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."

I love the drama and the cinematic quality of this scene. I see it in black and white, like a still photo  that gradually begins to move. Everything is frozen in anticipation of what has not yet happened--of the moment something significant will begin. We hold our breath, waiting for this world to unfreeze. Finally the clock ticks and movement enters the scene. The sentences become short and abrupt, like the chug-chug of the train that is about to arrive. You could not have torn the book from my hands at this point.

One of the ways Goolrick pulls us in is by using the second-person pronoun you. But his major tool is repetition. He echoes sounds (body, bird; silence, stillness; slice of time), single words (frozen); phrasing (you would not have noticed, you would have known) and sentence pattern (the three-word sentences at the end of the passage). The effect is to increase the drama and heighten the suspense.

I find the long sentence in the middle of the second paragraph too choppy, but I love the way he follows it with those short bursts of activity. He knows that one of the best ways to throw a spotlight on a sentence is to keep it short and place it after a long sentence.