Reading Style

by Jenny Davidson

  Keeler’s idiom is so strange as almost to amount to a new dialect of English. The Riddle of the Traveling Skull is dense with vivid but peculiar colloquialisms (“two shakes of a lamblet’s tail,” “24-carat thoroughbred”), and Keeler makes very odd use of the dash to signal thinking. Here are a few sentences that give the feel of his prose:

  Canada is as much of a refuge for you as—as a Wisconsin lumber camp is for a lost virgin.

  My forehead was so corrugated, as I could sense by feeling alone, that an Eskimo’s fur coat, sprinkled with nothing but Lux, could have been washed on it.

  Either as a detective I was a good sofa-pillow crocheter, or else I was playing in the identical luck of the piccolo player when the eccentric millionaire filled up the instruments of each member of the German band with $5 gold pieces.

  I held up that costermonger dummy significantly.6

  It would not be a good thing if everybody wrote like Keeler. But his use of simile and comparison is strikingly imaginative, almost grotesquely so. His inset references are strange for reasons at once verbal and substantive, conspiring to elicit an unusually strongly cognitive readerly response. The stuttered “as” in that first sentence makes a comparison that complicates rather than clarifying, as similes are generally supposed to do; the “corrugated” forehead of the second example literalizes the conventional synecdoche in which a furrowed brow is supposed to represent thinking, grounding the image by way of a bizarre far-flung allusion to the now-outdated technology of the washboard. The third example does something similar to the first, insofar as what are grammatically represented as alternatives actually offer the same thing twice rather than proposing two possibilities differing in their fundamentals; the image of the German band, the piccolo and so forth has something of the same particularizing strangeness as the Lux-sprinkled fur coat of the preceding example. Of the final example, I will only say that I am very certain this particular sequence of seven words has never appeared in any other literary work: the noun costermonger dummy shares that strangeness so characteristically at once verbal and physical, with the odd placement of the adverb at the end of the sentence compounding the effect. This is style for its own sake, a demented high-energy arabesque not really directed toward anything other than the performance of a sensibility. Many readers will prefer McDermott to Keeler. But what this style has going for it that McDermott’s sort of prose doesn’t is a sheer verbal inventiveness and originality that delights me far more than the tastefully modulated sentences of a Munro or a Trevor.

  My second example lacks the lightness of touch, the wayward strangeness of the Keeler passages. It is drawn from Lionel Shriver’s novel The Post-Birthday World, which takes a set of characters and recounts two divergent stories for them, fates and futures that split off depending on a choice made by the protagonist, Irina, on her birthday. I have already suggested, by way of those quotations from The Last Samurai, that it is worth asking what it means to talk about style as something moralized. Beyond the linguistic or strictly literary aspects of a novel’s style, is it just a fallacy to think that styles encapsulate moral orientations toward characters, or is it fair to think of diction itself as intrinsically wrapped up with acts of moral judgment? The reason The Post-Birthday World so clearly illuminates this question arises from Shriver’s decision to tell two stories that run on parallel tracks. Consider these two passages, the first from the post-birthday world in which Irina has kissed another man (her live-in boyfriend, Lawrence, has just arrived home the next evening, and Irina’s in the kitchen cutting him a piece of the pie she baked the day before for his homecoming—the pie originates in the “single” world before Irina’s life story split into alternate strands), the second from the world in which she refrained from doing so:

  Leadenly, Irina removed the pie from the fridge. Chilling for under two hours, it wasn’t completely set. With any luck the egg in the filling had cooked thoroughly enough that the pie’s having been left out on the counter for a full day wasn’t deadly. Well, she herself wouldn’t manage more than a bite. (She’d not been able to eat a thing since that last spoonful of green-tea ice cream. Though there had been another cognac around noon…) The slice she cut for herself was so slight that it fell over. For Lawrence, she hacked off a far larger piece—Lawrence was always watching his weight—than she knew he wanted. The wedge sat fat and stupid on the plate; the filling drooled. Ramsey didn’t need admiration of his snooker game, and Lawrence didn’t need pie.7

  And here’s the post-birthday world in which Irina has virtuously suppressed her sexual attraction to Ramsey (Lawrence has just criticized her for having had a drink before he got home):

  Scrutinized for signs of inebriation and disgusted with herself for having overimbibed the night before, in the kitchen Irina poured herself an abstemious half-glass of white wine. She pulled out the pie, which after chilling for a full day was nice and firm, and made picture-perfect slices that might have joined the duplicitous array of photographs over a Woolworth’s lunch counter. She shouldn’t have any herself; oddly, she’d snacked all afternoon. But countless chunks of cheddar had failed to quell a ravenous appetite, so tonight she cut herself a wide wedge, whose filling blushed a fleshy, labial pink. This she crowned with a scoop of vanilla. Lawrence’s slice she carefully made more modest, with only a dollop of ice cream. No gesture was truly generous that made him feel fat. (69)

  Shriver’s sentences very effectively express two different mindsets or orientations on Irina’s part: in the first pair of paragraphs, there is a satirical self-loathing energy that anticipates a set of unexpected but liberating choices that “this” Irina will go on to make, while the second example shows Irina dutifully submitting the force of her own personality to the shape of sentences that are as steady, sedate and self-concluding as the other sentences are oblique or destabilizing. Neither passage depicts a moment of significance or even centrally of self-reflection, but the moral implications of Irina’s choice are written into every turn of phrase; Shriver wants to show us two strikingly different orientations toward a character’s state of being, though the schematic nature of the opposition risks rendering both modes parodic or reductive. It is impossible to tell whether that second passage is inadvertently clumsy or deliberately satirical, and it can be said that in certain respects Lionel Shriver is a bad writer—but a bad writer in the sense that George Eliot, too, is a bad writer. Middlemarch is both unparalleled in its greatness and full of sentences that make me cringe, not because of the insights they express but because of the words in which those thoughts are couched. At such times, Eliot’s style has about it something graceless or embarrassing:

  The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly disturbing to Mr Casaubon, but there were other reasons why Dorothea’s words were among the most cutting and irritating to him that she could have been impelled to use. She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers; she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently to his heart-beats, but only felt that her own was beating violently. In Mr Casaubon’s ear, Dorothea’s voice gave loud emphatic iteration to those muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to explain as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness: always when such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without, they are resisted as cruel and unjust. We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness!8

  “Those hidden conflicts…which claim our pity”: ugh! That “our” is intolerably smug; it is either presumptuous (“you the reader and I the narrator know that which Dorothea does not”) or sanctimonious (the “we” of philanthropy and charitable condescension). I don’t like the word “iteration” here—it seems pretentious or overly technical—and I dislike even more the move after th
e colon to aphoristic generalization: it may be true, but there’s something coy or even annoying about the smug diction of the pronouncement. It can be said throughout, though, that intellectual muscle and a sort of temperamental obtrusiveness do the work for Eliot that a perfectly impeccable style might do for another novelist (an Austen or a Flaubert). Many of the turns of phrase the narrator offers have something arch or self-satisfied about them—I have singled out some of the ones I especially hate—and yet the force of the insights is unparalleled, so that the blocky embarrassments of the language perfectly set off the intelligence of the psychological commentary. It could not be a better passage if it were more tastefully inoffensive; it is perfect exactly as it is. This passage sums up for me the strange allure of Middlemarch, a book that would not be nearly so brilliant if it were not so frequently and grotesquely ponderous in its locutions, and it is a strength rather than a weakness that Shriver can be said to share something of Eliot’s badness.

  3

  Mouthy Pleasures and the Problem of Momentum

  Gary Lutz, Lolita, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Lethem

  In an essay called “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” Gary Lutz tells the story of his discovery of a group of books “in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude,” books (most or all of them edited by Gordon Lish) whose writers “recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy.”1 These books reveal to Lutz that he himself wants to produce “narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.” He calls this kind of sentence “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative,” a description that pairs these two aspects of the ideal sentence in a way that emphasizes the tension between self-contained aphoristic stasis on the one hand and the going-somewhere aspect of fiction on the other. A tractor, though we tend to think of it mostly as an agricultural vehicle, can actually be anything that draws or pulls something else (the “tractor beam” of Star Trek). Thus “load-bearing, tractional” are basically synonymous, the pair of terms offered partly for emphasis but also to give Lutz’s own substantive and load-bearing sentence an allegiance it can wear on its sleeve: the gratuitous pairing, with that obtrusive comma, tips the sentence toward the stylized, the nonfunctional.

  Sentences of the sort that Lutz praises are experienced through the mouth as well as the ear and the eye. Lutz’s own fiction has a chewy quality, his diction strangely combining a feeling of the inevitable with near-extraplanetary strangeness. Here are three paragraphs from “Waking Hours,” from the collection Stories in the Worst Way:

  I was in receipt of the mothered-down version of the kid every other Saturday. The bus would make an unscheduled stop in front of the building where I lived, and then out he would come, morseled in an oversized down jacket, all candy-breathed from the ride. I would drive us to a family restaurant where we would slot into seats opposite each other and he would ask me the questions his mother had asked him to ask. I had a quick-acting, pesticidal answer for every one.

  When the food arrived—kiddie-menu concentrates for him, an overproportioned hamburger for me—I would tilt the conversation toward him, maybe a little too steeply. I would want to poach on the life inside him, whatever it was. He would splay his hands on the table-top, arms slat-straight, crutching himself up.

  After lunch, in the undemanding dark of a movie theater where he goggled at some stabby, Roman-numeraled sequel, I would plug my ears and loot my own heart.2

  Lutz has an unusual sense of adjective and verb. “Mothered-down,” “morseled”—these words don’t exactly make for tongue-twisters, but they linger in the mouth nonetheless, just as juxtapositions like “candy-breathed” (a tricky coinage that visually invites misreading via the more familiar past-tense “breathed,” with its voiced th) or “quick-acting, pesticidal” insist on a rhythm that disrupts the reader’s own likely sense of the natural motion of sentences. (“Quick-acting, pesticidal” echoes the rhythms of “load-bearing, tractional,” a verbal pattern for which Lutz shows a strong preference.) The “tilt” of the conversation is rendered almost more literal than figurative by the further application of the adverb “steeply,” and the passage is full of verbs not unusual in themselves but distinctly odd in their application here: “slot,” “poach,” “crutching,” “goggled” (the middle two of these four also come with unusual prepositions: “poach on,” “crutching himself up”). These words call attention to themselves by their sound (in particular by their combinations of consonants) as well as their meaning. So does the clever and slightly painful formulation “some stabby, Roman-numeraled sequel”: almost too smart for its own good, the expression allows for a small eruption of pain or pathos through the irony. This sort of movie is “stabby” not just because people get stabbed in horror movies (and the perpendicular lines of the Roman numerals here come to seem almost weapons themselves, knives or javelins) but because it is the sort of movie fathers sundered from their sons inflict upon themselves; the “s” of “stabby” and the liquid “-aled” of “numeraled” get neatly wrapped up together in the final word “sequel.”

  Lutz takes an unusually extreme position, of course, on the merits of the tractional versus the topographic. In an interview, Lutz once said, in response to a question from Daniel Long about whether syntax was really sufficient unto itself or whether his notions of story and character might perhaps be beneficially expanded,

  I just do what my nervous system wants done or allows me to do. It is not in my nature to care about plots. I do not see storylines in life. Life hits me by the instant. My writing is a record of one instant after another, with causality mostly drained away. I am trying to describe how life and the world look and feel to me. The world has already been plentifully described otherwise. I have nothing to add to those descriptions and see no reason to try. Characterization is no concern of mine, either. The last thing I want to do is to bring somebody new into words. I practice birth control of a typographical kind.3

  Language need not be emphasized so much at the expense of the traditional pleasures of story, even given a commitment to acoustical elegance. The famous opening of one of the twentieth century’s best-loved novels offers a near-perfect invitation to perform this sort of reading on the tongue. Here are the first three paragraphs of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:

  Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

  She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

  Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.4

  The relationship between sound and sense interests narrator Humbert Humbert, and the obtrusive presence of his own tongue on the page prompts uncomfortable mimicry in the reader’s mouth.

  It is not only elaborate or fancy sentences that call for this sort of reading through the mouth. Nabokov and Lutz are similar in their preference for using words almost as neologisms, attending to their literal meanings and origins and then wrenching them sideways, like the knight’s move in chess, to create unexpected and often disorienting new sense. But very plain sentenc
es can also be “chewy.” Here is Lydia Davis’s short story “Boring Friends,” in its entirety (it is from the collection Samuel Johnson Is Indignant):

  We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.5

  Davis has taken concision as a storytelling practice perhaps as far as it can go without becoming mere gimmick (I am thinking of the fashion for the six-word life story, licensed on the Internet by an example that is attributed to Hemingway, though I doubt it originated with him: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”). The title story of that collection of Davis’s, for instance, reads in its entirety as follows, with the colon marking the break between title and story, “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: that Scotland has so few trees.”6 Davis’s sentences are as “mouthy” as Lutz’s, in a different way, but I do not know that the effect could be enjoyably extended (the counterexample of Lolita’s opening notwithstanding) over a fiction made up of tens of thousands of words; at any rate, a novel is likely to display more varied diction than either Lutz’s or Davis’s much more compressed stories.