AUTHOR'S STYLE

The style of A Hope in the Unseen is clearly journalistic in tone and intent. The book is written with an emphasis on objectivity, voicing the opinions of many character but also making sure to balance it with relevant counter-arguments. That balance isn't always provided immediately, often arising organically from the perspective of another character with a different background. Another obvious journalistic approach in the book is the way that individual situations or events are often placed in a larger context in order to show the importance to American society as a whole. Statistics and historical background are occasionally brought up in the course of the book, such as the success rates measured for Ballou, or the fact that African Americans made up a very small percentage of college students during the 1960s.

Such grounding in context helps to establish a sense of relevance for readers, since journalism must always answer the question, Why do I need to know about this? More specifically here, readers will ask, Why should Cedric's life matter to me? In the balance of opinions, attention to detail, and contextual background, we understand on an intellectual level that Cedric's life is a reflection of the struggles of American society as a whole, and a lesson in the problems of our nation's struggling lower class youth.

As noted, there are many passages where Suskind assumes the perspective and mood of a character. This often happens with Cedric, but is also quite notable in the various other perspectives that the book assumes. The twelve other characters as listed by Suskind in the Author's Notes are Barbara Jennings, Cedric Gilliam, Bill Ramsey, Clarence Taylor, Phillip Atkins, Zayd Dohrn, Chiniqua Milligan, Bernadine Dohrn, Rob Burton, LaTisha Williams, Larry Wakeford, and Tom James. Helaine Schupack is not mentioned, though her perspective is assumed in the first section of chapter 10, nor is Bishop C.L. Long, though chapter 6 has a section devoted to him. Suskind notes,

In the book's portraits, there is a significant amount of what is sometimes called "internal voice," elucidating the thoughts and feelings of a character as he or she moves through visible actions or encounters in a day. Those "thoughts" are based - in almost every case - on a subject's immediate disclosure or fresh recollection of what he or she thought or felt at a particular moment. In a few cases, a subject described to me his or her thoughts or feelings about a situation or individual, and I've connected those thoughts to what I witnessed - and then checked with him or her later. In either case, all the internal voice passages, crucial to understanding various points of views, are drawn from literally dozens of interviews with each of a dozen main characters stretching over several years. (369)

In effect, Suskind is using his journalistic background to create a vivid novelistic effect in the book. He interviews relevant people in Cedric's life, determines their specific views and opinions and feelings, then recreates the voice of those people in literary portraits. Stylistically, Suskind assumes not only the point of view of these characters but also their voices. For example, Bernadine's passages have a clipped syntax and use the rhetoric of the counterculture, while Tom James' passages use sociological jargon and develop ideas in the manner of academic arguments.

As the author, Suskind also has passages in the book that are poetic in nature. This is often the case when he is dealing with the rhythms of student life, as seen in several quotations below. Such passages help recreate the experience of growing into adulthood, whether it's the trade-off of higher ambitions for more immediate gratifications at Ballou, or the uncertainty of new experiences for Brown freshmen, or the mundane routines and cyclical nature of campus life in general.

The overall journalistic distance and evenhanded observation of this book contributes a great deal to its ability to impart knowledge to the readers, to make clear the seriousness of the issues being explored in Cedric's quest. However, the more novelistic touches - the voices of various characters, the poetic passages - balances this with a more emotionally immediate appeal to the reader. These touches draw readers closer to the people they are reading about, and provide a humane reminder that what they are going through is something most of us go through in our own lives.