In my dreams, the baby could talk. A one-day-old, apparently understanding the conversation going on around her crib, suddenly weighed in with a factual correction; a three-day-old, still in the hospital, piped up to agree that the surgical procedure being recommended was both unnecessary and outlandishly expensive; an infant, evidently inferring the entire universe from first principles, observed that soon she would be able to refer to her mother’s sister’s fiancé as her uncle. In the months before my partner’s due date, I experienced so many variations on this recurrent dream that it finally took a turn for the meta. In that version, when our newborn began to talk, I turned to the assembled family members and exclaimed, “The dreams were prophetic!”
Awaiting the birth of a child is a very strange experience. Life is full of momentous events, but, as a rule, they either happen with no warning whatsoever—someone you love is killed in a car accident; you step into a café and meet your future wife—or occur on a foreordained day: you graduate from college; you get married; you gain your citizenship. Having a baby is not like this, a fact that becomes increasingly obvious toward the end of a pregnancy. At thirty-four weeks, your baby is almost equally likely to be born in seven days or in two months. This presents all kinds of practical problems: How are you supposed to schedule parental leave? For what date should the grandparents buy plane tickets? How long do you have to meet a work deadline or to find curtains for the nursery? If, in your famished late-pregnancy state, you eat all the snacks in the bag you packed for the hospital, will you have time to replace them?
Such logistical issues are vexing. But the final weeks of pregnancy, with all the uncertainty and anticipation that they entail, also foster a very specific emotional state, one produced only by the experience of waiting, for an indeterminate amount of time, for something momentous to happen. And so lately I have been thinking, in the context of life, about something I have thought about for years in the context of literature: the structure, function, and strange pleasures of suspense.
Like a lot of fun things, suspense has a bad reputation. Its detractors have long regarded it as a cheap trick, deployed by hacks or sellouts to entertain the masses. In the nineteenth century, when whole classes of overtly suspenseful books began to emerge, including mystery novels and detective fiction, highbrow critics were quick to denounce them as “preaching to the nerves”—that is, winning over readers by provoking curiosity and excitement, rather than by offering any ethical or aesthetic fulfillment. “Tawdry,” “hideous,” “ignoble”: thus did Matthew Arnold denounce so-called railway books, the potboiling precursors to airport fiction.
Such opprobrium rests on a logical flaw: yes, tawdry literature is full of suspense, but virtually every other kind of literature is, too. In fact, outside of phone books and instruction manuals,