'How much elation I got out of savage and precise wit!'
Nicholas Dames' masterclass on prose style; the best-written NBCC novel of the century; and the best from this year's shortlist
In today’s post:
— Part I of Nicholas Dames’ extraordinary discussion of prose style, one of the finest pieces we’ve yet published. We chose Dames’ The Chapter as the best-written book on the shortlist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
On Tuesday we’ll post our pick from the shortlist for the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize for a first book. The NBCC winners are announced on the 21st of March.
— Our pick of the best-written book from the shortlist for this year’s NBCC Award for Fiction. In July we chose the same book as the best-written recent release in literary fiction.
— Our pick of the best-written book among the previous winners of the NBCC’s award for fiction. This is part of our project to identify the best-written novel of the century to date.
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Nicholas Dames on Prose Style Part 1
What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?
As a teenager I was initially drawn, like the usual budding literary snob, to what were presented to me as difficult books. Above all the great modernists, who were taught in high schools back then but only guardedly, as if they were behind protective glass and one needed to ask for a special key to get at them. I remember the impact of the first page of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or the bewilderment of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, or the feeling of being swallowed by the atmosphere of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. But that difficulty didn’t seem to me particularly tied to the prose as such— more to a series of structural puzzles (who was talking? where are we?) that needed untying. The puzzle-aspect prevented me from seeing the sentences as such.
I think actually that I can locate my first encounter with prose— a dawning sense of the way sentences are constructed— to the moment when I somehow found my way to satire. This was entirely accidental. Likely it was just a matter of pulling random books off shelves. If I try to explain what it was I so loved about satire, it was first the anger and even cruelty; these were not affects celebrated by the fuzzy humanism of high school curricula. Then it was the awareness of how carefully designed the sentences of the great satirists are— the pointedness of satire, how finely sharpened the sentences have to be to really draw blood. It didn’t even matter if the targets of the satire were far from my own experience. Good lord, how much elation I got out of savage and precise wit!
What I particularly recall are the opening pages of Evelyn Waugh’s 1928 Decline and Fall, which starts with a description of the kind of upper-class Oxford club—a thinly disguised version of the infamous Bullingdon— that prime ministers then and even now tend to come from:
There is tradition behind the Bollinger; it numbers reigning kings among its past members. At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles. What an evening that had been! This was the first meeting since then, and from all over Europe old members had rallied for the occasion. For two days they had been pouring into Oxford: epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title was there for the beano.
I mean: what control of voice and diction, what precision of rhythm! Coming from the usual writing pedagogy, which was still centered on a suspicion of modifiers, the perfection of “indelicate” here just proved the opposite: everything in this passage is about the modifiers. And against the usual ethic of prose simplicity too, with its suspicion of the semi-colon— Waugh’s passage is filigreed with them. The little pleasurable phonemic games: the trilled Hibernian l-sounds in “illiterate lairds,” the balance of “epileptic” and “exile,” or the just-obvious-enough alliterations like “uncouth… crumbling country seats” or “hovels in the Highlands.” Above all, the alchemical mixture of rage and glee here, both of them corrupting the other. The sheer disrespect of it all, done with such pleasure.
What does it mean that I discovered my interest in prose not in something like beauty but instead in wit? Probably nothing very morally uplifting. (Waugh’s own life furnishes the warning.) But there it is: I was an addict, suddenly, for wit; and for semi-colons, and modifiers, and all the things writing teachers had said were bad for you; and this made me an addict for prose. Probably I then wrote in a highly affected style for a time. Possibly I never left it.
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of The Chapter?
The Chapter is fundamentally a book about textual rhythms: about hearing the pauses that constitute those rhythms, hearing things that aren’t even “there”— such as the white space between chapters— and determining what those blanks might mean and have meant, why they exist. I felt it was crucial for my own style to work similarly. My prose would have to surface the question of cuts or pauses; it would have to surface its own rhythms, sometimes even by varieties of arrhythmia, rapid alternations or rhythmic discordances. I was as a result more attuned to rhythm than anything else, more than to my diction or vocabulary. Naturally I felt this pressure most at the beginnings and endings of my own chapters, but it was something that was always at the back of my mind.
As an example: the book begins with a fairly innocuous fourteen-word declarative sentence. But the second sentence is a deliberate enticement, or warning— a little overture. It’s over 150 words long, broken up by twelve semi-colons, each clause attempting a different figurative relation to the question of how we might imagine the divisions of time. These different attempts aren’t in complete syntactical balance with each other, and the penultimate one increases the sentence’s tempo into a more hurried, breathless list of six distinct metaphors appearing as quick binaries— it’s a kind of crescendo, feeling a little unhinged, almost as if the sentence is getting out of control; and then the final clause quiets everything down again or “resolves” the progression, calms what was a rising, manic intensity. The idea for this sentence was manifold, and it came to me fairly early on in the writing of the book— the idea, that is, that there had to be a sentence like this one, right at the start. My first motive was to announce that the book was going to be invested in style, and in stretching the usual limits of what counts as effective scholarly or argumentative prose. I wanted to be just a bit indulgent right from the start, to signal some slight excess; one doesn’t need every item in that 150-word list, but the point is the profusion. My second motive was to produce a sentence that performed in miniature the experience of an elongated linear process broken up by pauses or cuts: this is what a chapter does to narrative, and it is what the semi-colons do to this sentence. Now this kind of a sentence doesn’t always pass muster in academic prose. I’m fortunate that my editor saw what I was trying and didn’t ask me to trim or adjust it. In fact, I kept tweaking it for some time, adding portions and retouching some of the items, usually to make the sentence just a bit more discordant, to make those pauses of the semi-colons more flagrant or even jarring. Of course it was a balancing act as well; my hope was, in that syntactical discordance, to also produce something with an overall harmony or logic.
All that said, there is a problem to this way of proceeding, at least in scholarly writing. Much of it has to do with the sheer quantity of information that has to be imparted, and clearly. The Chapter has a good deal of historical detail to convey, some of it fairly knotty, spread out over two millennia of book production and across many different cultural situations. My keenest struggle was not with the book’s more evocative moments, like that second sentence, which was free to depart from anything like “fact”; it was with the need to somehow embed “fact” into the texture of the prose without losing a sense of rhythm. It was in places like this that I tended to revise most frequently. When I write criticism, particularly for magazines, this problem diminishes somewhat, but in a book like The Chapter it was continual challenge.
What do you understand by ‘voice’ in writing, and how much does this matter to your own?
I’ve bever been satisfied with any definition of “voice”— but to commit myself to one now, I’d say that it’s the sense that the prose has departed in some way from a consensus manner (now we’d say something like “AI voice”), and that those idiosyncracies are consistent with themselves, give you the outline of a figure, a body, some kind of physical apparatus within which the air vibrates in a distinctive manner. “Voice” is not at all equivalent to writing properly or correctly. It involves a sense of play, or experiment. It even involves a willingness to violate good manners in some respects. For my own part, I’m excited to see writers exploit the full panoply of technical devices text can supply. Why not exclamation points? Why not italicize for emphasis? Why not accumulate semi-colons or luxuriate in a long parenthesis that pries open the closed logic of a sentence?
Voice is obviously a starting requirement for a writer of imaginative prose. It’s much less obviously a requirement for a writer of scholarly or argumentative prose. I learned this lesson when I sent my first book manuscript to an editor who’d been recommended to me. This was a very astute, deeply experienced older academic used to working with first books, and in that capacity she helped innumerable young scholars get their start. But after having read my manuscript she wrote to me that while the book was worth publication, and its line of argument illuminating, it would have to be rewritten from start to finish; one simply couldn’t write scholarship that way, it was too clotted, too showy, too indulgent. I was stubborn and refused. I didn’t (and don’t) understand the idea that argument is separable from style— not just in my apprentice manuscript, but anywhere. The argument inheres in the sensibility projected by the prose; this just feels to me like a basic principle of literary criticism.
Part II of this piece will appear on Tuesday.
Nicholas Dames is the Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches nineteenth-century fiction, the history and theory of the novel, the history of reading, and the aesthetics of prose fiction from the eighteenth century to the present. He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (2001), and The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (2007). He has written on contemporary fiction, novel reading, and the humanities for The Atlantic, n+1, The Nation, New Left Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and Public Books, at which he is co-Editor in Chief.
You can read an extended extract from The Chapter here.
This year’s shortlist for the National Book Critics Award for Fiction
Tremor by Teju Cole (Random House)
North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House)
I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore (Knopf)
Vengeance Is Mine by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump (Knopf)
Blackouts by Justin Torres (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The best-written of these is
Dearest Sister,
The moon has roved away in the sky and I don’t even know what the pleiades are but at last I can sit alone in the dark by this lamp, my truest self, day’s end toasted to the perfect moment and speak to you. Such peace to have the house quiet—outside I believe I hear the groaning deer. The wild-eyed varmints in the traps are past wailing, and the nightjars whistle their hillbilly tunes. I can momentarily stop pretending to tend to my accounts in the desk cartonnier. The gentleman lodger who is keen to relieve me of my spinsterhood has gone upstairs to bed, clacking his walking stick along the rails of the banister, just to create a bit of tension; now overhead his footfall to and from the basin squeaks the boards. I have a vague affection for him, which is not usable enough for marriage. I cannot see what he offers in that regard, despite some impressively memorized Shakespeare and Lord Byron and some queerly fine mimicry of the other lodgers: Priscilla the plump quakeress, tragically maddened by love. Miriam with her laryngitis and Confederate widow’s weeds (the town has run out of that slimming black silk and resorts to a confused dark Union blue). Or Mick, the old Chickasaw bachelor, who keeps a whole hawk wing pinned to his never-doffed cowboy hat.
Dapper as a finch, the handsome lodger can also recite the bewildering poems of Felicia Hemans, one of which features a virtuous heroine torn from home by pirates—sweet Jesus take the reins. His mustache is black and thick as broom bristle and the words come flying out from beneath it like the lines of a play in a theater on fire. He has an intriguing trunk of costumes in his closet—cotton tights, wool tights, a spellbinding number of tights, some wigs he combs out and puts on for amusement, and even some stuffing for a hunchback which he portrays unnervingly and then lets the stuffing fall completely out. I don’t know how he could manage a vigorous sword fight wearing those wigs. If I don’t laugh he puts it all away. He says he suffers stage fright everywhere but the stage. He says he will help me build a platform on the side of the house, if I would like to get into wicked show business and put great joy into the hearts of simple men.
“I will certainly think about that,” say I and go about my chores.
“Why, Miss Libby, an Elizabeth should learn Elizabethan.”
“Should she now.”
“I do desire that we be better strangers.” He is bold.
But he has his own straitened circumstances which I hardly need to take on as my own, though he appears always in fine fettle—handsome in the silvery variegated fashion of rabbits and foxes, a pair of pomaded muttonchops which he says hide a bite scar from his boyhood horse, Cola. The muttonchops fetchingly collect snow in January, though he limps—some might say imperceptibly but that has the lie built right in, so I don’t say that, not being a good liar. A cork foot from the secesh, he told me. Mounted the real foot and donated it to a Lost Cause Army Medical Museum, he said, and sometimes he goes and visits it just to say hello. Well, everyone got a little too dressed up for that cause, I do not reply, claret-capes and ostrich plumes, as if they were all in a play, when they should instead have noted that causes have reasons they get themselves lost. The smash comes soon enough, as others have declared, and a boy’s adventures know no pity. These dazed old seceshers are like whittlers who take small sticks and chop them away, making nothing but pixie pollen. I find people’s ideas are like their perfume—full of fading then dabbing on again—with no small hint of cidered urine. A good scalawag sticks to the late night cipher of her diary. Also? I myself have taken to whittling and am making your Eliza a doll from some spruce wood. Its body is like a star and I will sew it a dress out of an old Indian blanket and it will look exactly like some doddering namesake aunt made it for her.
Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs—a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart.
A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all...
With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.
THE BEST-WRITTEN BOOKS OF THE CENTURY TO DATE
See our previous picks here and here.
The National Book Critics Award for Fiction previous winners:
2001 W.G. Sebald with Anthea Bell (trans.) Austerlitz
2002 Ian McEwan Atonement
2003 Edward P. Jones The Known World
2004 Marilynne Robinson Gilead
2005 E. L. Doctorow The March
2006 Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss
2007 Junot Díaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2008 Roberto Bolaño with Natasha Wimmer (trans.) 2666
2009 Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall
2010 Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad
2011 Edith Pearlman Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories
2012 Ben Fountain Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
2013 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah
2014 Marilynne Robinson Lila
2015 Paul Beatty The Sellout
2016 Louise Erdrich LaRose
2017 Joan Silber Improvement
2018 Anna Burns Milkman
2019 Edwidge Danticat Everything Inside
2020 Maggie O'Farrell Hamnet
2021 Honorée Fanonne Jeffers The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
2022 Ling Ma Bliss Montage
The best-written of these is
ONE
GhettoNerd at the End of the World 1974–1987
THE GOLDEN AGE
Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.
And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).
He was seven then.
In those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was something of a Casanova. One of those preschool loverboys who was always trying to kiss the girls, always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving them the pelvic pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it any chance he got. Because in those days he was (still) a “normal” Dominican boy raised in a “typical” Dominican family, his nascent pimp-liness was encouraged by blood and friends alike. During parties—and there were many many parties in those long-ago seventies days, before Washington Heights was Washington Heights, before the Bergenline became a straight shot of Spanish for almost a hundred blocks—some drunk relative inevitably pushed Oscar onto some little girl and then everyone would howl as boy and girl approximated the hip-motism of the adults.
You should have seen him, his mother sighed in her Last Days. He was our little Porfirio Rubirosa.
All the other boys his age avoided the girls like they were a bad case of Captain Trips. Not Oscar. The little guy loved himself the females, had “girlfriends” galore. (He was a stout kid, heading straight to fat, but his mother kept him nice in haircuts and clothes, and before the proportions of his head changed he’d had these lovely flashing eyes and these cute-ass cheeks, visible in all his pictures.) The girls—his sister Lola’s friends, his mother’s friends, even their neighbor, Mari Colón, a thirty-something postal employee who wore red on her lips and walked like she had a bell for an ass—all purportedly fell for him. Ese muchacho está bueno! (Did it hurt that he was earnest and clearly attention-deprived? Not at all!) In the DR during summer visits to his family digs in Baní he was the worst, would stand in front of Nena Inca’s house and call out to passing women—Tú eres guapa! Tú eres guapa!—until a Seventh-day Adventist complained to his grandmother and she shut down the hit parade lickety-split. Muchacho del diablo! This is not a cabaret!