A Matter of Style

While I can't speak for everyone, it's hard for me to imagine a writer who isn't prejudiced one way or the other about literary style. It won't come as a surprise to anyone who's read even a few sentences of my work that I prefer dry, clear, sharp writing to robust, purple prose. Given the choice between Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne, or to be more contemporary, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, I'll go for Austen and Roth every time. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed the works of flashier writers ranging from Henry Fielding to Thomas Hardy to David Foster Wallace. But there's a difference in my appreciation of the two types of writing. With Hardy, I'll slug it out with his winding sentences and use of arcane vocabulary like "dumbledore" for the rewards of his bizarre plots and unforgettable characters. When I read a master of concision like E. M. Forster, however, I get pleasure out of his plot and characters as well as the cool elegance of a line like, "To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it."

During the `80s and for a part of the `90s, it seemed as though lush, muscular, flashy prose wasn't quite so commonplace. Minimalists like Raymond Carver held more sway, particularly among graduates of MFA programs. These days, however, walking through the literary fiction section of a bookstore you can't help but trip over plump four-hundred-plus page books jam-packed with zany characters, plot twists, and marathon-length sentences that you don't read so much as decipher, like a message written in Morse Code.

That's not to say the minimalists are inherently superior to other writers. At its worst, minimalism can be a cover for lazy, unimaginative, and dull writing, the kind you might encounter in a Dick and Jane reader. However, maximalism at its worst suffers from much the same disease, lazy, unimaginative, and dull writing that because it's so busy can sometimes seem more impressive than it actually is.

Take, for example, an excerpt from the novel "The Amalgamation Polka" by Stephen Wright, recently published to high acclaim. Here is a representative sentence: "She flung open the window, admitting the clemency of spring, its sweet pastoral breath, and the nervous twitter and rustle of sparrows on the roof." In English, this sentence means that she opened the window and felt a spring breeze and heard birds outside. But that's not good enough for Wright, who wants his character to "fling" open the window (for no apparent reason I could find other than to impress the reader with the choice of "fling" instead of "open"). He then gives us "the clemency of spring," a metaphor that made me pause, but for the wrong reasons. Clemency from what? Winter, I suppose. This leads me to wonder, what sin has been committed to earn the dire punishment of winter? Who handed down this stern judgment? And to whose grace do we owe this welcome "clemency"? "The nervous twitter and rustle of sparrows on the roof" sounds alright to me; that's a specific, if uninspired, bit of detail I can wrap my mind around. The same cannot be said for the cloying and vague "sweet pastoral breath." Maybe this phrase is an attempt to imitate or spoof an archaic, formalized style of writing. So why does it remain merely an attempt at parody instead of a direct hit? For me, it's because the choice of words seems like a forced reach for a kind of majestic tone that the writer isn't himself comfortable with. It reeks of the kind of pretense you often hear in public speakers like Jesse Jackson who are so anxious to pass themselves off as intellectuals that they confuse words like "tragical" and "tragic" or "orientate" and "orient."

Compare the laxness of these word choices with another pastoral image, this from the forthcoming novel by Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan: "The world was golden around me, the evening sun setting light to a row of swaying alders; the alders abuzz with the warble of siskin birds, those striped yellow fellows from our nursery rhymes. I turned pastoral for a moment, my thoughts running to Beloved Papa, who was born in a village and for whom village life should be prescribed, as only there--half asleep in a cowshed, naked and ugly, but sober all the same--do the soft tremors of what could be happiness cross his swollen Aramaic face." Wright gives us sparrows, but Shteyngart gives us "alders abuzz with the warble of siskin birds." Which writer would you rather go bird-watching with? Wright's sparrows are merely there for window dressing, to give us an idea of a real scene. Shteyngart's alders, however, are not only specifically observed, but also they connect the image of the countryside to the theme of childhood innocence ("those striped yellow fellows from our nursery rhymes,"), which in turn leads naturally and elegantly to memories of the narrator's father. Every word in Shteyngart's sentence seems chosen for a precise effect, and yet no one could accuse Shteyngart of dullness. His sentences are every bit as lively and lush as Wright's, with that added advantages of meaning and sense.

So how do we account for the acclaim Wright has received for "the vibrant beauty and savory brilliance of every paragraph" of his writing, "the untrammeled delight it offers to anyone lucky enough to read it"? I can't, except to say that when reading Maximialists, critics are often so distracted by the strangeness of the writing that they don't stop to take the sentences to task and rather accept their somersaulting on faith. It's a little like watching a movie with expensive special effects, when we're so dazed from all the fireworks on screen that when the smoke clears, we forget to notice there's nothing else there.