Entropy and the Novel: Writing About Decay, Disorder, and Time

A house begins to fall into disrepair. Water stains appear on the ceiling, paint peels from the walls, and weeds gradually overtake the garden. The family that once inhabited it has scattered, and the rooms, emptied of their familiar occupants, begin to feel strangely unfamiliar. Such scenes are common in literature, where the deterioration of physical spaces often reflects larger processes of personal, social, or historical change. They also suggest an interesting parallel between the novelist's understanding of time and a concept borrowed from physics.

In thermodynamics, entropy describes a property of a physical system related to the distribution of energy and the number of possible microscopic arrangements corresponding to its state. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the total entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease. Heat flows spontaneously from warmer bodies to cooler ones, for instance, while reversing that process requires work. Although entropy is frequently described as a measure of disorder, the scientific concept is more complicated than this familiar definition suggests.

For the novelist, however, the metaphor is suggestive. Much of human life involves the effort to maintain structures that would otherwise deteriorate. Relationships require care, buildings require maintenance, and communities depend upon the continued participation of their members. What happens when these efforts cease, or when the forces working against them become too powerful?

Thomas Pynchon's early short story "Entropy" addresses this question with characteristic playfulness. Set in a Washington, D.C., apartment building, the story follows two very different households. In one apartment, an increasingly chaotic party has continued for days, its participants apparently incapable of bringing the festivities to an end. Upstairs, a man named Callisto has attempted to establish a carefully controlled environment, insulating himself from the unpredictable world outside. Both situations prove unsustainable. Pynchon uses the language of thermodynamics to explore the limits of what we can control. He also finds something faintly ridiculous in his characters' attempts to impose their preferred order upon existence.

Other writers have found ways to explore similar ideas without explicitly invoking the sciences. One of the most extraordinary passages in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse occurs in the novel's middle section, "Time Passes," when the narrative turns away from the consciousness of its characters to describe the Ramsay family's abandoned summer house. Years pass, the building deteriorates, and the natural world begins to reclaim the spaces once occupied by human activity. Major events, including deaths within the family, are communicated almost incidentally, while Woolf devotes sustained attention to the movement of air through empty rooms and the gradual accumulation of dust and damp.

The effect is unsettling. Having spent the novel's opening section immersed in the thoughts and preoccupations of individual characters, we suddenly encounter a world in which those concerns seem almost insignificant. Time continues without regard for human ambitions, and the house, once the setting for an intricate network of relationships, becomes an indifferent collection of deteriorating objects. Yet Woolf eventually allows the house to be restored, suggesting that the passage of time need not be understood exclusively as a movement toward destruction.

What makes these works interesting is their willingness to organize narrative time around processes that conventional storytelling often overlooks. Sometimes a novel’s movement can be found in the gradual transformation of a place, or in the difference between how a character remembers something and how it appears many years later.

There are difficulties, of course, in writing fiction that concerns itself primarily with decline. A story in which everything steadily deteriorates risks becoming predictable, particularly if the writer is determined to make every image and incident reinforce the same philosophical idea. The most convincing treatments of impermanence usually allow for contradictions. Something survives unexpectedly; an apparent loss makes another kind of freedom possible; a character discovers that the past was never quite what they imagined.

W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn offers an instructive example. Traveling through the English countryside, Sebald's narrator encounters ruined estates, abandoned industries, and landscapes marked by centuries of human activity. His observations lead him into lengthy digressions concerning imperialism, warfare, commerce, and the lives of people long dead. Its movement depends upon the strange and often surprising connections the narrator discovers between apparently unrelated subjects. The disappearance of one thing opens the way to an investigation of another.

A book writing mentor can be especially useful in distinguishing between a novel's underlying philosophical concerns and the particular experiences through which those concerns become meaningful to readers. Perhaps the recurring descriptions of a family home are doing too much symbolic work, or perhaps the most interesting tensions emerge in scenes that initially seemed peripheral to the central story. Working through these questions with an experienced reader can help the author identify where the narrative comes alive and where it has become too dependent upon its governing ideas.

Entropy, after all, is not a prescription for how a novel should develop. Nor does the second law of thermodynamics establish that every human undertaking must end in failure. The value of the metaphor lies instead in the attention it directs toward the processes of change that accompany ordinary existence. A house can be repaired, a friendship renewed, a forgotten history recovered, even as time continues to alter the conditions in which such efforts take place. Fiction gives us a way of observing these transformations closely, of considering what disappears and what survives, and of discovering why certain things remain precious precisely because they cannot be preserved indefinitely.