This is an impressive piece of voice, which makes sense coming from Crace, who is an excellent stylist. Walter Thirsk’s narration of the dissolution of his village is perfectly constructed by his author, mannered enough to be timeless without becoming archaic, and methodical enough to serve character without cheating interest or incident.
Nan A Talese / Doubleday 02.12.13
April 23, 2013, 10:41am Comments
I feel like Woke Up Lonely suffers from a mis-fit, between the ambitions of its scale and themes and its execution, and between the complexity of its language and the simple absurdity of its plot. And style, here, is a symptom, a clue: ironic and distanced and very highly wrought, but working in broad strokes that wind up seeming nebulous. The backdrop of the story — which involves a mass-movement cult, and government surveillance, and North Korea — is a big canvas; in the middle of that canvas is a set of Rube Goldberg mechanisms that resolve into a reluctant hostage crisis. But the stuff that works well in Lonely are individual stories, single-character vignettes, while the big stuff — the cult and its ambitions, especially — remain frustratingly amorphous. So you wind up with formulations like “antecedent to purdah among friends” that clearly mean something, without quite knowing what.
April 11, 2013, 11:00am Comments
Skizzen is not the only one who overworks his words; this isn’t an important moment in the book, but it is a very good example of Gass’s language, as he plays off of the pun on “curve” to emphasize Skizzen’s haplessness between the society of corner-cutting boys and the inflexibility of Miss Gyer: there’s a great deal of information coded into Gass’s language in this very short space, and it’s very poised and witty and intentional. And this is a minor moment, not anything complex, in a book that concerns itself with complex ideas; Gass’s prose tends to ornate, long, late-style sentences, each one of which bears the mark of the same kind of pressure on its language, each one of which does precisely what it’s author wants it to do. It’s instructive, and it’s exhausting.
April 07, 2013, 11:00am Comments
November 28, 2011, 7:29am Comments
“‘I have a nagging suspicion that only about forty percent of what you write is true. I also think your people all speak alike, at least you and Friend and Romp.’
‘Well, Morris,’ I said, ‘style can be infectious. Look at blue jeans. I am friends with Friend and Friend is friends with Romp.’”
Then again, Giraldi knows this, and — even though Busy Monsters is composed largely of a voice and a series of set pieces — a bunch of the set pieces are good, and the voice eventually works in them. Which means that, for a reader enamored of (say) Sam Lipsyte, I’d imagine this to be great, or at least safely worth an if-you-liked-then-you’ll-like. Because, after 300 pages, even the stingiest version of me is won-over-enough to stop nitpicking.
August 05, 2011, 12:00pm Comments
“A sort of fond sadness meandered through Shade. It was partly because he loved his brother and knew him perfectly, partly because he did not know him at all. The unlighted chamber where one’s true and most secret longings and convictions are housed has a door that is impressively sealed. The more you turn the knob and peek through the keyhole, the more you have to guess, and the less you know.”
Absolutely a piece that’s carried by style, as it’s rooted in a place and a geography; this is a book that doesn’t pull you along to find out what happens, because mostly you already know and the plot’s just something to hang everything else on. Instead, it’s a book you wind up reading slower to keep up with the nuances and stay within the voice. Or, really, voices: Woodrell is great at dialect, at rhythms of spoken language, and in his narration he drops into a southern gothic semiformality that’s just as distinctive. Both of these voices are cadenced, rhythmic; the gulf between narration and speech, high and low, is huge and striking.
“There had been a time, not too long ago, when Francois has been energetic in his defense of the stepped-on multitudes, passionate in his pleas for those mendicants before the bar, those old neighborhood losers whose humanity he would not deny. He’d had a threat in his stance toward the system that had not always been kind to those close to him, and a mind quick to become belligerent in his quest of justice for the smallfry.”
reprinted in The Bayou Trilogy, Mulholland Books 04.28.11
May 11, 2011, 10:21am Comments
One of the keynotes of any discussion of Mitchell’s work winds up being his mastery of genre, his ability to mimic styles. This generally gets brought up in the second or third paragraph of any review or profile. For all his ability with pastiche, Mitchell is also an amazing writer at the sentence level — here folding together both Jacob’s embarrassment, his regret and happiness in his infatuation, with the pastoral scene of the physick garden he’s in (and all the medical and spiritual resonances of that); right down to the obvious, intentional, clinking flaw of the rhyme in the middle of the passage.
July 04, 2010, 7:06am Comments
Stylistically clean as Hemingway: no fat, no embellishment, no fancy punctuation, just facts. And each of the facts carefully selected, dispassionately sorted, to give the clearest possible picture, and to allow the story to continue building velocity, because the forward motion of the story, its inevitability as a tragedy, is the most important thing.
Millipede 2007 / Julian Messner 1947
November 15, 2009, 3:53pm Comments
