Reading Style: A Life in Sentences

2. Lydia Millet, “Alice in Familyland,” Globe and Mail, September 23, 2006, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/alice-in-familyland/article193732/. As I finish the last revisions to these pages, Christian Lorentzen has just published “Poor Rose: Against Alice Munro,” London Review of Books 35, no. 11 (June 6, 2013): 11–12.

3. I have a strong enough sense of fairness, buttressed by feelings of scholarly responsibility, that after writing these words, I did read the novel in question.

4. The passage is from McDermott’s novel After This, as quoted in Joan Acocella, “Heaven’s Gate,” New Yorker, September 11, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/11/060911crbo_books.

5. Otto Penzler, “The Worst Writer in the World,” New York Sun, December 21, 2005, http://www.nysun.com/arts/worst-writer-in-the-world/24771/.

6. Harry Stephen Keeler, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, ed. Paul Collins (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2005), 182, 191, 111, 201.

7. Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World (London: HarperCollins, 2007), 46. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

8. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (1871–1872; reprint, London: Penguin, 1994), II.xx.

1. Gary Lutz, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” Believer, January 2009, http://www.believermag.com/issues/200901/?read=article_lutz.

2. Gary Lutz, “Waking Hours,” in Stories in the Worst Way (1996; reprint, Providence, RI: 3rd bed, 2006), 8–9.

3. Daniel Long, “An Interview with Gary Lutz,” Fiddleback 1, no. 5, http://thefiddleback.com/_webapp_4159108/An_Interview_with_Gary_Lutz.

4. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955; reprint, New York: Knopf, 1992), 9.

5. Lydia Davis, “Boring Friends,” in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 313.

6. Lydia Davis, “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant,” in Collected Stories, 351.

7. Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (2003; reprint, New York: Vintage, 2004), 91. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

1. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. James Kinsley, intro. Adela Pinch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), I.i.5. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

2. Jonathan Swift, The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 2:556. The original reads “Danes l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis nous trouvons quelque chose, qui ne nous deplaist pas.”

3. Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, trans. Michael Hofman and Geoffrey Brock (New York: Schocken, 2006), #20, #29, #32.

4. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. Alice Wakely, intro. Tom Keymer (London: Penguin, 2005), I.v.

5. Samuel Johnson, vol. 4 of The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 3.

6. D. A. Miller, “No One Is Alone,” in Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 31–56. The passage quoted is on 31–32.

7. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking Penguin, 2010), II.12.167. Here is the text in the original language: “Il s’était tant de fois entendu dire ces choses, qu’elles n’avaient pour lui rien d’original. Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses; et le charme de la nouveauté, peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement, laissait voir à nu l’éternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les mêmes formes et le même langage. Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres: comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles”; Madame Bovary, ed. Bernard Ajac (1856; reprint, Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 259.

8. James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), 19.

1. Peter Temple, Black Tide (San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2005), 38.

2. Unlike crime fiction, science fiction is a genre less inherently hospitable to beautiful prose—though there are always exceptions to this sort of generalization—even as it magically inherits the mandate of the novel of ideas, no longer commercially viable if it ever was, but now finding new life in a form that potentially reaches huge audiences: an excellent recent example of bestselling science fiction that is also a first-rate novel of ideas would be Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

3. Peter Temple, The Broken Shore (2005; reprint, New York: Picador, 2008), 127.

4. Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys (New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2005), 135–36. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

5. Luc Sante, “French Without Tears,” Threepenny Review, Summer 2004, http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/sante_su04.html.

6. For more on this, see Jim Dawson, The Compleat Motherfucker: A History of the Mother of All Dirty Words (2011), esp. 159; I am indebted to Brian Berger for the reference.

7. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, intro. Christopher Ricks (New York: Penguin, 2003), V.xvii.339. The missing letters are chamber pot and pissout of the window.

8. A. L. Kennedy, Paradise (2004; reprint, New York: Random House/Vintage, 2006), 198.

9. Tobias Hill, “School Stories,” Guardian, April 5, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/05/extract.

10. William Boyd, “The Things I Stole,” Guardian, August 1, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/02/william.boyd.short.story.

11. Jenny Davidson, “Great Jones,” Village Voice, August 26, 2006, http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-08-29/books/great-jones/.

12. Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (New York: HarperCollins/Amistad, 2006), 395, 237.

1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Essays on Music, intro. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 565–67.

2. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 456.

3. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (London: Penguin, 2009), 3. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

4. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), 280.

5. Alan Hollinghurst, “The Shy, Steely Ronald Firbank,” Times Literary Supplement, November 15, 2006.

6. Ronald Firbank, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), in Five Novels (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, [1949]), ch. 1, 333–34. The following paragraph reveals that the entity being christened is “a week-old police-dog.”

7. Quoted in the introduction to Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin, 2004), xiv. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

8. When my brothers and I were small children, our Scottish grandmother used to give us a sort of sachet or envelope labeled “Japanese Water Flowers” full of colored snippets that would magically unfold into blossoms when placed on the surface of a bowl of water; they are most commonly made out of paper, so that there is perhaps something additionally and self-consciously literary about the notion of reading the past from such signs.

9. “‘Proust’s Way?’ An Exchange,” André Aciman’s reply, New York Review of Books 53, no. 6 (April 6, 2006), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18851.

1. In an affectionate nod to Brent Buckner, I also note the possible congruence between the Myers-Briggs personality types and the Gygaxian system of alignment for AD&D.

2. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1987), 95–114.

3. Georges Perec, La disparition (Paris: Les lettres nouvelles, 1969), 17; and Georges Perec, A Void, trans. Gilbert Adair (London: Harvill, 1994), 3.

4. David Bellos explains that Perec was allowed to “cheat” slightly, obtaining permission from his OuLiPo colleagues to make one change to French spelling and a handful of further modifications as needed. The English analogue is that “‘and’ may be spelt ‘n’”; the consonantal “y” is permitted, and so are other distortions of conventional spelling. Georges Perec, The Exeter Text, in Three By Perec, trans. Ian Monk, intro. David Bellos (London: Harvill, 1996), 53–55. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

5. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2008), 13–14, original ellipsis. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

6. David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill, 1993), 543.

7. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

8. The phrase in the French original—“Ayant débité la matière de ces fragments pendant des mois”—harks back to the section title “La seiche et son encre” (the cuttlefish and its ink); Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Quercy, France: Seuil, 1975), 166.

9. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (1951; reprint, London: Verso, 1978), 36.

10. Wayne Koestenbaum, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (1995; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1996), 90. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

11. Wayne Koestenbaum, “My ’80s,” originally published in Artforum, reprinted in The Best American Essays 2004, ed. Louis Menand (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), 128–37; and Luc Sante, “Commerce,” in New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg, ed. Marshall Berman and Brian Berger (Chicago: Reaktion Books, 2007), 102–12.

12. Carl Wilson, “My So-Called Adulthood,” New York Times Magazine, August 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-gen-x-nostalgia-boom.html.

1. Julia Glass, Three Junes (2002; New York: Random House/Anchor, 2003), 192.

2. George Pelecanos, Hard Revolution (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), 40.

3. Stephen King, Needful Things (1991; reprint, New York: Penguin/Signet, 1992), 174.

4. Tim Parks, “Your English Is Showing,” New York Review Blog, June 15, 2011, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jun/15/english-showing/.

5. “For Me, England Is a Mythical Place,” Tim Adams interviews Kazuo Ishiguro, Observer, February 20, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/20/fiction.kazuoishiguro.

6. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973; reprint, New York: Penguin, 2006), 81.

7. Daniel Mendelsohn, included in Juliet Lapidos, “Overrated: Authors, Critics, and Editors on ‘Great Books’ That Aren’t All That Great,” Slate, August 11, 2011, http://www.slate.com/id/2301312/.

1. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1999), first published in German in 1995 and in English translation in 1998; and Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004; reprint, New York: Bloomsbury, 2005). Subsequent references are to these editions and will be given parenthetically in the text.

2. See Robert J. Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

1. Marina Van Zuylen, Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 45, 48, 58.

2. Georges Perec, A Man Asleep, trans. Andrew Leak, in Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990), 154–55.

3. Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, trans. Keith Gessen (New York: Picador, 2005), 235–36.

4. Jonathan Lethem, “The Beards,” in The Disappointment Artist (2005; reprint, New York: Vintage, 2006), 101; the subsequent passage I quote is on 142.

5. Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship, trans. David McLintock, originally published in 1982 in German and first appearing in English translation in 1988 (New York: Vintage, 2009), 71. Subsequent references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.