Kate Atkinson’s ‘Groundhog Day’ Fiction

Gareth McConnell for The New York Times

Kate Atkinson

Imagine having the gift (or the curse) of continually dying and being reborn, so that you relive segments of your life again and again, differently each time, going down various paths and smoothing out rough areas until you get it right and can move on. Imagine, too, that you are not conscious that this is happening, but experience it as intermittent déjà vu, a sometimes-inchoate dread, an inexplicable compulsion at sudden moments to do one thing rather than another.

Kate Atkinson's Shrewdest Plot Tricks

A brief history of the author's narrative schemes, from time travel to dreaming up an entire novel from the title of a favorite Dickinson poem.

This is not an original artistic conceit, obviously. A century ago, the book "Strange Life of Ivan Osokin" depicted a young man who is given a chance to relive his life and correct his mistakes in 1902 Moscow. And in "Groundhog Day," Bill Murray is forced to repeat the same wretched day, and listen to the same wretched Sonny and Cher song, in Punxsutawney, Pa., until he becomes a better person and wins over Andie MacDowell. But in "Life After Life," her eighth and latest novel, the British writer Kate Atkinson has taken these notions — what if practice really did make perfect, and what if we really could play out multiple alternate futures — and put them through the Magimix, pumped them full of helium, added some degrees of difficulty and produced an audacious, ambitious book that challenges notions of time, fate and free will, not to mention narrative plausibility.

Atkinson's work suffers from a bit of brand confusion, which partly explains why it hasn't caught on in the U.S. as it has in Britain. She does not write about vampires or werewolves or women exploring their inner goddesses with a little sadomasochistic sex. Nor does she continually produce variations on a theme or even variations within a genre. Her writing is funny and quirky and sharp and sad — calamity laced with humor — and full of quietly heroic characters who offer knowing Lorrie Moore-esque parenthetical asides. ("I think in brackets; I do my own asides to myself," Atkinson said.) She writes critically admired family sagas that are not really family sagas; crime novels that are not really crime novels; and now, in "Life After Life," to be published in the U.S. next month, a science-fiction novel, in the loosest possible sense, that is nothing of the sort.

Atkinson's true genius is structure. Her books wend forward and backward, follow multiple stories from multiple points of view, throw dozens of balls up in the air — but always conclude with loose ends tied up, so that everything makes sense. Her first novel, "Behind the Scenes at the Museum," published in 1995, intersperses the linear narrative of the heroine's life with a series of chapter-long explanatory "footnotes" that fill in the back stories of various glancingly mentioned relations and events, painting an intense portrait of a big, messy British family in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. The book seemingly came from nowhere to win a major literary prize in London, instantly establishing Atkinson as a singular voice while generating grumbling among more established (male) writers. The novel also displayed what have become staples of her work: big complicated plots and joyful experimentation with form. One of Atkinson's novels has three different beginnings. Another, set over three days, has four main characters. A protagonist in another spends a good portion of the book in a coma.

Atkinson cannot really articulate how she creates these elaborate structures. Although she used a Moleskin storyboard to keep track of the acrobatic chronology in "Life After Life," she generally does not formally map out her plots. Instead, many of her books start as ideas, or as challenges to herself — characters or thoughts that dare her to put them in stories. Sometimes they begin with the title itself, as in "Started Early, Took My Dog" (2011), which came from an Emily Dickinson poem and which required only that she include a dog and make her hero a Dickinson fan. With "Life After Life," Atkinson knew she wanted to write about the London Blitz, but she also wanted to experiment with a protagonist who constantly dies and is reborn, and she wanted to examine whether someone in that predicament could actually alter the course of history. Could her heroine — brave, tragic Ursula Todd, born in 1910 to an ordinary family in an ordinary English county — somehow stop World War II?

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