Reading Style
Page 19
Friends Free Library of Germantown, 5–6
friendship, 134–35, 171
Fuentes, Carlos, Terra Nostra, 7
Gaiman, Neil: Anansi Boys, 58–60; variable pacing in novels of, 62
generalization, 97
Genette, Gérard, 7
Germantown Friends School, 5–6
Gide, André, sight of eating a pear provokes fantasy of being a writer in Roland Barthes, 113
Glass, Julia, Three Junes, 127
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 113
Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 8
grammar, etymology of term, 12
Grass, Günter, The Tin Drum, 7
Graves, Robert, 4
Gray, Alasdair, Lanark, 5
Gygax, Gary, AD&D alignment as version of Myers-Briggs grid, 180n1
hatred, 173–74
Hazlitt, William, 7
Hill, Tobias, 64–65
Hilton, Boyd, 97
Himes, Chester, 61
hinges, narrative, 64
history, 144
hoarding, 96, 98
Hogarth, William, 157–58
Hollinghurst, Alan, The Line of Beauty, 2, 135–36, 147–65, 167; on prose style of Ronald Firbank, 84–85
Homer, The Iliad, 166
Howard, Richard, 122
Hume, David, 7, 69
Hunt, Holman, 157
Huxley, Aldous, held in high esteem by Anthony Burgess, 6
hypergraphia, 96
hyphenation, 57
hypotaxis, 114
idiom, novel as inventing, 19
imbalance, 43
impersonality, 166–67
influence: of eighteenth-century satirists on later prose, 42–43; of Melville on Pynchon, 69
innocence, 77, 160–61. See also experience, knowledge
innovation, 141
insincerity, and truth, 163–64
“I remember,” 121
irony, 41–43
Ishiguro, Kazuo, globalized style of, 130–31
Jakobson, Roman, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Linguistic Disturbances,” 98–99
James, Henry, 70, 147; childhood memoir of, 159; on death of Poe, 164; The Golden Bowl, 71–84, 89–92, 167; homage to, 158–59; “late style” of, 70–71, 162–63; The Princess Cassamassima, 69; vulnerability of style to parody, 78
James, William, 79
Jarrell, Randall, childhood reading of, 7
Johnson, Samuel, Life of Pope, 43–44
Jones, Diana Wynne, Fire and Hemlock as portrait of adolescence, 135
Jones, Edward P., All Aunt Hagar’s Children, 66–67
Joyce, James: “The Dead,” 48; Ulysses, 130, 132–33
judgment, 8, 46–54
juxtaposition, 125, 159–60
Kafka, Franz, aphorisms of, 39–40
Kahneman, Daniel, 54
Keeler, Harry Stephen, prose style of, 19–21
Kennedy, A. L., Paradise, 62–64
King, Stephen, Needful Things, 128–29
Knausgaard, Karl Ove, My Struggle, 175–76
knowledge, 73, 147, 157–58; in The Golden Bowl, 77–84; and narration, 155
Koestenbaum, Wayne: Jackie Under My Skin, 118–21; “My ‘80s,” 121–23
La Rochefoucauld, François de, 39
language, 75–76, 176; fails to capture reality, 103; feel of in the mouth, 9, 27–28; and identity, 107; limitations of, 169–70; as magic, 59; and reality, 175; and substitution, 61–62. See also style
length, 86, 97–98
Lethem, Jonathan, “The Beards,” 170–71; The Fortress of Solitude, 31–34; pacing differs across novels, 62
letter-writing, 49–50, 163–64
Levi, Primo, The Periodic Table, 137
Lewis, Heather, House Rules, 169
Li, Yiyun, 64, 67
liberalism, 117
libraries, 5–6, 7
lipograms, 100
Lish, Gordon, as editor, 26
lists, 41, 63, 99, 105–109, 116–17, 126
literature, and the self, 174–76
Locke, John, 7
loss, 136
Lutz, Gary, 100; “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” 26–27; “Waking Hours,” 27–29
Mailer, Norman, 5
Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees, 43
maps, 138–39
Markson, David, 146
Martin, George R. R, prolixity of, 98
Mathews, Harry, 106, 121
McDermott, Alice, 17–18
McInerney, Jay, and stunt-writing dimension of second-person narration, 63
Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick, 69–70, 132
memorialization, 126, 144
memory, 88–89, 106, 136
Mendelsohn, Daniel, 132–33
metaphor, 72, 75, 76, 79–83, 89, 90, 98–99
metonymy, 98–99, 114, 119, 143
Miller, D. A., on Austen’s style, 44–45
Millet, Lydia, 15–16
Milton, John: “Lycidas,” 112; Paradise Lost, 69, 132
miniatures, 138–39, 144, 152. See also models, scale
models, 140, 143–44, 145, 146
momentum, 62
Montaigne, Michel de, 109
morality, and style, 13
morality, of art, 162
Mount, Jane, “Ideal Bookshelf” paintings, 135
“mouthy” style, 27, 30–31, 34, 100, 120–21, 123, 132
Munro, Alice, costs of canonizing, 15–19
Murdoch, Iris, 4
Nabokov, Vladimir, 5; Lolita, 29–30
Nagel, Thomas, Mortal Questions, 8
Naipaul, V. S.: A Bend in the River, 5; The Enigma of Arrival, 137; A House for Mr. Biswas, 5
names, 107, 139; proper, 100, 128
narration, 2, 44; and consciousness of individual characters, 147, 150; first-person, 65–66, 86; omniscient, 67; and perspective, 71–72; pictorial aspects of, 92; present-tense, 100; third-person, 41, 66–67, 111; and time, 64; unreliable, 141. See also third-person narration
narrative, in relation to aphorism, 45–46
narrators, 137
nature, malignity of diagnosed by Thomas Bernhard, 172–73
Nietzsche, Friedrich, aphorism quoted by Harold Bloom, 46
nomenclature, 6, 119
nostalgia, 121
notation, 75–76, 83–84, 103; of interiority, 93–94; of numbers, 101. See also Roman numerals
nouveau roman, 110
novel, and criticism, 114; as proxy for world of ideas, 8; and short story, 62–66; subject matter of, 15–17, 147
novelist-essayists, texture of thought in prose of, 7–8
novel-writing, purpose of, 175
numerals, Roman, 28, 76
O’Brien, Flann, 5
objective correlatives, in The Line of Beauty, 163
objects, 118
obscenity, 61–62, 180n6
obsolescence, 129
omission, 125; and dilation, 84–85; of letters in lipogrammatic writing, 99–103. See also ellipsis
openings, 6, 29, 36, 147–48
ordering principles, 105–106, 108–109, 110–11, 114–15, 121–22; alphabetical, 115; unconventional, 146
Orwell, George, 7, 69; “Politics and the English Language,” 15
OuLiPo, 99, 121
pacing, 55–56, 88; and feeling of inevitability, 64; novelistic, 62–64
pain, 166–67
panic, induced by shortage of reading material, 7
panoramas, 143–44
paragraph, as unit of meaning, 9
paragraph breaks, 171
parataxis, 114, 123, 125
parenthesis, 112
Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, 8
Park, Ed, 62
Parks, Tim, 129–30
parody, 150
Passmore, John, The Perfectibility of Man, 8
pastiche, 58–59, 110
Pelecanos, George, Hard Revolution,
128
Penzler, Otto, 19
perception, 71, 79–81
Perec, Georges, 99–109, 121; “Attempt at an Inventory,” 105–107, 126; The Exeter Text, 101–103; Life: A User’s Manual, 135; A Man Asleep, 168–69; Species of Spaces, 103–109; A Void, 99–101, 108
perfection, 170–71
periods, rhetorical, 162–63
person, claims of the, 44
persona, narratorial versus authorial, 42, 46
perspective, 144
photography, 110, 137
pleasure, 1, 135
point of view, 141–44
Pope, Alexander, 43–44, 151–52
postmodernism, 110, 139; linked to vulgarity, 158
Pound, Ezra, 4
Powell, Anthony, A Dance to the Music of Time, 86
prizes, literary, dislike of Thomas Bernhard for, 171
proportion, sense of, 10
prose, and thought, 173
Proust, Marcel, 56, 84–85, 108, 110, 136; Perec reimagines, 104–105; on reading, 92–93; and Sebald, 143; Swann’s Way, 85–89, 92–95
punctuation, 33, 156; commas, 73, 138
Pynchon, Thomas: Gravity’s Rainbow, 5, 130, 131–32; influenced by Melville, 69; vocabularies of, 5
quotation, 142
quotation marks, 123. See also emphasis, punctuation
Raymond, Derek, 57
reading, 92–94, 176; addiction to, 3; childhood, 4, 7, 35; developmental stages of, 8; at different ages, 68–70; ethics of, 1–2; “mouthy,” 27–28, 30; pathologies of, 3; for pleasure, 6–7, 8, 133; speed of, 3; voluminous, 7; as way of life, 8, 176
realism, 15–16, 153
record-keeping, 126
rejection, 85–86
Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson, 140–41
repetition, 41, 56–61, 63, 172–73; and humor, 57–60
rereading, 9, 35–36, 69
revision, 71, 98; by re-typing, 122
rhetoric, 73. See also periods
Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa, 56, 84, 97
risk-taking, emotional, 171
Rousseau, Confessions, 109
rule-breaking, 180n4
Sacks, Oliver, case studies of, 8, 97
Sante, Luc: “Commerce,” 123–26; “French Without Tears,” 60–61
Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Words, 109
satire, 42–44
Sayers, Dorothy L., 4
scale, 89, 103–104, 138–39. See also miniatures, models
scholarship, novelistic qualities of excellent, 8
science fiction, novel of ideas and, 179n2
Sebald, W. G., On the Natural History of Destruction, 137; The Rings of Saturn, 2, 135–46
selection, 3, 9; as argument, 12–13
sensation, literature of, 18
sensibility, 15, 89, 136–37
sensory experience, 113–14
sentences, 71, 122, 146; of Gary Lutz, 26–27; glimmer of, 2; and paragraphs, 95; in Proust, 94–95; reading for, 11–12; as units of meaning, 9
Sévigné, Madame de, 145
Shakespeare, King Lear, 2, 144
Shklar, Judith, 69
Shklovskii, Victor, 7
short story, traits of, 16–19, 31
Shriver, Lionel, The Post-Birthday World, 21–25
simile, 20–21, 58–59
slang, 119
sleepovers, 7, 134–35
Smith, Adam, 7; love-hate relationship with Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, 43
Solomon, Andrew, originality of, 97
Sontag, Susan, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 75, 121
sound, 71
Spark, Muriel, 17
spelling, 180n4
sport, 6
Spufford, Francis, The Child That Books Built, 4
Spurgeon, Caroline, 5
stage directions, 9
Stephenson, Neal, Anathem, 179n2
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 61
story, 29; as model versus vector, 64
strangeness, literary style and, 20–21
Strauss, Richard, and morality of taste, 155–56
structure, 124
Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 12, 56
style, 2; affiliated with sentences rather than character-driven fiction, 135; bleak, 169; clinical, 75; and emotion, 165; and ethics, 154–55; etymology of, 12; and experience, 18; experienced in time, 55–56; in the European tradition, 136; free indirect, 47–48, 166; and global literature, 129–30; as instrument of the self, 176; as key to the heart, 13; “late,” 70; and morality, 13–15, 21–23; not affiliated with narrative, 146; perfection of, 170–71; as performance of sensibility, 21; in proportion to occasion, 65; as repository of character, 12, 15; and the senses, 113–14; and sexuality, 161; and speech, 132; sublimation of emotion into, 167; as topic, 49; and writing, 112
surfaces, 164
sweets, 120–21, 144–45. See also chocolate
Swift, Jonathan, 39, 42
syllabus design, 69
synecdoche, 5, 20, 128
synesthesia, 119–20
taste, 3, 9–10, 32–33, 116–17; changes over time, 54; erotics of, 153; morality of, 155–56
taxonomy, 3
teaching, 2–3
temperament, 12
Temple, Peter, 56–57
tense, 125–26
testimony, 170
Thatcher, Margaret, 148–49, 161
theatricality, 172
third-person narration, 2, 136, 148–49, 166–67; versus first-person, 128; in relation to stage directions, 9. See also narration, first-person narration
time, 87–89; and narration, 66–67
Tolstoy, Leo, 68, 69; experience of reading War and Peace affected by duration, 55
tradition, 3, 136
transcendence, 98
transgression, of subject matter, 147, 169
translation, 100–101, 129–30, 137
Trapido, Barbara, 169
Trevor, William, 19
Tyler, Anne, 62
Van Zuylen, Marina, 167–68
verisimilitude, 140–41
vernacular, 130
vocabulary, 4, 5, 153
vocations, 175–76
walking, 139, 172
weather, 134–35
webs, deformed by spiders’ drug intake, 96–97
West, Rebecca, 7, 135
whatnots, 118–19. See also placeholder words
Wilde, Oscar, 14
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, shares Barthes’ dislike for women in trousers, 117
Woolf, Virginia, 18
word choice, 24, 72, 76, 90. See also diction
words, placeholder or dummy, 60–61, 118
Wordsworth, William, 135, 151–52
work, 145–46
writer, fantasy of the, 113
writing, in English for global audiences, 129–30
World War II, 105, 137–39
Zusak, Marcus, The Book Thief, 10