Love the point about the biblical "forswear." That last Roth sentence also invites multiple revisits:
"But now with hormonal infusions ebbing, with the prostate enlarging, with probably no more than another few years of semi-dependable potency still his—with perhaps not that much more life remaining—here at the approach of the end of everything, he was being charged, on pain of losing her, to turn himself inside out."
Those four repeated "with" phrases can be analyzed formally but also work well as psychology, as a litany of complaints pulled from everyday life. The way the last part of the sentence is broken up with commas and more prepositions, making us wait to learn what the charge will be, adds both to the drama and to the character's indictment of himself.
The sentence is conversational and funny, and yet Roth makes us wait on the subject and verb ("he was being charged") as if we were reading Cicero. Not easy to do.
Great analysis. Yes, there's this Latinate build-up to the subject and verb, yet he does it in a conversational tone that verges on the stand-up comedian.
The very next (beast of a) sentence after the one you pulled does the same thing:
"She was Drenka Balich, the innkeeper's popular partner in business and marriage, esteemed for the attention she showered on all her guests, for her warmhearted, mothering tenderness not only with visiting children and the old folks but with the local girls who cleaned the rooms and served the meals, and he was the forgotten puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, a short, heavyset, white-bearded man with unnerving green eyes and painfully arthritic fingers who, had he said yes to Jim Henson some thirty-odd years earlier, before Sesame Street started up, when Henson had taken him to lunch on the Upper East Side and asked him to join his clique of four or five people, could have been inside Big Bird all these years."
He's an absolute master of prose in the English language.
So good, Courtney. I’ve never thought of writing in this way before but it’s absolutely how I judge a book. I agree that there is a certain degree of magic to permeable writing, and I think a lot of it comes down to whether or not you as a reader find it to be an authentic voice. This idea that you instinctively know great writing when you see it resonates so strongly with me. Thanks for attaching words to an otherwise mystical experience.
Glad it resonates with you, Jason! Yes, I think there's something to the idea of instinctively responding to authenticity in the voice. Does it seem somehow put-on or self-impressed, in ways that aren't stemming from the character or narrative voice but from the author? Then it's probably laminated.
Yes, absolutely! Voice is also one of those mystical qualities, but I think it’s something we inherently either like or don’t like. And I do think a lot of it has to do with whether or not we as the reader trust the character or narrator. I also agree that an overly lyrical voice can strike a false note if it seems forced. Then again, some of the best stylists seem to know how to pull it off.
Thank you Courtney, I've always wanted an excuse to stop reading stories or books that don't hold me either because of the story or the writing. I've been meaning to read A Little Life, loved the first page, and am hopefully committed to the next 700 plus.
Wow. I read a few pages from the first story in Paper Menagerie and loved it. As evidenced by this post, I have a high bar for that, but it felt like a Borgesian science fiction. Just ordered the whole book. Thanks so much for the rec, Sam!
Haha, I know it’s the most controversial one on here! People love it or absolutely hate it. I’m in the love camp. As I say: I can see why people think the writing is bad, and I can see why I might think so too of another author, but somehow this one just sucked me in.
Was it the prose or the content or the structure that you couldn’t deal with?
The prose is lovely, but I really struggled with how the book is almost entirely summary and barely gets into scene. The sentencing seemed designed to coddle and completely rip the tension out of a moment.
"And that was the first time Jude had sex." All that buildup for Jude's time as a boy-whore, and that's what we get? Oh well!
Also, the voice stays too samey across POVs. Granted, all the characters are hyper-educated New Yorkers, so I'll give them all the power of "sounding smart." Nothing anyone said or thought felt intuitive or unique to any particular character.
I’m so glad this is your problem with the book! So many people hate the content (“trauma porn,” which I get to a degree), but I really respect a dislike of the predominant narrative mechanism as the reason to dislike a book.
I actually think I’m attracted to novels written more in summary than in scene. Or at least novels that are more on the expository side, or that dip in and out of scene without being too beholden to scene.
I totally agree that the voices are same-y. Of the voices, though, the JB section in the middle—essentially a novella—was by far my favorite part of the book. I thought he had the most unique voice. Then he disappears!
I think I was so consistently flabbergasted by the boldness of these nonsensical choices (Malcolm too disappears, very early, and there’s some random second-person at some points) that I came around to respecting the book. Like: This is the totally unwieldy beast that this author had to write. Good for her! I’m in the presence of a bizarre vision!
If “And that was the first time Jude had sex” is an actual quote, I do have to laugh at the badness of it out of context.
Trauma porn? I'd call it "lite trauma erotica" at best - since the language obfuscates and makes the reader do the work of inventing what happened - which is a cute way for the writer to not do her fucking job and write things as they occurred.
Balancing show vs tell is tricky, because a story gripping you by the ear and leading you through the moment-to-moment action gets stale fast.
I almost fucked with the JB chapter, if only it were as voicey as JB was in dialogue!
As for the second-person, was that Harold? Totally made me wonder if the whole book was actually from Harold's POV and he's just speculating his way through the experiences of all the other characters. Also, I think there was an affair that gets mentioned in these chapters, that Harold is having sex with a student or something, and it NEVER COMES UP AGAIN.
So that whole, "Then he disappears!" comment is a giant neon sign pointing at another problem: A Little Life forgets its key objects, characters, and themes. Hanya will introduce something you think might be important, and then completely forget about it.
And yes, "That was the first time Jude had sex" is an actual quote...
“Balancing show vs tell is tricky, because a story gripping you by the ear and leading you through the moment-to-moment action gets stale fast.” Totally agree, and really well said.
To me, what hooked me in the Fleischman excerpt was "“I need to be done in ten because I have to pick up Bella from ballet.”" rather than the "our"--partially because I missed the "our" until you pointed it out, but I think more because it punctures the lascivious fantasy Toby inhabits for most of the paragraph. It felt similar to the line from My Brilliant Friend, in that it sets up a smooth, relatable experience for the protagonist, then throws in a bucket of sobering cold water.
Great point. He's talking at the start about how these are not the women of his teens and twenties, then he extols all the virtues of that difference...and then this one sneaks in. Puncturing the lascivious fantasy, as you say. It's also a good setup for the main conflict of the book, which is going to revolve around his children, so that's a great pick-up too. Have you read the book?
I couldn’t put it down. For me, that weird narrative distance thing with the “our” was the extra feature that put more suspense under everything, but it pulled me right in even without that.
Absolutely, and I think "suspense" captures it even if we each found it in different sentences. But now I wonder if you have any thoughts about analyzing laminated prose? I'm eager to test the null hypothesis by digging up books that I bounced off of myself...
I think I’m going to do another post about lamination, since this one was about permeability. The problem is I don’t want to throw living authors under the bus as examples of bad prose, and most of the lamination I find is in contemporary authors. (Probably because the bad prose of the past has not made it into the canon.)
But I think false lyricism is my number one problem with books I find laminated. Overindulgence in language that doesn’t merit indulgence. Language that draws attention to itself or its poetry, but has nothing interesting or new to actually say when you go and give it your attention.
Verbing nouns might be my biggest pet peeve on this score. “She paintinged the room,” or something, to say she hung art. I hate it so much I find it difficult to do myself, but so many authors praised as lyrical do it.
Do you have a sense of what makes things laminated for you?
I have some theories, but like you said, I'd hate to trash talk a working author. Although, I'm curious enough to ask my spouse/first reader if there are any WIPs of mine that still feel "cold" to her, which I have an inkling might be a related concept!
I think I notice it mostly in non-fiction writers- two that come to mind are David Grann and Isabel Wilkerson. Hanya Yanagihara and Taffy Brodesser-Akner both wrote for periodicals too.
Good point about Yanagihara and Brodesser-Akner, my own fiction examples. And I agree that Grann and Wilkerson are quite readable, too. So I think I'm on board with your theory! I'd guess it's because these are writers used to getting to the point, capturing an audience fast and holding their attention, not having the page space to waste on filler. But I'll keep an eye out for this pattern, too. Thanks for pointing this out
I'd say it's changed only insofar as I'm more willing to trust my own instincts about it now. When I was a more immature reader, I outsourced my decision-making about good writing to e.g. literary prizes, best-of-the-year lists, etc. I think there's a place for that as you're developing your tastes, to make sure you're reading widely enough -- but even then, I often thought, "*This* is supposed to be good writing?"
So now I trust my own instincts from the first sentence or paragraph, instead.
What about you, do you have a sense of your reading tastes changing over time?
I do, in so far as I now look back on some work I used to like and wonder how I could have gotten through the first page. For the past few years I've been primarily reading 'genera', and permeability is often overlooked for the sake of immediacy of plot and world building. A notable exception, and one that I think turned me into a better reader, is the first sentence in William Gibson's Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." It hits me every time.
Now I find I have to fight my way through a lot of gristle to read scify/fantasy, at least until the point the plot takes on a gravity of its own.
Yes, I think the immediacy of plot and world-building often pushes me out, if it's not accompanied by something that justifies itself as prose rather than basically transcribed TV or movies. "The color of television tuned to a dead channel" is great.
I think there's a higher bar now for the written word to justify itself as separate from what film can do--but ironically, because film exists, the written word starts to imitate it, to its own detriment.
Love the point about the biblical "forswear." That last Roth sentence also invites multiple revisits:
"But now with hormonal infusions ebbing, with the prostate enlarging, with probably no more than another few years of semi-dependable potency still his—with perhaps not that much more life remaining—here at the approach of the end of everything, he was being charged, on pain of losing her, to turn himself inside out."
Those four repeated "with" phrases can be analyzed formally but also work well as psychology, as a litany of complaints pulled from everyday life. The way the last part of the sentence is broken up with commas and more prepositions, making us wait to learn what the charge will be, adds both to the drama and to the character's indictment of himself.
The sentence is conversational and funny, and yet Roth makes us wait on the subject and verb ("he was being charged") as if we were reading Cicero. Not easy to do.
Great analysis. Yes, there's this Latinate build-up to the subject and verb, yet he does it in a conversational tone that verges on the stand-up comedian.
The very next (beast of a) sentence after the one you pulled does the same thing:
"She was Drenka Balich, the innkeeper's popular partner in business and marriage, esteemed for the attention she showered on all her guests, for her warmhearted, mothering tenderness not only with visiting children and the old folks but with the local girls who cleaned the rooms and served the meals, and he was the forgotten puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, a short, heavyset, white-bearded man with unnerving green eyes and painfully arthritic fingers who, had he said yes to Jim Henson some thirty-odd years earlier, before Sesame Street started up, when Henson had taken him to lunch on the Upper East Side and asked him to join his clique of four or five people, could have been inside Big Bird all these years."
He's an absolute master of prose in the English language.
So good, Courtney. I’ve never thought of writing in this way before but it’s absolutely how I judge a book. I agree that there is a certain degree of magic to permeable writing, and I think a lot of it comes down to whether or not you as a reader find it to be an authentic voice. This idea that you instinctively know great writing when you see it resonates so strongly with me. Thanks for attaching words to an otherwise mystical experience.
Glad it resonates with you, Jason! Yes, I think there's something to the idea of instinctively responding to authenticity in the voice. Does it seem somehow put-on or self-impressed, in ways that aren't stemming from the character or narrative voice but from the author? Then it's probably laminated.
Yes, absolutely! Voice is also one of those mystical qualities, but I think it’s something we inherently either like or don’t like. And I do think a lot of it has to do with whether or not we as the reader trust the character or narrator. I also agree that an overly lyrical voice can strike a false note if it seems forced. Then again, some of the best stylists seem to know how to pull it off.
Thank you Courtney, I've always wanted an excuse to stop reading stories or books that don't hold me either because of the story or the writing. I've been meaning to read A Little Life, loved the first page, and am hopefully committed to the next 700 plus.
You’ve got the excuse!
I enjoyed this framing. I’ll be thinking about it for some time. Thank you! (And—to answer—I think Ken Liu’s science fiction is plenty permeable!)
Glad it resonated with you! And I haven’t read Ken Liu. Where would I start?
A couple suggestions from which you can pick:
1) his translations into English of The Three Body Problem series, which follows humanity and its first extraterrestrial encounters
2) The Paper Menagerie, his collection of magical realism short stories
3) The Grace of Kings, the first of his four epic fantasy books that blend politics and silkpunk!
Frankly I’ve read and loved all three so it really does come down to preference of style.
Wow. I read a few pages from the first story in Paper Menagerie and loved it. As evidenced by this post, I have a high bar for that, but it felt like a Borgesian science fiction. Just ordered the whole book. Thanks so much for the rec, Sam!
Oh I’m so glad you like it!!!! Let us know what you think about each story!
That’s a fun exercise—I will!
You're a hero for being able to get through A Little Life.
Haha, I know it’s the most controversial one on here! People love it or absolutely hate it. I’m in the love camp. As I say: I can see why people think the writing is bad, and I can see why I might think so too of another author, but somehow this one just sucked me in.
Was it the prose or the content or the structure that you couldn’t deal with?
Oh, don't get me started.
The prose is lovely, but I really struggled with how the book is almost entirely summary and barely gets into scene. The sentencing seemed designed to coddle and completely rip the tension out of a moment.
"And that was the first time Jude had sex." All that buildup for Jude's time as a boy-whore, and that's what we get? Oh well!
Also, the voice stays too samey across POVs. Granted, all the characters are hyper-educated New Yorkers, so I'll give them all the power of "sounding smart." Nothing anyone said or thought felt intuitive or unique to any particular character.
All the characters sound like the author.
What about the book worked for you?
I’m so glad this is your problem with the book! So many people hate the content (“trauma porn,” which I get to a degree), but I really respect a dislike of the predominant narrative mechanism as the reason to dislike a book.
I actually think I’m attracted to novels written more in summary than in scene. Or at least novels that are more on the expository side, or that dip in and out of scene without being too beholden to scene.
I totally agree that the voices are same-y. Of the voices, though, the JB section in the middle—essentially a novella—was by far my favorite part of the book. I thought he had the most unique voice. Then he disappears!
I think I was so consistently flabbergasted by the boldness of these nonsensical choices (Malcolm too disappears, very early, and there’s some random second-person at some points) that I came around to respecting the book. Like: This is the totally unwieldy beast that this author had to write. Good for her! I’m in the presence of a bizarre vision!
If “And that was the first time Jude had sex” is an actual quote, I do have to laugh at the badness of it out of context.
Trauma porn? I'd call it "lite trauma erotica" at best - since the language obfuscates and makes the reader do the work of inventing what happened - which is a cute way for the writer to not do her fucking job and write things as they occurred.
Balancing show vs tell is tricky, because a story gripping you by the ear and leading you through the moment-to-moment action gets stale fast.
I almost fucked with the JB chapter, if only it were as voicey as JB was in dialogue!
As for the second-person, was that Harold? Totally made me wonder if the whole book was actually from Harold's POV and he's just speculating his way through the experiences of all the other characters. Also, I think there was an affair that gets mentioned in these chapters, that Harold is having sex with a student or something, and it NEVER COMES UP AGAIN.
So that whole, "Then he disappears!" comment is a giant neon sign pointing at another problem: A Little Life forgets its key objects, characters, and themes. Hanya will introduce something you think might be important, and then completely forget about it.
And yes, "That was the first time Jude had sex" is an actual quote...
“Balancing show vs tell is tricky, because a story gripping you by the ear and leading you through the moment-to-moment action gets stale fast.” Totally agree, and really well said.
To me, what hooked me in the Fleischman excerpt was "“I need to be done in ten because I have to pick up Bella from ballet.”" rather than the "our"--partially because I missed the "our" until you pointed it out, but I think more because it punctures the lascivious fantasy Toby inhabits for most of the paragraph. It felt similar to the line from My Brilliant Friend, in that it sets up a smooth, relatable experience for the protagonist, then throws in a bucket of sobering cold water.
Great point. He's talking at the start about how these are not the women of his teens and twenties, then he extols all the virtues of that difference...and then this one sneaks in. Puncturing the lascivious fantasy, as you say. It's also a good setup for the main conflict of the book, which is going to revolve around his children, so that's a great pick-up too. Have you read the book?
No, but it's been increasingly on my list!
I couldn’t put it down. For me, that weird narrative distance thing with the “our” was the extra feature that put more suspense under everything, but it pulled me right in even without that.
Absolutely, and I think "suspense" captures it even if we each found it in different sentences. But now I wonder if you have any thoughts about analyzing laminated prose? I'm eager to test the null hypothesis by digging up books that I bounced off of myself...
I think I’m going to do another post about lamination, since this one was about permeability. The problem is I don’t want to throw living authors under the bus as examples of bad prose, and most of the lamination I find is in contemporary authors. (Probably because the bad prose of the past has not made it into the canon.)
But I think false lyricism is my number one problem with books I find laminated. Overindulgence in language that doesn’t merit indulgence. Language that draws attention to itself or its poetry, but has nothing interesting or new to actually say when you go and give it your attention.
Verbing nouns might be my biggest pet peeve on this score. “She paintinged the room,” or something, to say she hung art. I hate it so much I find it difficult to do myself, but so many authors praised as lyrical do it.
Do you have a sense of what makes things laminated for you?
I have some theories, but like you said, I'd hate to trash talk a working author. Although, I'm curious enough to ask my spouse/first reader if there are any WIPs of mine that still feel "cold" to her, which I have an inkling might be a related concept!
My working theory is that books by writers with experience writing for newspapers and magazines are more permeable. Why that is? I have no idea.
Interesting! Hemingway is the first to spring to mind, and Dickens, but who are you thinking of?
I think I notice it mostly in non-fiction writers- two that come to mind are David Grann and Isabel Wilkerson. Hanya Yanagihara and Taffy Brodesser-Akner both wrote for periodicals too.
Good point about Yanagihara and Brodesser-Akner, my own fiction examples. And I agree that Grann and Wilkerson are quite readable, too. So I think I'm on board with your theory! I'd guess it's because these are writers used to getting to the point, capturing an audience fast and holding their attention, not having the page space to waste on filler. But I'll keep an eye out for this pattern, too. Thanks for pointing this out
I loved this.
Thanks, Daniela! Glad to hear.
Have you noticed what’s permeable and what’s laminated changing as you mature as a reader or has it been a consistent quality?
I'd say it's changed only insofar as I'm more willing to trust my own instincts about it now. When I was a more immature reader, I outsourced my decision-making about good writing to e.g. literary prizes, best-of-the-year lists, etc. I think there's a place for that as you're developing your tastes, to make sure you're reading widely enough -- but even then, I often thought, "*This* is supposed to be good writing?"
So now I trust my own instincts from the first sentence or paragraph, instead.
What about you, do you have a sense of your reading tastes changing over time?
I do, in so far as I now look back on some work I used to like and wonder how I could have gotten through the first page. For the past few years I've been primarily reading 'genera', and permeability is often overlooked for the sake of immediacy of plot and world building. A notable exception, and one that I think turned me into a better reader, is the first sentence in William Gibson's Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." It hits me every time.
Now I find I have to fight my way through a lot of gristle to read scify/fantasy, at least until the point the plot takes on a gravity of its own.
Yes, I think the immediacy of plot and world-building often pushes me out, if it's not accompanied by something that justifies itself as prose rather than basically transcribed TV or movies. "The color of television tuned to a dead channel" is great.
I think there's a higher bar now for the written word to justify itself as separate from what film can do--but ironically, because film exists, the written word starts to imitate it, to its own detriment.