A lighter interlude after that solemn conclusion: not all is lost. Certain details linger in the mind long after the novels in which they appear have largely faded from memory. Here, for instance, is a sentence that I can’t quite decide whether I love or hate. It is a line from Julia Glass’s Three Junes, a man’s description of fixing a puppy’s hernia by hand when he was a boy: “I still recall the sensation of pushing the lump of flesh back through the muscle wall in that taut little belly, using just the tip of my right middle finger. It felt like forcing a marble into an elastic velvet pouch.”1 I am tempted to adduce it as a happy instance of self-consciously “fine” writing mobilized in the service of character development and the themes of the novel as a whole, and yet there is something gratuitous, distracting, self-indulgent about it. It seems to me costly to stud one’s narrative prose with observations of this sort, though it’s probably easier to get away with it in a first-person narrative than when writing in the third person; in the latter case, the author risks losing the goodwill of a reader who may prefer not to be asked to admire the author’s own lavish powers of noticing and notating.
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.