Images of life and death

Thanks to Ken Ledford for sending this gorgeous opening passage from The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy:

"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun."

We start with a macro view that sets the time, place, weather, and mood. Then Roy's camera zooms in on specific images: crows gorging, "dustgreen" trees, overripe fruit, flies drunk on the abundant life--and then, abruptly, dead. I love the assonance of "dissolute bluebottles" "fatly baffled" and the echo of "stun" and "sun." And I like the way Roy varies her sentence length--some are snapshots, some movie scenes. 

I listened to the audio version of this book when it came out, and I had trouble following it. The more poetic a writer's style is, the more I need to see it with my eyes. 

Sunset, Moonrise

Anyone who has read Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides, or even just seen the movie, will remember the scene where Lila Wingo first shows her children the simultaneous sunset and moonrise over the marshes. Conroy is sometimes guilty of overwriting, but here I think his language is as breathtaking as the natural beauty he captures.

"The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendent, the depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks. The moon then rose quickly, rose like a bird from the water, from the trees, from the islands, and climbed straight up—gold, then yellow, then pale yellow, pale silver, silver-bright, then something miraculous, immaculate, and beyond silver, a color native only to southern nights."

The first sentence balances parallel phrases in imitation of the sun and moon, then moves through layers of description that mirror the sun's descent. In the second sentence, the cadence of "from" phrases and gradations of color lift us up with the moonrise. Every time I read this I feel I have witnessed two miracles: one of nature, the other of art.

When you just can't stop reading

From the opening of Mark Richard's House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home:

 "SAY YOU HAVE A 'SPECIAL CHILD,' which in the South means one between Down’s and dyslexic. Birth him with his father away on Army maneuvers along East Texas bayous. Give him his only visitor in the military hospital his father’s father, a sometime railroad man, sometime hired gun for Huey Long with a Louisiana Special Police badge. Take the infant to Manhattan, Kansas, in winter, where the only visitor is a Chinese peeping tom, little yellow face in the windows during the cold nights. Further frighten the mother, age twenty, with the child’s convulsions. . . . Move the family to Kirbyville, Texas, where the father cruises timber in the big woods. Fill the back porch with things the father brings home: raccoons, lost bird dogs, stacks of saws, and machetes. Give the child a sandbox to play in, in which scorpions build nests. Let the mother cut the grass and run over rattlesnakes, shredding them all over the yard. Make the mother cry and miss her mother."

It had been a long time since I'd read a book in a single day, but Richard's (pronounced Ri-SHARD) memoir grabbed me and refused to let go. It's beautifully written in many ways, but what gives it its narrative power is the unusual use of second person. Instead of I, Richard uses you, a risky choice made famous by Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City. In the paragraph above, he turns the opening into a cadenced set of orders, almost military in tone. Though not literally directed at the readers, they nevertheless compel our attention.

Most of the narration isn't in the imperative mode, but the hypnotic effect of the repeated you is always present:

"You are lost at sea in New York City, headphones on, Bible tract in your back pocket, the seafaring novel roaring in your head, the heaving concrete, headlong black foaming ocean, a pitched deck where men hold on for life in the shadows, a Master somewhere on the upper deck, unseen but seeing, seeing you, no urgency, no destination, no end to the night, you sail under reefed sail, a stranger pulls you by your collar from stepping in front of an express bus on Fifty-seventh Street."

This sentence, with its piled-up, rhythmic phrases and its stream-of-conscious immediacy, doesn't need second person to be powerful. It would work well with the more conventional I or he. But all those you's reach out for us. We become the subject of the story. And when you're watching a life you never knew you had unfold on the pages you hold in your hands, you find it hard to walk away.

The power of three, not to mention the bdelygmia

I've been meaning to look closely at the language of Barack Obama's speeches. Richard Nordquist beat me to it in his ever-fascinating About.com column on all things linguistic. In his analysis of Obama's rhetoric, he focuses on the President's use of tricolons--series of three items.

Don't visit Nordquist's site unless you have hours to take delight in his collection of rhetorical devices (unpronounceable Greek names like bdelygmia offered at no charge), examples of great writing from the classical to the contemporary (the metaphors of Dr. Gregory House, for example), practical advice, and humor.

In the tribe of the sentence watchers

"Some people are bird watchers, others are celebrity watchers; still others are flora and fauna watchers. I belong to the tribe of sentence watchers. Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences. I am always on the lookout for sentences that take your breath away, for sentences that make you say, 'Isn’t that something?' or 'What a sentence!'” 

"Alone a word is just a word, a part of speech clustered in a category; it looks over at other words it would like to have a relationship with (it’s almost a dating situation) but has no way of connecting with them. And then a verb shows up, providing a way of linking up noun to adjective, and suddenly you have a sentence, a proposition, a little world. 'Beautiful Joan sighed.' 'John was angry.' 'I am proud.' 'Crucial decisions await'."

from How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish

Go here for Entertainment Weekly reader ideas of great sentences. It's a motley collection, punctuated by the kind of outraged comments I stopped teaching eighth grade to get away from. But there are a few sentences worth reading.

A better collection is here. Number 8 gets my vote, maybe because I hadn't heard it before.

Dash away, all!

Back when I wrote twenty-page letters on lilac-scented stationery—yes, I’m that old—a friend pointed out that I used more dashes than periods. Dashes still pepper my informal writing—see the previous sentence—oops, I can’t stop!--because they enable us to capture the irregular ebb and flow of ordinary conversation with all its starts and stops and interruptions and about-faces.

Dickens knew this when he gave Esther Summerson her voice in Bleak House: “It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other birthdays—none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as I knew from what I heard the girls relate to one another—there were none on mine.” If Dickens were writing today, he’d probably use but’s or periods instead, but I like the dashes—they highlight the contrast between the other girls’ lives and Esther’s. She continues to define herself by what she is not, set off by dashes: “I was brought up, from my earliest remembrances—like some of the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming—by my godmother.”

When the words just won't come out of your mouth

"Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions." 

This sentence from James Geary's I is an Other, an exploration of metaphor, stopped me cold, but not because it was beautiful. The writing had been smooth until I got here, but suddenly I felt as if I'd stepped off a paved road into knee-deep mud. I looked back at the sentence to see why.

It wasn't that I had trouble understanding the meaning, but rather that the words, even when read silently, did not want to come out of my mouth. Too many long words? Too many s sounds? Three repetitions of the unlovely syllable "tions" followed by a "tious''? For all of the above, this sentence failed the read-aloud test for me--a test all good writing must pass. Every piece of writing has a unique voice, one we hear even when we're reading silently.

I'm happy to report that the clunky sentence wasn't typical of Geary's style, which is mostly clear and fluid and sometimes rises above the quotidian. Isn't that a great word?  "Metaphor," says Geary, "slips a pin into the quotidian." Here I like the contrast of short, simple words--no modifiers--with the four-syllable Latinate quotidian. The subtle assonance of the short-i sound (slips, into, quotidian) adds some music. The pin, as Geary explained in the previous sentence, stands for a prick of sensation. He goes on: "By mixing the foreign with the familiar, the marvelous with the mundane, metaphor makes the world sting and tingle." Three pairs of well-chosen words (foreign and familiar, marvelous and mundane, sting and tingle) use sound effects to make their point beautifully. All is forgiven.