Originally published in November 2020.
While a good title is no guarantee of a good book, it can act as a guide.
Choosing a title is challenging. It is hard to find a memorable word or phrase that not only sums up a work of fiction but ideally enlarges it. The working title for my first novel, What Alice Knew was A Cornet for a Kingfisher, which referenced a memory in the book, the moment the narrator Alice as a schoolgirl hurled her cornet through a high window to liberate a trapped kingfisher. It served as a metaphor for her behaviour at the end of the book.
The publishers demurred. Not least because they had decided to publish the novel as ‘crime fiction’ and took the view that for some potential readers cornets (and possibly kingfishers) would deter rather than seduce. They suggested What Alice Knew, which worked well. It homed in on the theme of the novel while remaining true to the requirements of genre fiction. After the change in title, the cornet in the text was replaced by an altogether more probable paintbox.
My original choice reflected a preference for allusive titles such as To Kill a Mockingbird or The Catcher in the Rye over does-what-it-says-on-the-tin titles such as Him or When I Find You, the pronoun-heavy staples of genre fiction. The former opens a novel or its central metaphor to wider interpretation, the latter applies a full stop.
It is hard to find a memorable word or phrase
that not only sums up a work of fiction
but ideally enlarges it
While a good title is no guarantee of a good book, it can act as a guide. Catch-22 is one of the most famous titles, an expression that has slid into the lexicon, but it proved a high-water mark for Joseph Heller. His second novel, Something Happened, sported an enticingly portentous and catchy title, but the car veered off the road thereafter. Good as Gold is a cliché even for those unaware the protagonist is named Bruce Gold, while God Knows, Picture This and the Catch-22 sequel, Closing Time, are redundant phrases afforded no extra weight by virtue of being raised to title status. His final autobiographical novel about an ageing writer attempting to replicate an earlier success was titled Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, its derivativeness in no way reduced by the punctilious, even precious, insertion of a comma.
Elsewhere the comma has been used magisterially, most obviously in the arch-stylist Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory. The Russian émigré delighted in titles. Bend Sinister, the oxymoronic Pale Fire and parodic Look at the Harlequins! bear testimony to his love of language (in his fourth tongue), his linguistic taste even sanctioning the exclamation mark which, reported speech aside, is always dangerous terrain.
While puns often require exclamation marks to remind the reader they are witty, punning titles range from the brilliant to the appalling. In the former category I would place Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, about a stalker’s enduring love which his victim must endure, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a tale of vinyl and love, and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, its title taken from the suburban street in which the protagonists live, their depleted aspirations’ silent comment on the ideals of the revolution that had given them their freedom.
The author who created more outstanding titles than any other was not a novelist but a playwright. Tennessee Williams’ plays included The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird of Youth and The Night of the Iguana, a run of titles that, to my mind, has never been bettered.
Ultimately, a title is like a name or a haircut: it grows into itself. No one claimed Of Mice and Men or The Great Gatsby were sublime titles when they were published – Tender is the Night was deemed superior – but over time they have embedded themselves in the culture and their greatness is assured. In music, the Beatles, with the weak pun in the spelling, achieved a similar effect, to the power of ten.
The same, obviously, can be said for Catch-22. Late in life Joseph Heller was told he had never written anything as good as Catch-22 again, to which he replied, “Nor has anyone else.” He could have been talking about titles.
