much attacked for reasons of misogyny and violence against women, had a real go in the Observer.

I think the major reason so many of my generation dislike Mr. Updike and the other G[reat].M[ale].N[arcissist].’s has to do with these writers’ radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters.

I bring this up partly because I’m quoting Updike and Wallace, but also because, if Updike has a redeemable best book, it’s usually agreed to be Rabbit, Run.

And perhaps this is because the third person singular present tense is constantly pulling the writer away from a concern with themselves and into an attentive fascination with another and with another’s pressingly physical world.

What exactly are they doing? How exactly does it feel?

That’s why it’s a fitting POV for a sportsperson, or ex-jock, like Rabbit Angstrom. They are either in the moment of triumph, or they are dealing with their disappointing ever-extending present tense life, after the thrills of he shoots, he scores!

For this — along with the present continuous variant — is also the POV of sports commentary.

Two against four, but one of them is Messi. Gets around Miralis. Tucks it in. Lifted by di Maria! A masterpiece from Messi!

Or,

“The crowd gasp at Cocker’s masterful control of the bicycle,
skillfully avoiding the dog turd outside the corner shop.”

In summary:

Third person singular present tense.

Likely upsides:

Thrilling, loose, tender, blithe.

Possible downsides

Shallow, glib, skating, foregone.

Other examples:

Anthony Doerr, All the Light we Cannot See

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet