Reading Style

by Jenny Davidson

  Another kind of memorable novelistic detail figures in the world of history or human psychology rather than existing primarily in the register of style or as a turn of phrase. I have two favorite examples of this sort of detail, instances I think of very regularly; I suppose one might accumulate a much larger collection, but these two are memorable particularly for being at once minor, even insignificant and at the same time sweepingly effective in terms of establishing some aspect of a setting or a relationship. In George Pelecanos’s novel Hard Revolution, set in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, the protagonist walks into a diner called the Three-Star: “Ella Lockheart, the Three-Star’s counter-and-booth waitress, poured watery A&P brand ketchup into bottles marked Heinz.”2 It’s an unassuming detail; this is a very ordinary part of the quotidian routine in a familiar location, something you might well see happening if you stop by a diner regularly. But it very nicely conjures something of the down-market nature, the casual acceptance of deception, the inherent seediness of the physical and moral milieu in which the story is set. The specificity of the detail is verbal as well as visual: A&P is a name evocative for me not just of the John Updike story of that title but of the years I spent as a young child in 1970s Wilmington, Delaware, where people said “I’m going to the A&P” as though it were synonymous with “going to the grocery store.”

  My other example is drawn from Stephen King’s Needful Things, a novel whose plot involves a sinister antique store where purchasers can buy whatever it is they most need, but only at the cost of their souls. What the novel’s female protagonist craves is relief from the pain of severe arthritis in her hands. Her boyfriend is the town cop: he is an observant and perceptive man who knows that dialing a telephone is physically very painful for her, even on a good day but especially on a bad day. When he sees her dial a number and doesn’t hear pain in her voice, he accordingly makes the wrong judgment about what sort of day she is having: “because she was on the far side of the room,” the unobtrusive third-person narration coolly runs, “he was unable to see that this phone—and all the others—had been changed earlier that day to the type with the oversized fingerpads.”3 Taken out of context, this is a neutral detail, but in the context of the story, it is intensely ominous, the first of a number of ordinary small misjudgments and mishaps that rapidly escalate into the kind of supernatural catastrophe whose depiction is one of King’s specialties. This detail would translate effectively into a language other than English, although I suppose the passage of time may have rendered landline telephones, with or without oversized keypads, relatively little known to a younger generation; it is much less grounded in specifics of time and place, at any rate, than the ketchup example of the previous paragraph.

  Tim Parks has recently argued that in the contemporary world of literature, pressures both internal and external tend to push writers in the direction of less complexity, with many novelists “perform[ing] a translation within their own languages” or “discover[ing] a lingua franca within their own vernacular, a particular straightforwardness, an agreed order for saying things and perceiving and reporting experience,” with the consequence of making translation of a novel from one language to another “easier and more effective,” but only at a high cost in terms of the linguistic originality and complexity of the prose.4 He regrets the move away from forms of writing he sees as having been more resistant to this sort of easy seamless transition, writing that embraced idiosyncratic vernaculars without regard to the consequences for international markets. “Above all there is a problem with a kind of writing that is, as it were, inward turning, about the language itself,” he writes, “about what it means to live under the spell of this or that vernacular”:

  Of course one can translate Joyce’s Ulysses, but one loses the book’s reveling in its own linguistic medium, its tireless exploration of the possibilities of English. The same is true of a lot of the experimental writing of the 1960s and 1970s. It is desperately hard to translate the Flemish writer Hugo Claus into English, or indeed Gravity’s Rainbow into anything. There was a mining of linguistic richness in that period, and a focus on the extent to which our culture is made up of words, that tended to exclude, or simply wasn’t concerned about, the question of having the text travel the world. Even practitioners of “traditional” realism like John Updike or, in England and in a quite different way, Barbara Pym, were obsessively attentive to the exact form of words that was their culture.

  Parks sees the move away from exactitude toward lingua franca as having been especially costly for writers working initially in languages other than English, but it may be that English-language writers too have “skeletonized” their own idioms, eradicating the sorts of specificity that would prevent their novels from slipping easily into other languages via the medium of translation. In a 2005 interview with Tim Adams for the Observer, Kazuo Ishiguro claimed a sort of globalized impulse for himself, one that he said affected his choices as a stylist: “I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write—with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.”5

  Ishiguro’s fiction does seem unusually open to being translated; his sentences are very beautifully constructed, but they are largely stripped of the sort of linguistic particularity that would provoke difficulties for the translator. To return to Tim Parks’s counterexample, Gravity’s Rainbow provides a very good instance of verbal particularity posing unusual challenges to the potential translator, not least because of its intense American-ness, the affectation of a jaunty and demented 1940s idiom that owes much to the sound of movies and popular music. Here is a bit of Pynchon’s prose, a favorite of mine, that shows very clearly the sort of “reveling in [a] linguistic medium” that Parks has in mind. Brigadier Ernest Pudding is “rambling on from the pulpit” of what was once a private chapel in the house that gives shelter to the divisions of “The White Visitation”:

  The mud of Flanders gathered into the curd-clumped, mildly jellied textures of human shit, piled, duckboarded, trenched and shell-pocked leagues of shit in all directions, not even the poor blackened stump of a tree—and the old blithering gab-artist tries to shake the cherry-wood pulpit here, as if that had been the worst part of the whole Passchendaele horror, that absence of vertical interest…. On he goes, gabbing, gabbing, recipes for preparing beets in a hundred tasty ways, or such cucurbitaceous improbabilities as Ernest Pudding’s Gourd Surprise—yes, there is something sadistic about recipes with “Surprise” in the title, chap who’s hungry wants to just eat you know, not be Surprised really, just wants to bite into the (sigh) the old potato, and be reasonably sure there’s nothing inside but potato you see, certainly not some clever nutmeg “Surprise!”, some mashed pulp all magenta with pomegranates or something…6

  The ellipsis is in the original passage, as are the italics; it goes on for many more sentences in this vein. That first sentence is quite “mouthy,” in a Lutzian way (it is characteristic of this novel, with its anal obsessions and its scenes of coprophagy, that mouthiness should arrive in a sequence of words like “the curd-clumped, mildly jellied textures of human shit”). The exact words matter here: “piled, duckboarded, trenched and shell-pocked” register as strongly as a syllabic sequence as they do in terms of establishing a physical environment, and the same can be said as the tone shifts away from Pudding’s own words to the exterior voice of some unnamed audience member whose consciousness filters the next bit of the passage. The phrase “cucurbitaceous improbabilities,” punctuating a sustained study in voice that relies on the rhythms of colloquial speech: what could be more gratuitous? It isn’t functional, it’s not load-bearing: it is a form of narrative play that would pose enormous difficulties if one were to wish to capture the same effects in another language. In its encyclopedic wordplay, Pynchon’s great novel harks back to Moby-Dick and Ulysses both; for me, it doesn’t
quite match the sublimity of Melville’s novel (or indeed of Paradise Lost, another major epic it sometimes calls to mind), but it exceeds Ulysses on certain counts, not least in the propulsive purposefulness of the story. Daniel Mendelsohn has recently put into words something of what I dislike about Ulysses (his observations were included at Slate as part of a larger collection of critics’ and writers’ thoughts on what “great books” may be overrated):

  Honestly I’ve never been persuaded by Ulysses. To my mind, Joyce’s best and most genuine work is the wonderful Dubliners; everything afterwards smacks of striving to write a “great” work, rather than simply striving to write—it’s all too voulu. Although there are, of course, beautiful and breathtakingly authentic things in the novel (who could not love that tang of urine in the breakfast kidneys?), what spoils Ulysses for me, each time, is the oppressive allusiveness, the wearyingly overdetermined referentiality, the heavy constructedness of it all.7

  He compares the experience of reading Ulysses to “being on one of those Easter egg hunts you went on as a child—you constantly feel yourself being managed, being carefully steered in the direction of effortfully planted treats.” It is undoubtedly the case that my love for Gravity’s Rainbow and my dislike for Ulysses derive partly from the stages of life at which I encountered them: it was probably only two or three years apart, but Gravity’s Rainbow was something I found on my own in the treasure trove of the library, and reading it felt transgressive and exciting because of its subject matter and how very different it was from the novels one read in high school English classes (Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby), while Ulysses has had the misfortune to become entrenched as part of an undergraduate curriculum that has more of the flavor of responsibility to a tradition than of free-ranging play. I envy my students who love Ulysses because it seems to them to have some transgressive promise, but that is not the book I have been required to read, and I side with Daniel Mendelsohn in finding the freshness and force of Dubliners immensely more precious.

  9

  The Ideal Bookshelf

  The Rings of Saturn and The Line of Beauty

  In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York. In Morningside Heights, I found myself virtually unaffected, but A. and her twelve-year-old son O. (plus cat José Reyes) had to evacuate their West Street apartment and stay in my living room for a week. A. and I have been best friends since our first week at university, in 1988, and I can honestly say that our only major point of disagreement in life concerns the Oxford comma (she is pro, I am vehemently con). That week immediately preceded the presidential election, making A.’s job as a senior editor at the New Yorker particularly demanding. The New York City public schools were closed all week, and O. and I went for runs and inspected hurricane damage in Riverside Park, ate bagels, watched Firefly, the first season of Fringe and The Big Bang Theory and baked a cake—a lifestyle sufficiently suited to our mutual tastes that O. observed, at the end of the week, that he thought he might want to be a professor when he grew up. As a thank-you present, A. and O. commissioned a painting for me, an “Ideal Bookshelf”: artist Jane Mount paints portraits of people through the spines of their favorite books, in gouache and ink on smooth water-color paper. Mine includes many of the books I write about in these pages—Richardson’s Clarissa and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Burke’s Reflections and Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Burgess’s 99 Novels and Rebecca West’s extraordinary The Fountain Overflows (perhaps my favorite novel of all time, paired with James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head in the innermost recess of my heart)—but also several more personal choices: Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones, which seems to me to capture the emotional tone of growing up better than any book I know, and Dick Francis’s novel The Danger. It is not his best novel, but it is one I possess in a signed hardcover first edition because my idolatry of Dick Francis at age twelve was such that my mother let me take half a day off school to attend his book signing in Center City.

  I am sufficiently a novel-reader at heart that though Perec is one of my favorite writers, he never wrote a book that could be described as one of my favorite novels; in fact, I have to confess, shamefully, that I have never read Life: A User’s Manual in its entirety. There are a small handful of books, though, that seem to me to provide the fullest possible range of pleasures: the mandarin satisfactions of sentence-writing, the emotional and affective richness of fiction in the tradition of Eliot or Dickens, the aching sense of dislocation or loss that might be associated more with William Wordsworth or Paul Celan than with fiction as such. The two I’ll write about here both feature on my ideal bookshelf: the German writer W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and the English novelist and critic Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. They seem to me to represent the culmination of what can be done in each of two major lines of style that emerge from the nineteenth-century European literary tradition: the inward turn of the Proustian first-person voice in Sebald’s case; in Hollinghurst’s, the elaborations and acts of judgment associated with the use of the third-person voice by George Eliot and Henry James.1 Sebald’s book (it is not exactly a novel, rather a web-or netlike construction of equivocally fictional species, owing something to Thomas Bernhard’s crypto-autobiographical first-person voices and even more to the reflexive fictions of Jorge Luis Borges) can be thought of as testing the limits of what might be done with a first-person voice in the Proustian tradition, although the relationship with memory is here quite different. The impersonal first-person voice has been largely emptied out of all distinguishing traits, and serves primarily as a kind of repository for collective memory, calling Perec more strongly to mind than Proust. Hollinghurst’s novel is explicitly and outrageously Jamesian, a technically extraordinary accomplishment that is at once highly conservative and radically fresh in its language and subject matter; the novel’s third-person narration prominently features the sorts of satirical summing-up voices, the ability to swoop in and out of the thoughts of a focalizing character, that might seem to have disappeared from the novel as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, a form of narration that Hollinghurst shows to be an exceptionally powerful aesthetic and moral instrument. Both books, though, as different as they may seem on the face of things, share Jamesian and Proustian elements, showing clearly the cross-pollination of these two lines of style, each offering a unique set of advantages for chronicling loss and delineating the devastation wrought by an epidemic or a conscious program of eradication.

  When talking about Sebald, it’s tempting to use the term sensibility rather than style as such, especially as I am not capable of reading his books in the original German; on the other hand, Sebald very closely supervised their translations, having taught literature at an English university for most of his career. Sebald was born in 1944 and grew up in a postwar Germany of silences and forgetting. He writes between fact and fiction (I think, too, of Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival), and the photographs with which his texts are interspersed, as in Barthes’s curious autobiography, represent not so much a means of corroboration (I was there) as a device for calling into question what we think we know. They are curious, sideways, elliptical; they institute the slippage and blurring of fact rather than its fixity, with details often askew. Sebald’s texts have the patina of verisimilitude but cannot in any straightforward sense be thought of as nonfiction. Unlike other equally “literary” or well-crafted pieces of prose that are more clearly nonfictional—I am thinking here in particular of Primo Levi’s masterpiece The Periodic Table—the narratorial persona is definitively though non-pin-down-ably different from the real-world historical figure of the author himself, despite what the two may have in common (the divergence feels wider, I think, than in the case of Bernhard).

  Sebald published a nonfiction book called On the Natural History of Destruction, about writing and memory in the wake of the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II, and that title phrase offers one avenue of entry into the strange and fascinating book that i
s The Rings of Saturn. Though The Rings of Saturn describes the narrator’s walking tour around East Anglia, it also concerns the death of Jews in the European camps (Sebald’s family had Jewish connections, though his father fought in the German army and spent the last part of the war in a prisoner of war camp), the European war in the air, citywide firestorms. One of the characters the narrator meets and converses with is a gardener named William Hazel who remains obsessed, some sixty years later, with the bombing raids launched on Germany from “the sixty-seven airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940”:

  People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the eighth airfleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somerleyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting about in the ruins. One day when Lord Somerleyton was helping me prune the vines in this greenhouse, for something to do, said Hazel, he explained the Allied carpet-bombing strategy to me, and some time later he brought me a big relief map of Germany. All the place names I had heard on the news were marked in strange letters alongside symbolic pictures of the towns that varied in the number of gables, turrets and towers according to the size of the population; and moreover, in the case of particularly important cities, there were emblems of features associated with them, such as Cologne cathedral, the Römer in Frankfurst, or the statue of Roland in Bremen. Those tiny images of towns, about the size of postage stamps, looked like romantic castles, and I pictured the German Reich as a medieval and vastly enigmatic land. Time and again I studied the various regions on the map, from the Polish border to the Rhine, from the green plains of the north to the dark brown Alps, partly covered with eternal snow and ice, and spelled out the names of the cities, the destruction of which had just been announced: Braunschweig and Würzburg, Wilhemlshaven, Schweinfurt, Stuttgart, Prorzheim, Düren, and dozens more. In that way I got to know the whole country by heart; you might even say it was burnt into me. (38–39)