Do spoilers for books actually improve them?

Reviewers have been carefully eliding Karen Joy Fowler's latest plot, but she doesn't seem to care and nor, apparently, do we

by: Claire Armitstead

The launch of the latest novel from Karen Joy Fowler caused some angst on the Guardian books desk. Given that the identity of one of two central "characters" is not revealed until page 77, how much should the reviews give away? Barbara Kingsolver gave advance notice of the problem last year, prefacing her New York Times review with an old-fashioned spoiler alert: "To experience this novel exactly as the author intended, a reader should avoid the flap copy and everything else written about it. Including this review."

She didn't mention the picture used to illustrate the review, which the spoiler-sensitive can't help but see as they consider whether or not to read on. On the books website we went both ways, using a generic photograph to illustrate Lucy Scholes's review (from the Observer) and a – ahem! spoiler ahead – differently generic picture for Liz Jensen's review (from Guardian Review). Both reviewers either hinted at or explicitly discussed the big reveal.

It was with these quandaries in mind that I turned on Radio 4's Front Row that evening – to hear Karen Joy Fowler herself not just spoiling her own plot, but setting light to it and jumping up and down on it.

In doing so, she delivered to Radio 4 listeners a novel that I would argue was substantively different to the one I had read, sight unseen, a week earlier – even if only up to page 77. But does it matter?

On Twitter, opinion was divided, with blogger @johnself tweeting: "The marketing materials, so flagrantly spoiling it, made me toss it on the charity pile," while thriller writer SophiehannahCB1 was ambivalent: "Depends how important it is as a 'ta-da' surprise in the story. Answer could be yes or no, IMHO. Not much help, I know!" @TimRelf and @TheLamplands, meanwhile, felt it was a question of proportion. "Reckon if it's less than a quarter of the way into the book it's fine to reveal," said @TimRelf.

Just as interesting is whether an author has the right to spoil his or her own work? I'd say no, in the belief that as soon as a book is published, it belongs to its readers. But @Isabelwriter felt it was an author's call, while @KirstyWark tweeted: "The publishers revealed anyway," a point taken up by @TinyCamels: "Reading is a cultural activity. A novel (&its marketing) is part of the discussion, not just its object."

There's nothing new about this discussion. Blogger EC Ambrose on Clarkesworldmagazine made an elegant case for a heroic spoiling tradition, as exemplified in the prologue to JRR Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, in which he sets out the whole story.

"What is he [Tolkien] up to? First of all, he wants to present the narrative as an epistolary text with a historical context. He intended his Middle Earth to be an invented history or mythology for England, and this academic and contextual approach enhances that impression. You don't read history for plot, so the spoilers reinforce the notion that this is part of the historical record with which the reader may already be familiar."

"I suspect," Ambrose continued, "in part, that Tolkien wanted to reassure his readers – just as the grandfather in The Princess Bride tells his grandson that the princess 'doesn't get eaten by the eels at this time'."

A more scientific approach was taken by American researchers in 2011, as reported in an Association for Psychological Science blog. The University of California team doctored 12 short stories by a top line-up of writers, including John Updike, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie and Raymond Carver, to test whether spoilers actually made any difference.

They tested three types of stories: ironic-twist, mystery and literary. Each was presented in three different forms – as originally written, with a prefatory spoiler paragraph, and with that same spoiler paragraph incorporated into the story as though it were a part of it.

Their conclusion: though there were some differences in response, readers in all three categories preferred the spoiled versions to the unspoiled ones.

Why? "Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing," said one of the researchers, Nicholas Christenfeld. How's that for telling us?

I'll be bringing my copy of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves to our first #guardiancoffee Bookswap tomorrow. So if you're in the vicinity of London's Bethnal Green Road at 1pm, do drop in and let me know your thoughts. Bring your own book to swap. It's all free. There will be spoilers. But perhaps it doesn't matter after all.

from: Guardian