The Haunting Art of Cormac McCarthy

I was going to write about humor on this perfect spring day, but I can't find my Dave Barry books. So I reached at random into my Great Sentences folder and pulled out the opening of The Road, about as far from humor as it's possible to get. Even when what's being described is the lifeless, lightless world that remains after an unspecified apocalypse, McCarthy's prose is worth studying. Its stark imagery, no-nonsense sentence structure and punctuation, and subtle sound effects evoke the setting so vividly that I shudder every time I read it. But I keep reading. The novel opens with this riveting passage:

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkenss and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the days of it and the years without cease."

Hooking the Reader

I enjoyed Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife a couple months ago, and I remember being struck with the power of the opening scene, which hooked me and reeled me in to a story that continued to be addictive. When I look back at it now, I see that it's much like McCann's opening  (Feb. 10, "Look! Up in the Sky!") and also that it's uneven. See what you think:

"It was bitter cold, the air electric with all that had not happened yet. The world stood stock still, four o'clock dead on. Nothing moved anywhere, not a body, not a bird; for a split second there was only silence, there was only stillness. Figures stood frozen in the frozen land, men, women, and children.

"If you had been there you would not have noticed. You would not have noticed your own stillness in this thin slice of time. But, if you had been there and you had, in some unfathomable way, recorded the stillness, taken a negative of it as the glass plate receives the light, to be developed later, you would have known, when the thought, the recollection was finally developed, that this was the moment it began. The clock ticked. The hour struck. Everything moved again. The train was late."

The Arrangement of Words

Free-sampling first chapters is one of the joys of owning a Kindle. I no longer jot down titles suggested by friends or reviewers--I just pick up my little machine and instantly download the sample. It's a great way to find out, without investing a cent, if a book grabs you, and it's also a portal to great sentences, since writers know that to get published they have to leave prospective agents in a state of shock and awe in just a few paragraphs.

I've just sampled the openings of two novels by Irish writer John Banville, who has indeed  left me in awe. As one reviewer asked, can this man write a single sentence that isn't beautiful? I love his openings:

"They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide."  - The Sea

"Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works." - The Infinities

The Rhythm of Prose

Here's the opening sentence of Raphael Sabatini's Scaramouche: "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

There's nothing overtly unusual about this sentence. Its words are short and ordinary. Its sentence structure is clear and uncomplicated. What makes it so catchy?

What grabs our attention here, I think, is the music underlying the words. Read the sentence aloud and tap your foot or finger as you feel the beat. To me it sounds like this:

He was BORN with a GIFT of LAUGHter // and a SENSE that the WORLD was MAD.

Glints in the Sand

Reading Phyllis Theroux's The Journal Keeper feels like strolling along a beach, my breath slowing as I take in the horizon, my skin warmed by the sun. Every once in awhile something glistens in the sand ahead or pricks my bare foot. I stop to look more closely and find a shell or a stone whose beauty I'd almost missed. I  slide it into my pocket to take home for closer examination.

"What I continually fail to note," she writes, "...is the heart-breaking, light-filled brilliance of the world I swim through like an unappreciative fish every day. Let the record show that I am grateful." 

Looking at these sentences under my desk lamp, I see--no, I hear-- that it's not just the reminder to see the beauty around us that captures my attention. It's the repeated vowel sounds--assonance again--humming their melody under the words: filled and brilliance; swim, unappreciative and fish. Who knew that the syllable prec could ever rhyme with fish?