One of the tricks that Bill Watterson plays in Calvin and Hobbes is casting as his lead a character who is simultaneously a boy and a man. While Watterson only needed to know as much as a lazy six-year-old in order to write Calvin, he often snuck Calvin lines like "I must obey the inscrutable omens of my soul" in his conversations with Hobbes. In his musings about the nature and purpose of existence, his ruminations on modern art, his iconoclasm in the face of authority, Calvin evinces behavior much closer to an adult's unrestrained id than any young boy.
Of course, Calvin is a cartoon and one of the primary conceits of the strip in which he appears is that his stuffed tiger converses with him and enables his scheming and misbehavior, so questions of what Calvin should and should not know or be able to express are a bit curmudgeonly.
Not so with literary fiction, though.
I'm almost done with Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Like its precursor The Corrections, it documents the personal failings and emotional breakthroughs of a middle class Midwestern white American family. The observations are sharp, the writing tight and the scope sweeping. Franzen has left the snark of The Corrections out for the most part without softening his characters. All in all, Freedom is a great book deserving of all the praise that was heaped upon it.
Except for one thing. One big thing.
After a brief introductory chapter that tours the St. Paul street where the main characters live, Franzen gives the next 150 pages over to a fake autobiography written by Patty Berglund, the matriarch of the family. Patty is quite the writer. She has a sharp, cynical ear for dialogue, exquisite prose timing and an excellent vocabulary. I just opened the book to a random page. Here, on page 34, is Patty writing after her cheap but wealthy grandfather plies the children with glasses of his homemade Doe Haunch Reserve wine: "While the mothers came running to scold August and snatch their kids away, and the fathers tittered dirtily about August's obsession with female deer hindquarters, Patty slipped into the lake and floated in its warmest shallows, letting the water stop her ears against her family." I have no doubt at all that a bored Midwestern housewife could write about her own life with accuracy, compassion and skill. However, Franzen stretches credulity by the ease with which Patty moves between multiple points-of-view in a single sentence, to say nothing of the inclusion of 'tittered dirtily' and 'warmest shallows,' memorable descriptions that sound much more like a professional writer looking for the right words than a housewife who is composing an autobiography 'at the suggestion of her therapist.' There's an overwhelming stench of bullshit that comes off these chapters, not despite, but because of how well-written they are.
The easiest way for a writer to give herself license to include a character's thoughts and observations while still employing her own powers of observation and vocabulary is to include an author surrogate. Junot Diaz does this in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao with the character of Yunior. Yunior's part in the narrative is minuscule, but he writes the book, and so we get descriptions of the life of a teenage girl in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s that refer to Rafael Trujillo as 'Old Fuckface.' Probably the best modern example of this device are Philip Roth's Zuckerman books. Nathan Zuckerman, whose curricula vitae are suspiciously similar to those of Philip Roth, meets people he finds interesting and then resolves to write books about them. Zuckerman allows Roth to include very authorly digressions about, say, glovemaking in American Pastoral or the difference between crows and ravens in the eyes of an illiterate cleaning woman in The Human Stain. Nabokov makes Humbert Humbert an overeducated European dandy and suddenly Lolita has a vocabulary that allows it to transcend the creepiness inherent in its plot.
There is no requirement that a writer do this, of course, but it does aid clarity. One of the reasons that Ulysses is such a challenge is that Joyce constantly changes narrative voices. Underworld is both thrilling and relatively easy to read because every time DeLillo changes the narrative voice, he lets us know. There is also a traditional, omniscient third person narrator in Underworld who knows things that the characters don't and has a voice distinct from any of theirs. The Brothers Karamazov follows the brothers, but the narrator is always independent of them, and no one would argue that Dostoevsky's power loses any prose in the trade.
Perhaps the best example of a writer allowing his own voice and knowledge to intrude into the consciousness of a character who could not possibly think things that the author ascribes to him is John Updike in the Rabbit Angstrom cycle. Rabbit has a high school education, works as a typesetter and later a car salesman and spends any and all free time golfing, fucking his friends' wives and burning his house down. He also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the flora of southwest Pennsylvania, a better than average eye for architectural details and is prone to multiple-page riffs on the connective tissue between death and sex or golfing and immortality.
Interestingly, John Updike is Jonathan Franzen's least favorite writer in the history of the universe.
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