In an essay called “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” Gary Lutz tells the story of his discovery of a group of books “in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude,” books (most or all of them edited by Gordon Lish) whose writers “recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy.”1 These books reveal to Lutz that he himself wants to produce “narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.” He calls this kind of sentence “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative,” a description that pairs these two aspects of the ideal sentence in a way that emphasizes the tension between self-contained aphoristic stasis on the one hand and the going-somewhere aspect of fiction on the other. A tractor, though we tend to think of it mostly as an agricultural vehicle, can actually be anything that draws or pulls something else (the “tractor beam” of Star Trek). Thus “load-bearing, tractional” are basically synonymous, the pair of terms offered partly for emphasis but also to give Lutz’s own substantive and load-bearing sentence an allegiance it can wear on its sleeve: the gratuitous pairing, with that obtrusive comma, tips the sentence toward the stylized, the nonfunctional.
Sentences of the sort that Lutz praises are experienced through the mouth as well as the ear and the eye. Lutz’s own fiction has a chewy quality, his diction strangely combining a feeling of the inevitable with near-extraplanetary strangeness. Here are three paragraphs from “Waking Hours,” from the collection Stories in the Worst Way:
I was in receipt of the mothered-down version of the kid every other Saturday. The bus would make an unscheduled stop in front of the building where I lived, and then out he would come, morseled in an oversized down jacket, all candy-breathed from the ride. I would drive us to a family restaurant where we would slot into seats opposite each other and he would ask me the questions his mother had asked him to ask. I had a quick-acting, pesticidal answer for every one.
When the food arrived—kiddie-menu concentrates for him, an overproportioned hamburger for me—I would tilt the conversation toward him, maybe a little too steeply. I would want to poach on the life inside him, whatever it was. He would splay his hands on the table-top, arms slat-straight, crutching himself up.
After lunch, in the undemanding dark of a movie theater where he goggled at some stabby, Roman-numeraled sequel, I would plug my ears and loot my own heart.2
Lutz has an unusual sense of adjective and verb. “Mothered-down,” “morseled”—these words don’t exactly make for tongue-twisters, but they linger in the mouth nonetheless, just as juxtapositions like “candy-breathed” (a tricky coinage that visually invites misreading via the more familiar past-tense “breathed,” with its voiced th) or “quick-acting, pesticidal” insist on a rhythm that disrupts the reader’s own likely sense of the natural motion of sentences. (“Quick-acting, pesticidal” echoes the rhythms of “load-bearing, tractional,” a verbal pattern for which Lutz shows a strong preference.) The “tilt” of the conversation is rendered almost more literal than figurative by the further application of the adverb “steeply,” and the passage is full of verbs not unusual in themselves but distinctly odd in their application here: “slot,” “poach,” “crutching,” “goggled” (the middle two of these four also come with unusual prepositions: “poach on,” “crutching himself up”). These words call attention to themselves by their sound (in particular by their combinations of consonants) as well as their meaning. So does the clever and slightly painful formulation “some stabby, Roman-numeraled sequel”: almost too smart for its own good, the expression allows for a small eruption of pain or pathos through the irony. This sort of movie is “stabby” not just because people get stabbed in horror movies (and the perpendicular lines of the Roman numerals here come to seem almost weapons themselves, knives or javelins) but because it is the sort of movie fathers sundered from their sons inflict upon themselves; the “s” of “stabby” and the liquid “-aled” of “numeraled” get neatly wrapped up together in the final word “sequel.”
Lutz takes an unusually extreme position, of course, on the merits of the tractional versus the topographic. In an interview, Lutz once said, in response to a question from Daniel Long about whether syntax was really sufficient unto itself or whether his notions of story and character might perhaps be beneficially expanded,
I just do what my nervous system wants done or allows me to do. It is not in my nature to care about plots. I do not see storylines in life. Life hits me by the instant. My writing is a record of one instant after another, with causality mostly drained away. I am trying to describe how life and the world look and feel to me. The world has already been plentifully described otherwise. I have nothing to add to those descriptions and see no reason to try. Characterization is no concern of mine, either. The last thing I want to do is to bring somebody new into words. I practice birth control of a typographical kind.3
Language need not be emphasized so much at the expense of the traditional pleasures of story, even given a commitment to acoustical elegance. The famous opening of one of the twentieth century’s best-loved novels offers a near-perfect invitation to perform this sort of reading on the tongue. Here are the first three paragraphs of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.4
The relationship between sound and sense interests narrator Humbert Humbert, and the obtrusive presence of his own tongue on the page prompts uncomfortable mimicry in the reader’s mouth.
It is not only elaborate or fancy sentences that call for this sort of reading through the mouth. Nabokov and Lutz are similar in their preference for using words almost as neologisms, attending to their literal meanings and origins and then wrenching them sideways, like the knight’s move in chess, to create unexpected and often disorienting new sense. But very plain sentences can also be “chewy.” Here is Lydia Davis’s short story “Boring Friends,” in its entirety (it is from the collection Samuel Johnson Is Indignant):
We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.5
Davis has taken concision as a storytelling practice perhaps as far as it can go without becoming mere gimmick (I am thinking of the fashion for the six-word life story, licensed on the Internet by an example that is attributed to Hemingway, though I doubt it originated with him: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”). The title story of that collection of Davis’s, for instance, reads in its entirety as follows, with the colon marking the break between title and story, “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: that Scotland has so few trees.”6 Davis’s sentences are as “mouthy” as Lutz’s, in a different way, but I do not know that the effect could be enjoyably extended (the counterexample of Lolita’s opening notwithstanding) over a fiction made up of tens of thousands of words; at any rate, a novel is likely to display more varied diction than either Lutz’s or Davis’s much more compressed stories.
I can think of a few recent novels that offer “mouthy” pleasures—the almost physical sense, in the reader’s body, of each word and sentence being formed for one’s sensory delectation—without compromising the traditional narrative pleasures of long-form fiction. James Lasdun and A. L. Kennedy, for instance, both seem to me to work equally effectively in the short story and the novel formats. But my best example of a contemporary long novel that offers not just the deep pleasures I associate with nineteenth-century realist fiction (David Copperfield, Middlemarch) but also the “mouthy” pleasures of a Davis or a Lutz is Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. I find the narrative consistently and mesmerizingly perfect in its diction, immensely satisfying in the exact placement of the words even as the sentences are also effectively tractional, load-bearing:
Mingus fished in his lining for his El Marko, a Magic Marker consisting of a puglike glass bottle stoppered with a fat wick of felt. Purple ink sloshed inside the tiny screw-top bottle, staining the glass in curtains of color. Mingus drew out a safety pin and stuck the felt in a dozen places, pinning it out he called it, until the ink bled so freely it stained the light skin at his palm, then the green cuff of his oversize jacket. Dylan felt a quiver of the pleasure he associated with his father’s tiny brushes, with Spirograph cogs and skully caps.7
A hyperawareness of language runs throughout this paragraph, which follows the protagonist Dylan’s consciousness very closely: it is Dylan who is struck by the vivid phrase pinning it out, Dylan who notices and marks to himself in language these physical objects with their striking double existence in language and in the world itself. One of the things I like most in this novel is its portrait of Dylan’s awful friend Arthur Lomb, his ally in an as-yet-ungentrified 1970s Brooklyn where two white boys painfully stand out. Arthur Lomb’s speech is transcribed in all of its cartoonishness:
Only thing that matters is the test for Stuyvesant. Just math and science. Flunk English, who gives? The whole report card thing’s a joke, always was. I haven’t gone to gym class once. You know Jesus Maldonado? He said he’d break my arm like a Pixy Stix if he caught me alone in the locker room. Gym’s suicide, frankly. I’m not stripping down to my underwear anywhere inside the four walls of this school, I’m just not. If I have to BM, I hold it until after school. (124)
Mel Brooks’s funniest film is The Producers, then Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles. Terri Garr is hot. I feel sorry for any kid who hasn’t seen The Producers. My dad took me to all the humor movies. The best Panther is probably Return. The best Woody is Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. (126)
This sort of extended monologue, though, which allows the reader to locate Arthur Lomb (he is always called by his full name) on the taxonomic map of human personality and to judge him as harshly and precisely as he tabulates and judges cultural products, leads into an extraordinarily humane and perceptive reflection about Dylan’s relationship to his impossible friend:
Positioning, positioning, Arthur Lomb was forever positioning himself, making his views known, aligning on some index no one would ever consult. Here was Dylan’s burden, his cross: the accumulated knowledge of Arthur Lomb’s smug policies on every possible question. The cross was Dylan’s to bear, he knew, because his own brain boiled with pedantry, with too-eager trivia ready to burst loose at any moment. So in enduring Arthur Lomb Dylan had been punished in advance for the possibility of being a bore.
The first sentence employs two triplets—the word “positioning” appears three times, but its third use also represents the first term in a second threesome (“positioning,” “making,” “aligning”). The sentence would feel quite different if Lethem had chosen to use a semicolon or colon after the phrase “positioning himself”; the comma is less judgmental in this case than either of those other punctuation marks. Each successive sentence unfolds with a similarly sharp sense of how the comma can be used to capture the texture of thought: “Dylan’s burden, his cross”; “with pedantry, with too-eager trivia.” Then, after three sentences in which phrases proliferate, comes a final sentence of straight summation, a sentence that lacks any punctuation other than the period at its end and that can be thought of as existing in a relationship to the preceding block of text that would be marked, if it were all one long sentence, by a colon, the colon being the form of punctuation that most clearly puts one set of things in apposition to another. This invisible or notional colon offers a counterweight to the earlier colon and its despairing identification of “the accumulated knowledge of Arthur Lomb’s smug policies” as Dylan’s cross. The passage’s effectiveness depends to a great extent on the shape and cadence of the sentences rather than on the incorporation of “mouthy” nouns; that affinity with the mouthy is more clearly on view in the previous passage I quoted, with words like “puglike,” “wick” and “sloshed” and the evocative listing of colors and artist’s tools. In short, Lethem is able to mobilize a wider range of effects than either Davis or Lutz, and The Fortress of Solitude maintains a storytelling momentum that invites the comparison to nineteenth-century realist fiction (Dickens, Honoré de Balzac); it is finally a limitation, I think, however much it attracts me, that Lutz and Davis appeal to the reader by way of the emotional privation conveyed in the bald sequence of words grounded in the mouth.