Quiet, compelling, and wildly popular novels

[00:00:00] SUSAN MEISSNER: I know the quiet novel can do well in this market because I’ve seen it happen. It can happen. I need more books like that so that I can figure out how they pulled it off. Because they’re highly, highly quiet. But they did really well. So it’s like they go against the grain, the grain says no, it’s got to be TikTokable. And that’s not always true.

ANNE BOGEL: Hey readers, I’m Anne Bogel and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that’s dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don’t get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read. Every week we’ll talk all things books and reading and do a little literary matchmaking with one guest.

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My guest today is Susan Meissner, a historical fiction author based in the Pacific Northwest and author of works like Only the Beautiful and The Nature of Fragile Things. Susan is a reader and What Should I Read Next? listener but she’s also a writer with a readerly dilemma.

[00:02:02] Susan writes character-driven historical fiction. That’s her lane, and she’s happy to be in it. Sometimes books like hers are described as quiet, and she’s okay with that. But lately there have been whispers in the industry that this kind of quieter historical fiction isn’t what readers want right now.

Instead, so they say, today’s readers value compelling plots above compelling characters, and they prefer books with mystery, suspense, or romance as the driving force. Short, snappy, and flighty books are selling right now, and books with long, thoughtful chapters are not. At least that’s the conventional industry wisdom these days. So what does that mean for Susan and other authors of quiet books?

I’m a reader and lover of all sorts of stories, including decidedly quiet, character-driven novels. The question Susan is asking means a lot to me. As you’ll hear, I’ve been mulling over her query since it first landed in my inbox many moons ago.

[00:02:57] Today, we’re going to unpack the quiet novel and discuss its place in today’s literary landscape. We talk about what it even means to call a book quiet. We contemplate if readers have indeed lost their appetite for them. We’re going to highlight a few factors that make quiet books sing and share titles that are highly character-driven, but are also incredibly compelling, plotwise.

What makes a book quiet, and also what makes a quiet book work for a wide variety of readers? Those are our questions. Let’s get to it.

Susan, welcome to the show.

SUSAN: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this for a really long time.

ANNE: Ever since I first read your submission back in the fall, I think I’ve been thinking about your dilemma… Is that the right word?

SUSAN: That’s a good word.

ANNE: Three times a week. Easy. So I’m really excited we get to get into it today. First, would you tell us a little bit about yourself? We want to give the readers a glimpse of who you are.

[00:03:55] SUSAN: Well, I started out in newspapers. So writing novels I came to from kind of a different angle, I guess you could say. I really enjoyed working in community journalism for those ten years that I was in it, but I was always itching to write a novel. And I finally gave it a go. I guess, gosh, this will be the 20th anniversary of my first book coming out. I just realized that.

ANNE: Oh that’s big. Congratulations.

SUSAN: Thanks. In 2004, my first book came out. It wasn’t historical fiction, but it is what I write now. But it was my entree into this wonderful world of creating literature, and I’ve never looked back. I’ve enjoyed this career change so much. I feel like I was always meant to write novels. I just didn’t know it.

So now I’m writing historical fiction and it’s my favorite genre to read, my favorite to write. My husband and I have four adult children. We’re doing the grandparent thing now, which is so wonderful. I love that gig so much.

We live in the Pacific Northwest after having lived in a number of places, most recently San Diego, California. But now we’re up almost in Canada, living on a little peninsula, and it’s just gorgeous and beautiful. And I love writing there. I feel very, very lucky that we get to live in such a pretty place.

[00:05:05] ANNE: Oh, that sounds gorgeous. Now we all want to come visit. Susan, would you say more about feeling like you were always meant to do the work you’re doing, but you just didn’t discover it until 20-plus years ago?

SUSAN: Yeah, I feel like when I was really young, we’re talking, you know, preteen, teenage years, I was writing stories just for fun. And so writing for me was a hobby back then and very much a way of figuring out the world.

Some people wrote in diaries when they were a young, emerging adult, a lot of people journal. I never did any of those things. I didn’t write a journal, I didn’t do a diary, but I was always writing stories. I think that was my way of journaling and figuring out life.

So for a long time, I felt like writing was my gardening, writing was my cooking. It was my pastime to escape from the real world. And so a real-world pastime doesn’t become your job, because then what will you do for an escape? You’ve just given it up, which is not very good advice, because you can actually make the thing you love to do in your free time the thing you do for your work too. You can do both.

[00:06:08] So even though I loved to read fiction, I dabbled in fiction on the side for fun, I feel like I didn’t give it a chance when I was younger to actually make it my career until I was in my 40s. It actually took the death of my grandfather, who was every kid’s dream of grandpa. He died when I was 42. He was 84. I’m not great at math, but I could do that math if I lived to be as old as he was. My life was half over and I hadn’t even given it a try.

So I came home from his funeral and wrote my first book. And I didn’t know anybody in the industry. Nobody knew me. I did not have an agent. So I didn’t really know if it was going to go anywhere. But I had to try. I had to. And Harvest House Publishers picked up that book and published it. That was the beginning.

ANNE: That’s amazing. I didn’t know that story.

SUSAN: Yeah.

ANNE: Susan, you mentioned being a reader. Tell me a little bit about what your reading life looks like these days.

[00:07:06] SUSAN: I’m always feeling like I don’t get to read the books I want to read as much as I would like to. And maybe every historical fiction writer feels that way because we read so much for research. There’s a lot of pre-reading that goes into writing historical fiction.

My reading is usually based on what I can read at night before going to bed. So I don’t get through as many books as I like, but that’s when I read is at night after the day is done, and I’ve put away my computer.

I do gravitate towards historical fiction, but my main draw, I think, when I escape to a book after the day is done, is I want books that the characters just come alive on the page. That, to me, can happen in a really good mystery or it can happen with a fun, romantic comedy. But it happens more frequently for me with historical fiction. That’s my go-to.

ANNE: Well, I’m excited to hear some of your favorites today. I know we’ll get to that. Susan, I mentioned that you did come to us with a dilemma, and that’s going to color everything that we talk about and think about today. So would you go ahead and tell us what that is?

[00:08:13] SUSAN: What happened was I was listening to your podcast, and I think after about a month of just listening to your different guests — this was back in October of 2023 — I was feeling very stuck in the book that I was writing. I felt like it’s Anne, it’s Anne and her readers and listeners that might be able to help me.

And that was I was writing a book that I had turned in previously, like a few months earlier. I turned it in and both my editor and my agent loved it, but they felt like it wouldn’t sell. They felt like it wasn’t potty enough, that I needed something to accelerate the pace because my wonderful characters weren’t doing it on their own.

They felt like the book would be okay if we let it go, but it wouldn’t be its best version of itself. And they wanted me to restructure it completely, and I resisted. I really did. I had to have a… They didn’t know this. They will now if they listen to this podcast. I had a bit of a meltdown and I had to go for a long walk along the beach and kind of reassess.

[00:09:19] I felt like it was my first rodeo and it wasn’t my first rodeo. I felt very defeated as a writer and like a hack and had a lot of imposter things going on. I realized I needed help to figure out how can I write the kind of novel that will sell that others might think of as quiet.

It’s a term that we have in the industry for books that don’t have the same gas as a plot-driven mystery or thriller. They’re called quiet novels. And there’s some really good ones out there, so I know it can be done. I just need to figure out how. How can I write a quiet novel that readers will love and the market will love? And I reached out to you for help with that.

ANNE: Yes. And, you know, I reached out to readers in our audience to get their feel for what they think of when they think quiet novel. And I was really surprised at the answer. Like it definitely was not perceived to mean any one thing.

SUSAN: Huh?

[00:10:19] ANNE: Why don’t you start by describing what quiet means to you?

SUSAN: The first thing I think of is that it’s character strong. Like those characters they are the ones who drive the plot. The plot doesn’t drive the plot, that characters do. And so those characters are multifaceted and they have all the flaws and virtues that a real person would have and they’re right there on the page and what they want. Because we know every story is about a character who wants something.

So what they want is relatable and understandable, I guess you could say, like on a wide scale. There’s a universal need that the reader must connect with. Otherwise, why would we love these quiet novels?

There’s got to be something about the way a quiet novel is constructed that allows those characters to come to life in a different way than, say, a plot-driven novel that might also have great characters. But it’s the plot that has all the gas and the characters are just reacting and responding, you know, to what the plot is doing.

[00:11:25] I too am really curious to see what your readers said, because I feel like the quiet novel does kind of exist with some… I guess the parameters are maybe kind of foggy. Maybe it’s hard to define what one is, but I know how one makes me feel.

Like when I read a novel that, to me, feels like it’s a quiet novel, I just… when we were just chatting before we hit record, I was telling you some of the ones that I really enjoyed the last few months, which is The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store and Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and Trust by Hernan Diaz. Those books to me feel quiet because the characters are just so robust and the plot is really kind of secondary. But I’m excited to hear what you and your readers think a quiet novel looks like.

ANNE: Are you? It might be alarming.

SUSAN: Oh no.

ANNE: I want to be clear, Susan, to you and to our listeners that we’re not providing answers today. This is a conversation about the possibilities and about the quiet novel in general that, Susan, I think you and I both have a love for.

[00:12:30] So we might feel a little, um, not defensive, but maybe defensive. I very much want there to be a place for these sorts of books in the market. And when I say “these sorts of books”, I’m talking about ones that leave the room for intimacy, that really explore the interior lives of these characters that we come to know so well.

When I talk to readers about it, they comment that these stories aren’t propulsive. Like, sometimes a quiet novel gets defined by its opposite, that often the tension, at least on the page, can feel low even if the emotional stakes can be quite high.

I also noticed that sometimes quiet felt like it was being used as a euphemism. Like one reader said that she described a novel as quiet when it was character-driven and took its time to explore ideas and bored her so much she didn’t want to finish it. And I thought, well, one of those things is not like the other.

[00:13:30] Also talking to some industry people, I found that quiet is often used to describe a novel that may be very good, but lacks any discernible marketing hook for the sales team. Like, this can be good, but how do you talk about it? How do you sell it?

SUSAN: That makes a lot of sense, actually. Yeah.

ANNE: Oh, really?

SUSAN: Yeah, I do get that because in conversations I have with my editor who has to take this book to the sales team and tell them, here’s how you can sell it, that’s actually a really big consideration.

ANNE: Interesting. Would this be a good time to say more about your novel or do you feel like that’s helpful?

SUSAN: I think I can describe the novel in general terms and it won’t spoil the book for anybody who might want to read it. The book I wanted to write was about three women who feel a sense of displacement. And “displacement” is not a word we use a lot. Chemists and physicists probably use it a lot.

But after World War II there was a sense of displacement and for some people it was real. They were displaced persons. It was a proper noun, DPs. And there were DP camps all over Europe. They had no home. They either had no home to go back to or they didn’t want to go home because home meant going to an eastern European country that was now under Soviet control.

[00:14:44] So you had a million displaced people. A great many of them came to the U.S. as immigrants under a special congressional act that allowed them to immigrate beyond the usual quotas. So one of those persons is a displaced person. So she’s living the displaced life and it’s right there on the page because she’s outside of home. There’s no place where she belongs anymore.

Then the other character is a blacklisted Hollywood actress. That was a huge deal in the 1950s. There was a witch hunt going on in Hollywood. Of all places, that, to me, I thought was just amazing that there was this concerted effort to root out communism in Hollywood. Not in higher education or some other facet, but in Hollywood in the entertainment industry.

So I have a blacklisted actress who is not a communist. She’s not even sure what one thinks, but she’s been blacklisted and guilt by association. So she’s been displaced from a career, the only career she’s ever wanted. She’s young and this is happening to her after her only first big break. So her world has collapsed really and she’s been displaced out of the life she’s always wanted.

[00:15:52] Then the third person is a widow taking care of her brother-in-law. He’s agoraphobic. He doesn’t leave the house. He’s a screenwriter, but he’s so debilitated by his condition that she’s actually writing his screenplays for him.

That’s the reason why I think quiet novels are hard for editors to sell to the sales team, is it took me all that time to tell you what the book is. But these three women, their lives are going to merge and converge in Malibu, which is like the idyllic paradise of places outside LA.

All three of them facing either right now displacement or imminent displacement. And the thing about displacement, if you dial it down to just the word home with a capital H, they’ve lost any sense of that. We know home is a big deal. I’m not talking about your address, I’m talking about that place where you feel safe and loved and wanted. It’s where you go to feel like, “Well, this is where I belong. This is my place. I belong here.” And they don’t have that.

[00:17:01] That feeling is, I think, is kind of visceral. And I’m thinking, everybody either knows what that feeling is like or they can imagine it. And they fear it because who wants to feel like there’s no place for you?

So it’s a book about these three women in 1956 Malibu and that’s what they’re coming to the story with. Where I wanted to begin I cannot tell you now because I do want you and your readers and listeners to read it, but it begins with a rather… It’s kind of a life-changing event for one of those women and they become unlikely friends and allies as they’re trying to navigate all of this.

It’s also happening just on the eve of a Malibu wildfire. Malibu is sadly famous for its wildfires. There’s going to be another one. And there was one right after Christmas in December of 1956.

The thing about a wildfire is it comes for people’s homes. It’s like it’s a beast that wants to take your home from you. So it’s kind of like that metaphorical way of looking at how quickly your sense of home can be swept away by forces outside your control.

[00:18:10] ANNE: So what I’m hearing you describe is a story about physical and emotional displacement. Which, you can see the physical, you can’t see the emotional.

SUSAN: Exactly.

ANNE: I’m thinking of one of my favorite books, because of course I’ve been thinking about my favorite books and thinking about quiet novels in our conversation. Well, something that I really noticed thinking about these is how often a quiet novel doesn’t lack big events but they happen off the page or they’ve happened in the past.

So they’re present, like shattering things can happen or exciting wonderful things, life-changing things. But the focus in a quiet novel isn’t on the thing, it’s on the characters reflecting on the thing and thinking about what the thing means.

The ending of one of my favorite novels, Maggio Farrell’s This Must Be the Place, is two characters having a conversation about going to the airport.

SUSAN: Huh.

[00:19:06] ANNE: And, you know, that’s not exciting stuff. But the emotional stakes for those who have come on this journey for these characters are so high that this very simple conversation has deep, deep resonance. But that’s not the kind of thing that you get on TikTok and go, “And then the shocking twist!” You know? It’s just not.

Something that I heard repeatedly from – I almost said from characters. From characters I talked to – from listeners I spoke with who are protagonists in their own lives, of course, is that they said that the quiet novels are the ones that may or may not keep them up until 3 o’clock in the morning reading one more chapter but it’s the quiet novels that they think about 5, 10, 20 years later as being deeply meaningful reading experiences.

SUSAN: Oh, yeah.

ANNE: Far more so-

SUSAN: I can totally get behind that, yeah.

[00:20:04] ANNE: Yeah. Far more so than the book they rushed out to the bookstore to buy because a friend told them about it and they had to hear what happened. And then they gave it to the library book sale and they forgot they ever read it until they see it on Instagram three years later. But who am I kidding? Because you’re not going to see that book on Instagram three years later. You’re gonna see it during the three-week period.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. We’re speaking in hyperbole. But I did notice that I do love a quiet novel. Something that is often present in the quiet novels I love is a wistful kind of tone. And I enjoy a certain setup. Like, a character is looking back at events that happened long ago, maybe big fireworky events, but sometimes they’re still processing conversations that happened at the dinner table in 1982, and they’re trying to make sense of what it means for their lives.

Many readers commented that they suspected those books were much harder to write. Because to make someone feel the stakes of a dinner table conversation that’s ostensibly about the cornbread, but is really about your hopes and dreams for a certain person’s future, or disappointments you have surrounding decisions they’ve made, or some other significant stakes in that relationship, that that can’t be easy to do as a novelist. And I imagine you have thoughts about that.

[00:21:21] SUSAN: That kind of came to me late with this book because I had to restructure it almost twice. And the conclusion I came to was what I’m trying to do is really difficult and I may not have the chops for it.

Like I may aspire to write a really good quiet novel and I could envision it in my head, but I can’t execute it, which doesn’t mean I lack talent on a grand scale. It just means I don’t really know how to do that thing. Because I do think it’s harder. It’s harder than we think because it seems like it should be easier, right? But it’s not in fact. It’s far more difficult, I think.

I still want to figure out how to do it well because I feel like it’s still something I want to do. Like I really want to try and crack that nut. But I think I need to recognize that it’s not easy. I might have to work on that as I continue to write the books that will sell if that makes any sense. Because I do want to try. I do. It’s like a life goal now that I have is to write the book I want to write in the way I want to write it and have it do well.

[00:22:29] ANNE: Oh, Susan, I have a lot of thoughts there, but I think we better get into your books first. Are you ready to do that?

SUSAN: Yes.

ANNE: I would love to explore the books you love and the books that haven’t worked as well for you so that we can continue to think about what makes a quiet novel. Well, what you asked was, what is a novel that can be sellable and readable? Is that it?

SUSAN: It was probably something along those lines. I know the quiet novel can do well in this market because I’ve seen it happen. It can happen. I need more books like that so that I can figure out how they pulled it off. Because they’re highly, highly quiet but they did really well.

So it’s like they go against the grain, the grain says, no, it’s got to be TikTokable. And that’s not always true. A good seller, like a good bestseller, can be a quiet novel, too. But there’s something about it that is different than the TikTok book, I think.

[00:23:34] ANNE: So we’re going to be thinking about, just running in the background, the idea that what books are both quiet and viable in today’s market. You know, you and I both know that books are often great works of art and literature, and so much goes into them, and they’re so much more than commodities. Also, if a publisher doesn’t think it will sell, it will not be published, and readers won’t get to read it.

So, these are the realities that readers navigate when they’re looking for their next read. Like, if a publisher didn’t buy it, then they can’t buy it, they can’t read it. And also, if you want to keep writing books, then the publisher has to… yeah. Okay. Do you think we’ve defined our terms for our listeners?

SUSAN: It can be defined. Yes.

ANNE: Oh, that’s so true. Susan, how did you choose these books for today?

SUSAN: It was hard for me to choose the one I didn’t like because I just… I don’t ever talk about those books that I don’t like on a public forum. I just don’t. I don’t know.

[00:24:35] I feel like to say I didn’t like a book says more about me than it does about the book. And I’ll say that right up front, that it really says more about me than it does about the book itself. I actually changed the book that I did not like for that reason.

Although I do want to talk about the book that I almost put down as the book I didn’t like because it is far more quiet than the one that I find now, this is not for me at all. But the ones that I liked, it took me a while to decide because there’s so many good ones that I liked.

ANNE: Well, Susan, you know that you’re going to tell me three books you love, one you don’t, and what you’ve been reading lately and we’ll be thinking about your books in the context of, okay, we want a quiet novel that also readers will get, like publishers will want to put on the shelves, readers will want to read. And I’m so excited to hear more about these. So tell me about the first book you love.

[00:25:29] SUSAN: I will always love a book by Ann Patchett. Everything she writes, I resonate with. I think I fell in love with her with Bel Canto. I’m not sure if I can exactly say why I love Ann Patchett’s style, but to me, she writes an amazing quiet book. And somehow she’s able to do the thing with the characters where the characters provide that propulsive action by just their decisions, by what they do and what they don’t do.

So on my list that I gave you, I put down The Dutch House because it was a recent read. But I could really put down all of Ann Patchett’s books. I think for the most part I would consider them quiet novels. I did read Tom Lake and I loved it, but I loved The Dutch House more. It came to the forefront of my mind first.

It’s structured interestingly, if I can use that word. I loved the structure of it. And the sibling relationship between this brother and their sister and what happens to them as children with their stepmother, all of that was magical to me.

I’ve read it. I’ve listened to it. Tom Hanks does the audio. It’s masterful. I loved that book and I will always recommend it. It’s the kind of book I want to write.

[00:26:44] ANNE: You know what’s so interesting is you cannot have known this because at the time we’re talking the episode hasn’t aired yet, but Julie Van Huizen in Episode 421, it’s called Go Ahead, Judge That Book by its Cover, and it just aired earlier in March at the time you’re listening, told me about how she defended The Dutch House to her book club because they read it and they wanted something plottier. And she was like, “No, look, you have to understand how amazing this is for a character-driven novel. I love these characters. You’re entitled to your opinion, but back off.”

SUSAN: Yeah, I feel like the quiet novel, like The Dutch House, and like the other two I’m going to share with you, they plumb the depths. Like you’re going to go deep. And some people, I feel like, they have forgotten how to go deep with a book, maybe. And that’s why they resonate with these plottier novels. And they’ll read the quiet novel for their book club and they’ll come to the meeting saying, “I didn’t like it. It was too slow.”

And I think the person who maybe picked it that said they loved that book was because they fell, like they went deep, they fell into the abyss and it was wonderful and deep and so many treasures awaited them at the bottom of this dark place where you have to grab the rope and go down.

[00:27:56] I feel like that’s a really good way of describing it is that it means to go deep with a novel. And if you don’t know how to do that, if you’ve never gone deep, it might seem like, why do I want to do that? Or how do I even go deep with a novel? I think it’s probably a reader skill maybe, as much as it is a writer skill.

ANNE: Oh, interesting. And then you can show up to book club and with a novel that does go deep, you can say, And this is how I connected with it. And this is what it meant to me. And this is the thing it reminded me of in my own life.

SUSAN: Yeah.

ANNE: I love that you chose Ann Patchett. I have recently told this story in our Patreon community because I just did a One Great Book episode about Bel Canto. And the inspiration was both our conversation and also Will and I just went to see her at this amazing event we have in Louisville called the Kentucky Author Forum. She was a guest here. She was in conversation with Kevin Wilson.

[00:28:44] During the Q&A, she ended up talking about Bel Canto. And I was so struck by something she said, especially knowing our conversation was coming up. She said, Look, people remember that book as being very plotty and action-packed, but it is not. It is not.

It’s about a hostage crisis, so you assume there’s a lot of action. And yes, the book begins with a flurry of action, and it ends with a flurry of action. But after that initial burst of action… like, there are 222 people who are told to lie down on the floor and not move or say a word. Like, it’s very interior for the next 105 pages.

And then after that, it transitions into this period of peaceful domesticity with a much-reduced group of hostages and the militants overseeing them. But I mean, you know, it’s a good cozy mood in that house for a good four-month period.

[00:29:42] So she said people remember it a different way because they remember it’s a novel of a hostage crisis. But not a lot happens. I mean, it’s about art and love and communication.

SUSAN: Right. Wow.

ANNE: But Kevin Wilson pointed out that like, yes, it is all those things and it’s also under the oppressive outside force of this hostage situation, which gives a different flavor to the quiet events of the core of the novel.

SUSAN: Oh, that’s brilliant. I love that.

ANNE: There’s a lot to think about there with Tom Lake and The Dutch House and Commonwealth and all her… I’ve been thinking about the idea of like, is there an oppressive outside force, as I’ve been thinking about my other quiet books. We’ll come back to that idea.

SUSAN: Yeah, I like that a lot.

ANNE: Susan, what’s the second book you love?

SUSAN: It’s a book that not everybody loves, and I always rise to defend it because it’s masterful. It’s just masterful. And that’s Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land.

[00:30:40] Part of the reason why I might love it so much is I had the privilege of hearing him speak in San Diego. He came to the University of San Diego and gave this marvelous presentation of how this book came to be.

He’s very approachable as a presenter and you feel like you’re in his living room and he’s talking to you. He shared so much about the historicity of what he was trying to write about and the way he was laying out these characters in these three different time periods that seemed like they have nothing to do with each other.

Then we all went home with our signed copies of this book to read what he had just talked about. And boy, did we fall into this amazing… you know, so much depth in that book.

I do consider it a quiet novel. I read it in book club and there were a number of people in the book club who did not like it. And I’ve read different blog posts and I think I’ve heard from different readers on other reader forums that they didn’t like it. And I think it’s because it’s so very different.

[00:31:43] I don’t know why like… for the ones who didn’t resonate with it, was it because they couldn’t capture the feeling of momentum with these three disparate time periods? Was that it or was it there wasn’t…? That great oppositional force that you just talked about, was it that? Was it because it wasn’t as immediately identifiable? Or was it because it wasn’t the same oppositional force for all three time periods? I’m not really sure but I loved that book and I will defend it to my dying day.

ANNE: I’m excited to hear you say that. I’m on my way to Michigan for the Festival of Faith and Writing in April and he’s one of the keynotes. It’ll be impressive if I can feel like I’m in his living room because I think he’s going to be in the arena.

SUSAN: Oh my goodness.

ANNE: I’m very much looking forward to it though. Susan, what is the third book that you love?

SUSAN: The Thirteenth Tale always shows up on any list of books that I love. I read it a number of years ago. I loved it so much. I don’t really remember now how I picked it up. I don’t remember if it was recommended to me or if I just happened to see it in a bookstore, but I remember buying it, bringing it home and reading it and just falling in love with the story.

[00:32:55] I loved it so much that it kind of formed the backbone, construction-wise, for a book that I wrote called The Shape of Mercy, which published in 2008. That book was a genre shift for me. I went from publishing contemporaries to historical fiction.

The way Diane Setterfield constructed it was dual timeline. We have a character in what we would call the modern time who’s interviewing someone who’s giving you, like, a pass to come back with her to the past. And now you’re in a different time period with this interviewee as your host. And I loved that construction.

I loved the book. I think I’ve read it three or four times. And I always recommend it as one of my favorites. Also because it had such an impact on me as a writer, I was inspired by it to try something new, and that is historical fiction.

The book that I wrote because I read that book and loved it was my first starred review in Publishers Weekly. It won a bunch of awards. And I feel like it’s because I had finally tapped into what I was always meant to write, was this kind of book, historical fiction.

[00:34:05] ANNE: That’s so interesting. I’m glad to hear how that impacted your work because having read and really enjoyed both works, the connection wasn’t clear to me until you described it.

SUSAN: I will say that not every book by all of these authors do I feel like… I don’t have the same reaction. With Ann Patchett, I do. But I have read other books by Diane Setterfield. And the most recent one to… that really felt like it met me in a great place was Once Upon a River. It was also really good by her. But I still feel like The Thirteenth Tale is up on a pedestal all by itself.

ANNE: It’s good to feel that way about a book. A handful of books.

SUSAN: Yes.

ANNE: Susan, tell me about a book that was not right for you.

SUSAN: Well, when I was filling out my questionnaire for you, I started to put a book, and I’ll mention it here, but it’s beloved right now. So I offer it just as a way of being honest with you and your listeners. And it was Remarkably Bright Creatures.

[00:35:08] I mean, I loved it. I did. But I feel like… I don’t do this with every book that I write, but I felt like I wish I had thought of that. And the whole time… and I will say that I listened to that book. I did not read it. I had it on audio. I kept thinking, Well, what I would have done if it was my idea? Because it’s such a brilliant idea.

I have to say I loved Marcellus. He’s the voice of the octopus. Actually the audio narrator for his voice, he was perfect, perfect in every way. So I feel like I wouldn’t have changed anything with Marcellus. But I kept thinking of ways I would have done the other parts of the story differently.

That is all me. It is all me. It is not anything… The author, I believe, is Sherri Van Pelt. She did a great job. There are many, many people who love that book. But I think for me I just kept approaching it as a craftsman rather than a reader. And I shouldn’t have. I should have just enjoyed the book as she wrote it.

So then I pulled it back from you and I said, I’m not gonna say that one because it is a good book and many people love it. I just know that I kept thinking of what I would have done differently.

[00:36:17] ANNE: You know, we could rephrase and just say, tell us about a reading experience that wasn’t what you had expected or hoped for.

SUSAN: Well, that’s a good way of saying it, yeah. The book I put down for you I know was not meant for me and it’s Fourth Wing, which I believe is the first book in that series. There seemed to be a lot of hoopla and the market was like, everyone was loving this book and I knew it was fantasy.

And it’s not that I don’t like fantasy, I do. I know it’s a little outside my genre. It’s not a quiet book either. It’s like, if we’re talking about quiet books, Fourth Wing is not a quiet book. But I can tell you that I couldn’t engage with the plot or the characters.

The hardest part for me was understanding what is it about this book that people do love, you know, because it’s selling well and everyone’s loving it and they can’t wait for the adapted series for the screen. So I can’t quite figure out why is that book meeting so many people at so many different levels of their reading experience. So I’m not sure. But I know it was not for me.

[00:37:24] I actually didn’t even find it compelling even though I know it’s plot-driven. I couldn’t quite connect I guess with the plot which I believe is what’s supposed to hold you in, you know, captive is the plot for a book like that, and it just didn’t meet me there.

ANNE: So it’s a book you came to thinking, okay, so if this is an example of a book that’s selling well and my publisher, she would be happy with similar sales. Let’s see what readers are drawn to these days.

SUSAN: Yes.

ANNE: Okay. Susan, give me a feel for what you’ve been reading lately.

SUSAN: Well, right now I’m reading The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters, and I’m loving it. I would also consider it a quiet novel. But based on what you and I have been talking about, I can see there’s this great oppositional thing that happened early, and now what we’re seeing in the story is the characters reacting to that one event that actually doesn’t even happen on the page, which is just amazing to me, the insights I’m picking up from our conversation. It doesn’t even happen on the page.

[00:38:28] It’s about a child abduction. The brother who is six years old at the time of his sister’s abduction, he’s the last one to see her. She’s only four years old. So he feels this great sense of almost responsibility that he didn’t stick around. He didn’t see what happened to her. He’s just the last one to see her. And his reaction to her disappearance is going to color the rest of his life.

And then the story splits and we start seeing what happened to that little girl. She’s a grown woman now and she’s talking about her life and knowing deep down… she’s always known there’s something different. Like she has these dreams that feel more like memories and she can’t reconcile how these dreams can feel so real. She’s thinking about her original family, is what she’s thinking about.

ANNE: I mean, Susan, what she’s doing is living with a very real feeling of displacement, like we talked about in your novel.

SUSAN: Yes, absolutely. You’re so right. That probably is another reason why I’m loving it so much right now is that theme of displacement is really at the surface of all my thinking right now because of the book I’m writing. But it’s a wonderful, quiet novel, and I’m really, really loving it.

[00:39:45] The other book I’m reading is Kristin Hannah’s new one, The Women. I’m almost done with it. It’s a different book than what I thought it was going to be, but she’s very astute when it comes to keeping people engaged, I think, with characters who are experiencing a historical event.

So she takes you back to the past so that you can experience that historical event like she did with the Nightingale in World War II or Alaska in the 1970s.

So it’s both plot-driven and character-driven. I’m not really sure how she does that, but I think it’s both. And I think that’s kind of hard to do.

ANNE: I just read that The Women were selling so well right now. Susan, you already mentioned that you had recently read and enjoyed The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. What do you have to say about that one?

SUSAN: Oh, goodness. I listened to the book… and I don’t know if that changes your experience. I think it might. For this one, the narrator was just masterful. He really made that book come alive, and I think I know the reason why.

[00:40:48] Not everybody can pull off what we call the omniscient narrator point of view, but that’s what this book is written in. It’s some omniscient narrator. So the narrator, the voice actor, he’s telling you a story. It’s like you’re in bed and you’re a little kid and the story is being read to you and the voicing is perfect.

And the thing about this book, and it is a Barnes & Noble Book of the Year I believe, and it was on all kinds of best-of lists, and yet when I read it with a book club just recently, there were a whole bunch of people who didn’t like it. And it was because for them, it was too slow. So they felt like there was not enough gas, there was not enough propulsive or plotty, I guess, events that kind of tie everything together.

But this is a book that’s not about the plot. It really is about the people. Certainly, it’s about what happens to them, and certainly it is how they rally around each other to protect this little boy. He’s actually an adolescent who’s deaf and can’t speak. They’re all rallying around to protect him but it’s kind of almost secondary.

[00:41:58] It’s more about these people living in Chicken Hill in the 1930s, and a very interesting community of Black people and Jewish immigrants. I loved it. I think it’s because it was so much a tapestry of characters, and I was totally invested in it.

ANNE: I will just say that I included The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store on my own best-of-the-year list, and a lot of readers were like, “Why? That book was so boring.”

SUSAN: I know.

ANNE: Like, oh, it’s not about the plot. It’s about the people. Thank you for sharing more about that. Susan, we’ve been discussing quiet novels and looking for insights about what makes them both compelling while remaining more about the people than about the plot. What direction do you want to go in now? What would be helpful?

[00:42:53] SUSAN: I think you’ve hit on some things that are rather insightful that I’ll take away when I start… because what I’m doing now is I’m plotting my next book. I don’t want to have the same experience with this next one that I had with the one that I just turned in, the one that made me come to you with my submission, saying, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I need help.”

I want to have a better experience with this next one. So I’m in the plotting mode. And so I’m trying to figure out how I can do what I want to do, but also create a book that the market will like and that my sales team will know how to sell.

One thing you mentioned was there’s got to be some event that doesn’t even have to happen on the page. But it’s got to be something significant that can create a lot of character emotion, reaction, and action, I guess are the two words. So that. I’m gonna have to make sure that include that event.

[00:43:53] So I guess I’m looking for books that might have that, like an event and that doesn’t have to happen on the page, but the feeling, the reaction, all of that kind of needs to be there. That’s how the book stays together, I guess.

And it just has like, you know, tentacles that reach into every other part of what a book is about. You know, it is about a character who wants something, and they don’t have it, and they go after it despite obstacles. And there’s usually something in a book that happens that kind of is the catalyst, it kind of sets it in motion.

ANNE: Like I’m thinking of Marilynne Robinson, whose novel sold a bazillion copies. I’m thinking of Housekeeping, her first book. It’s a quiet novel that begins with somebody driving a car into a lake. That is gripping. And the rest is an exploration of how it got to that point and the aftermath. But that one thing frames the entire story.

[00:44:53] SUSAN: And you know, now that we’re talking about it, I did have that with this book that I just turned in. I started with an event. It’s pretty big. And I had to save it and put it farther along in the novel to keep it a suspenseful mystery that you’re not quite sure. And I wanted to start with the event in its surety, like it really did happen, and I ended up having to save that event and kind of bring the reader along in more of a mystery kind of way to find out.

I think there’s something to be said for not only having the event but also somehow gripping the reader with those characters. I think I still need to find a way to get my head around how it’s done, how we can bring readers along with us if we’ve already told them the event. Like the event is in the past or even if it’s in the recent past so there’s no mystery. The mystery has to be then something else. Like what then is it if it’s not what happened to them because that’s known.

[00:45:58] ANNE: I wonder if there are some readers, and I know that I am one of them, who think the question of why we do the things we do, sometimes even though it hurts us deeply, and others that we care about, is endlessly fascinating. And I so enjoy books that really explore that question.

Also, I enjoy books like Bel Canto about a bunch of hostages keeping house in an unnamed South American country during a four-month hostage crisis. What does it mean to be human?

SUSAN: Well, I like that a lot. And the other thing you said, why do we do the things we do? I think that’s very insightful. You could go a long way with asking that question as you’re writing.

ANNE: Susan, before we close, what if we took a look at a few more titles for further exploration that are both commercially successful and definitely quiet? Would that be worthwhile?

SUSAN: Yes. Yes.

[00:46:54] ANNE: Okay, just gonna rattle off a few real quick. We’ve got Jayber Crow, which we just talked about on the podcast by Wendell Berry. We have all of Marilynne Robinson’s novels. Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, definitely.

Another one of my favorites, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, has a quote that our team member Ginger quoted back to me when she knew that I was getting ready for our conversation. Anyone who has read this book has probably noticed this passage that I’m going to read word for word. This is deep in the text.

The story is about a novelist, his marriage, and a decades-long relationship with another couple that he and his wife are close to. So at one point, the child of his longtime friend says, write this story. And the novelist muses this to himself.

He says, “How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power?”

[00:48:07] So he’s saying, there’s no material here. Like, nothing happens. But of course, if you’ve read the book, you know what happens and you know… or maybe you don’t remember, because I didn’t remember until I came back for a reread, how the book is structured in a circle so that you enter in and you go, Oh, what is happening here? And what does it all mean? And then you go back in time and find out.

SUSAN: Oh, I love that. I’m going to read that, yeah. As soon as we finish, I’m going to get a hold of that one.

ANNE: I’m excited to hear that. A few more reads that have done very well in recent years. We’re going to look at a variety of genres, but Jesmyn Ward, I believe, is a quiet writer. Salvage the Bones is set against the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina, the days leading up to it, and its aftermath.

This is the story of a 14-year-old girl who is pregnant at this time. This is actually a retelling of the great myth of Medea and Jason. But she has this beautiful style of writing that always feels like a stark contrast with the pain and grit of all her stories. And this is definitely true here. She doesn’t leave her characters or her readers without hope but some of the content is just so hard.

[00:49:24] This is a character-driven novel also set during a time of a big event that isn’t often talked about, but is ever present in the plot of this story.

SUSAN: That sounds wonderful. Thank you.

ANNE: I’m glad to hear that. Claire Keegan’s work has really caught on in the U.S. since, I’m going to say since 2021. Her popularity here, her sales here have zoomed when Small Things Like These, which was shortlisted for the Booker, that doesn’t hurt, was published here in the U.S. So, Small Things Like These.

Foster, is another good story. After the success of Small Things Like These, this one was reissued in the U.S. This story is so, so sad and also so life-affirming. It begins on a hot summer day in rural Ireland when we meet this anxious child who’s being taken by her father to live with a distant relative for a time in order to ease the burden on her mother as she’s preparing to deliver another child.

[00:50:20] And you know immediately that something… oh, you can hear me setting up a mystery, right? I’m not sure I would have described it as such. But you know immediately that this couple seems kind and gentle, and also something has happened to them in between them, and you don’t know what.

There’s no fireworks. Like one of the big events is going to… I believe it’s awake at a neighbor’s at one point. But you slowly get to know the characters and that is why you care about what happens to them. It’s not these big things happen that are so interesting, exciting and they happen to these people. It’s about the people far, far more than the plot, which feels just like a vehicle.

Susan, something really interesting is that I like so many of our listeners read Small Things Like These and Foster in that order. And I thought, Oh, I need to go back and read more of Claire Keegan because I had a definite idea of the kind of writer she was. Insightful, beautifully constructed stories, compassionate, gentle, quiet.

[00:51:23] Then I read her short story collection that was published in the U.S. in the fall called So Late in the Day, and those stories are loud. It was such an interesting contrast.

SUSAN: Wow. That sounds great.

ANNE: Different direction entirely is Search, a novel by Michelle Huneven. This book feels like lower stakes. Although I think if we want to go with Ann Patchett’s theory, or perhaps we should attribute that to Kevin Wilson, that there’s this outside oppressive force that influences your reading of the entire story and the character’s actions in the entire story. I don’t think that’s absent here. That’d be a really interesting book club discussion.

But this is a novel written as a comic memoir with recipes. And Huneven leans all the way in. It opens with a fake premise to the second edition of the fictional novel. But the idea is this. There’s a woman in, I think she’s in California, who’s been a successful food journalist and restaurant critic for a long time. She’s also attended her progressive Unitarian Universalist church for a long time.

[00:52:27] The church needs a new pastor. She’s been asked to serve on the search committee, and she doesn’t want to do it because committee work I almost said gets a bad rap, but… nobody wants to do committee work. What a pain.

Plus, she hasn’t been going to church lately. She’s been sleeping in. But she needs an idea for her next book, and she thinks, look, in lieu of having anything better to write about, why not a memoir about my time on the search committee? Because at least, even if that doesn’t sound interesting at all, at least I can include the recipes that my readers expect from me.” So she says yes.

I mean, this is a story of human squabbles and frustrations and insecurities and… like, not a lot happens and yet it’s… it’s so human and relatable in so many ways.

And listeners, you should know that Dana’s church prides itself on being neither religious nor particularly spiritual, if you’re thinking, I don’t know if a book about a church search committee is for me.

[00:53:35] But this is a story of finding your path and your people. And I think… It’s been a while since I picked this up, but I’m thinking that question of “Where do I belong? Do I belong? Where do I fit? Do I fit?” I wonder if that’s not the big question looming over this ostensibly low-stakes, meandering, somewhat zany kind of story.

SUSAN: No, that’s great. Because that’s a really big question: where do I belong? It’s a huge question. And it’s cool to think that a low-stakes book can address it so nicely. That’s great.

ANNE: I think so. Books I’m not going to belabor that I want to mention are Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark. It’s about secrets kept over a decades-long friendship and why. I love the work of Elizabeth Strout, like so many readers.

A lot of times not a lot happens, or it happened a long time ago. But I think my favorite of hers, ooh, unless it was the other favorite of hers, but I am thinking of Lucy by the Sea, where not a lot happens, but the pandemic weighs over everything, to the point where driving to meet family outdoors for like lobster rolls or something like that for an afternoon picnic because you can becomes this like soul-filling event.

[00:54:49] Travis Baldry’s Legends & Lattes, which was marketed as a book of high fantasy and low stakes. Not a lot happens. It’s about a retired orc opening a coffee shop. No plot, just vibes might be the descriptor there.

Then I’m thinking of a couple of Japanese translations that have done really well in the U.S., like Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. Oh, you know what? I’m wrong. The second one is Korean. It’s the Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop that we just featured in our Spring Book Preview. Those books are all about atmosphere.

And I wonder if a note to close on is that marketing and expectations matter. You know, plotty, character-driven. Many readers know what they like. And those bookshop books are being marketed as like, oh, just enjoy soaking up the atmosphere as you journey with these characters into this specific world where they’re looking to find, it happens to be healing for some of these characters, and the comfort of connecting with those who share your love of, in this case, literature. You find that community, you find that belonging. But that’s a very different angle than you won’t believe what happens next.

[00:56:00] And as you go into final edits for your book that’s coming out in early 2025 and beginning to talk to readers about it, talking with the sales team, I’m just thinking that you’ve already written that. You’ve already been through the process. But marketing expectations, they’re not everything, but they do, I think, really matter to the reader.

SUSAN: You know, a book is 400, 500 pages, and you’ve got to be able to talk about it in just a few sentences, or the reader’s never going to know, is that a book I’m going to like? So there’s those marketing expectations. And the way a sales team talks about a book is the way the bookseller is going to talk about a book.

When somebody goes into the store and says, I need a new book, what’s this one about? It’s like those smaller sentences, they do matter. So I don’t want to discount the fact that marketing and sales kind of drives what we’re doing. But what they do is they drill it down into its basics so that we can talk about a book and create that reader interest with just a few words.

[00:56:59] ANNE: That’s so interesting. Susan, I hope this has been helpful today. I really enjoyed exploring the topic with you.

SUSAN: I’m so excited to get busy on your list of reads. There’s a few that I have read, but a great many that I have not and I’m really looking forward to diving in.

ANNE: Any ideas where you might begin?

SUSAN: I think I’m going to start with Wallace Stegner.

ANNE: Well, I’m excited to hear what you think. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk about your books with me today. I’m really looking forward to reading it. Come this time next year.

SUSAN: Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to chat about these things. They’ve been weighing on me, so it’s been really good to kind of dissect what I’ve been thinking about with you.

ANNE: Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. I enjoyed it.

SUSAN: Terrific. Thanks so much.

[00:57:39] ANNE: Hey, readers, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Susan, and we would love to hear your examples of quiet books you love, books that are highly character-driven and highly compelling. Is the market done for quiet books? What’s your relationship with these sorts of works? Tell us in our show notes comments. Visit whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find those. Just look for this episode.

Connect with Susan on Instagram @SusanMeissnerAuthor or at her website susanmeissnerauthor.com. Meissner is spelled M-E-I-S-S-N-E-R.

We’ve got all those links along with the full list of titles we talked about today at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

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Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by Will Bogel, Holly Wielkoszewski, and Studio D Podcast Production. Readers, that’s it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, “Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.” Happy reading, everyone.