David Rakoff's Heroic Couplets

You can make a novel out of just about anything these days: recipes, PowerPoint slides, e-mails, text messages. Still, not many novelists have turned to rhyming couplets. The novel is an expansive, necessarily flexible form. Couplets, by definition, are restrictive, far more so than other rhyme schemes, which space out their repetitions, allowing the reader a breath or two before the familiar sound comes boomeranging back. An elegant narrative might be strung together from a series of sonnets, a form in the service of complex expressions of thought and feeling; Vikram Seth pulled it off in his first novel, “The Golden Gate,” in 1986. But couplets bear the stigma of gimmickry, of tipsy limericks and earworms from the Hallmark aisle. Most contemporary poets won’t touch them. Would an architect build a house out of Lincoln Logs?