Eleanor Catton Wants Plot to Matter Again

Toward the end of “Birnam Wood” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the latest novel from the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton, Rosie Demarney, an otherwise minor character, gets a moment in the spotlight. She has been presented with a series of facts that seem to add up to a humiliating conclusion: the guy she likes has blown her off to pursue an old flame. Her fears are only confirmed by the embarrassed gaze of her crush’s sister. At home, clinging to her self-respect by a thread, Rosie firmly tells herself that she “was not going to play the role that he had cast her in; she was not going to spend the evening in her sweatpants, getting drunk and stalking him pathetically online.” A beat, a line break, and then the inevitable: “But hell. Nobody was watching.”