We the people

Browsing through the books recently arrived in the Prospect office, I picked up "How Fiction Works" by literary critic James Wood, which will be published next month. Wood starts his first chapter, Narrating, with a typically clear statement: "The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors. I can tell the story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps in the second person singular or in the first person plural, though successful examples of these latter two are rare indeed. And that is it."

Which got me thinking. I've read quite a fewstories in second person, but I find the style usually begins to grate after a while. It also never really seems apparent what the author is trying to achieve—an even closer identification with the reader than first person singular? A homage to Choose Your Own Adventure books? (While I'm on the topic, has anyone ever written a novel in the second person plural, which is a distinct form in some languages such as Spanish?)

But I've also read several novels in the past few years that have successfully—as far as I'm concerned—utilised the first person plural. Most recently, Joshua Ferris's And Then We Came to the End, which rightly made it onto several "bestbooksof2007" lists, and is almost entirely written in the first person plural. Going back a few years, Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) is partly written in it, and Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides (1993) exclusively uses it. (Thereareothers including, inevitably the great experimentalist William Faulkner.)

These novels work for me because the narrative device isn't purely a gimmick. In Ferris's novel "we" is the collective voice of the employees in a Chicago advertising agency, capturing the camaraderie of working life: "We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Then a day would pass in perfect harmony with our projects, our family members, and our coworkers, and we couldn't believe we were getting paid for this." The Virgin Suicides is narrated by a Greek chorus of men telling the story of five doomed sisters they knew during their teenage years—"We saw her only rarely, in the morning, fully dressed though the sun hadn't come up, stepping out to snatch up the dewy milk cartons." It's a haunting book that derives its emotional impact from the first person plural, and probably wouldn't work as a novel without it. Finally, and least essentially, Joy Fowler's "we" stands for the members of a book group, "We suspected a hidden agenda, but who would put Jane Austen to an evil purpose?"; its use echoes the whimsical nature of the book as a whole.

Do any other options for narrating a story exist? Wood is emphatic: "Anything else probably will not much resemble narration; it may be closer to poetry, or prose-poetry." Is he wrong?