There’s a popular book going around right now— I won’t name it, because I know the enormous effort it takes to write a book, any book, and I don’t want to disparage that—and a lot of my friends are reading it and raving about it. I read it; I thought it was OK. Just about as fine as a diner pancake. You know what to expect. It’s comforting. It’s sweet. It fills you up, yes, but it doesn’t nourish. An hour later you find yourself pining for the log of summer sausage Uncle Dan heaved upon you at the last family gathering. Why? Well, mostly it’s the sentences.
For a while I taught a class on sentences. That is, sentence craft. Or rather, writing that pays close attention to the rhythms, jolts, and predicable and/or idiosyncratic syntax and diction. We looked at uncommon commas and rebellious semi-colons. We looked at wayward words and deranged phrases. We looked at constructions that would make James Joyce’s bellybutton pucker. We looked at Stanley Elkin, Joy Williams, Hilton Als, Christine Schutt, George Saunders, Garielle Lutz, Paul Beatty, etc.—writers whose sentences are theater in and of themselves, whose most minute of choices elicit giggles and set synapses alight.
Two recent reads, Peter Schjeldahl’s brain-fizzing art criticism, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, and David Nutt’s quirky novel, The Great American Suction, reminded me of the good ol’ days of sentencing. (I.e. charming the reader on the smallest scale available to us.) The sentence is the prose-writer’s single brush stroke. It is the unit in which we are bound, over and over. In Garielle Lutz’s stellar essay, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” she says, “But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly.”
Bending and breaking grammar, prickly phrases, technicolor verbs: gimme that snazz. What I want most of all in writing—or any art, really—is surprise. There’s nothing worse than a timeworn story or scene—love triangle, best-friend betrayal, the mirror-looking pep talk. Sometimes I wonder if we like our intelligence insulted. Not that there isn’t a time and place for factory-made prose. I get stress, and I get the need to wind down, turn off the brain, as it were, but I do wonder if we turn to these things because we lack the discipline in other areas of life, namely activities that actually calm us down (meditation, prayer, exercise, doodling), in order to simply be momentarily placated. (But that’s another essay.)
Check this out, from The Great American Suction: “The cart’s operator is one of Shaker’s yard crew, a pill-and-pipe addict who also has a special fondness for chinchillas and mixed martial arts, named Thin.”
A lesser writer might’ve gone: “His co-worker was a man named Thin, who liked smoking pipe tobacco and talked about his chinchillas at home. He watched mixed martial arts on TV instead of the usual football like most of the guys on the crew.” The latter takes the play out of it, and Nutt’s delaying of the name, Thin, surprises and cajoles after learning about his fondness for MMA and substances.
Or check out this one: “He wears the sloughed-off expression of a meatloaf drooping under too many watts.” Original thought = original writing, so the adage goes. How many people do you know who would come up with something as odd and fun as this sentence? (I can think of two and a half.)
Peter Schjeldahl, on the other hand, lights up the phrase. Here’s an assortment:
"It covers a period of grueling brilliance, when Picasso kept junking and reassembling the female physiognomy like God the Creator with a hiccup.”
“Lawler deals us poisoned fixes.”
“There is no gainsaying Freud’s guts.”
“Sherman hammers ceaselessly at the delusion that personal identity is anything but a rickety vessel tossed on waves of hormones and neurotransmitters and camouflaged with habits and fashions.”
See what I mean? What a joy.
I used to play literary madlibs with my students, where I’d take some piece of commercial fiction and delete certain parts of speech, then do the same with a writer whose sentences I felt were worthy of admiration. The results were almost always the same: the commercial writing was predicted, and the sentence wielders were not.
This isn’t a treatise on style, but rather a friendly reminder that, while there’s plenty of good art out there, there’s also plenty of gooder art. There are certainly many writers I admire who have what I might call a muted style, or even hue close to “house style,” or write in a more conventional way—their surprise is in their plots and gestures and thoughts of characters. Writers like Willy Vlautin and Yiyun Li and, heck, Murakami, whose prose is usually so boring I find myself speed reading. But next time you reach for the cheddar block, why not try the sharp stuff?
(I say all this and have to admit that I’m currently watching a popular zombie show that is so full of cliches and tropes that I sometimes feel, deep down, like a hypocrite. So it goes. Take all this with a crumb of salt n’ vinegars.)
I think that of all your essays so far, this is my favorite! (Specifically, “I can think of two and a half.”) What a delight to be surprised by grammar, especially when the author makes a choice you would never have imagined. However, it’s killing me not to know the book you’re referring to in the beginning!