One of the best-written novels of the century
Plus our final pick from recent literary fiction, and one of the best books on prose technique.
Every week we identify the best-written works of fiction, speculative fiction, and nonfiction from recent releases and shortlists for major prizes. We also publish guides by their authors on prose technique.
Best-written novels of the century
Recent literary fiction
Books on prose technique
‘Best book on writing. Ever.’—New York Journal of Books
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Guides to prose technique
‘What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose? Without being prompted to copy the style, could AI ever write as well as this?’
Ruby Todd:
One of the reading experiences I remember most vividly from this period was when, one summer afternoon during a visit to my grandparents' house in Queensland, I lay on my bed beneath the ceiling fan, reading my mother's copy of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. As I read, I became hypnotised by the effects the writing was having on my senses, and wanted to understand why. The prose seemed almost material, and gathered force as I read, and this effect, I realised, seemed to a great extent created by the quality of its narrative voice, its intimacy and sense of testament, and its conjuring of image, place and time in combination with a particular rhythm and cadence, until I felt pervaded by an atmosphere that seemed as alive to me as the tropical day outside my room. It was the feeling of being visited by another world, and I'd repeat phrases and sentences to myself, to savour the effect and also to see if doing so would help me understand their power, as though they were equations I might solve.
I've always found the ending of Housekeeping uniquely charged. (For anyone who hasn't yet read the book, you might prefer to skip this response!).
We are nowhere in Boston. However Lucille may look, she will never find us there, or any trace or sign. We pause nowhere in Boston, even to admire a store window, and the perimeters of our wandering are nowhere. No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.
I've always loved the way that this final passage (along with those that precede it) offers narrator Ruth's speculative imaginings about her sister Lucille's adult life in the years since their parting. Through Ruth's eyes, we glimpse Lucille living on beyond what she mistakenly believes to have been the deaths of Ruth and their aunt, Sylvie, and we experience how despite in fact being alive, in the wandering isolation of their lives, there is a way in which they both haunt and are haunted, a truth evoked from the start by the spectral quality of Ruth's narration.
The above-quoted passage is the last in a series of Ruth's imaginings, in which she envisions scenes from Lucille's life without them, scenes that contain truth despite never having happened. Like so much of the novel, this description is animated by absence, by loss and by what is not, and this is mirrored on a technical level by the use of grammatical negation, which accumulates until the closing line. I've always been struck by the power of how Robinson in these passages combines the effect of speculation with testament through Ruth's voice, in combination with the incantatory potential of negative words like 'nowhere', 'never', 'no one', and 'does not', which (along with building rhythm and emotion) serve to evoke with such immediacy the truth and presence of exactly what they negate.
As both a reader and a writer, I've always been drawn to such effects, which foreground on a narrative level the negative power of language itself. I'm thinking too of passages in Marguerite Duras's The Lover, in which she summons with strange immediacy the vision of a photograph from the narrator's youth, decades ago, that was never taken, also using the present tense, and employing declaratives like, 'On the ferry, look, I've still got my hair'. Like Robinson above, Duras in this passage imbues her description with specifics that carry with them a kind of pointedness—'I use Crème Tokalon, and try to camouflage the freckles on my cheeks'—which contributes to the effect of a kind of blurring between hallucination and reality. And Roland Barthes in his essay-elegy, Camera Lucida, does something similar in describing a photograph of his late mother that does exist, yet which the reader is unable to see except through his words, which only lends those words a greater force.
I don't believe any synthetic intelligence, divorced from the full-spectrum, sensory experience of love and beauty, cruelty and pain in a mortal body on our planet, will ever be able to match the best of human literary expression. So, I'm unsurprised that attempts to do so using AI rely on parasitic mechanisms and ultimately, unacknowledged theft, that undermines the integrity and sovereignty of genuine human expression, cultural production, and art. It's a scandal, to say nothing of the other risks posed by this technology.
Read on here»
Browse all our guides to prose technique »
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Eskor David Johnson:
My best guess is in the books of Roald Dahl, who I believe was the first author whose writing I could easily identify. In going back years later to read through some, I was surprised by how perspicacious his prose in fact is:
So it’s more than just the silly words—which are gloriously silly.
To speak more recently, I might have to say “A Father’s Story” by Andre Dubus, which I read when I came to the US for high school, and remains my favorite short story to this day. Here’s how it opens:
My name is Luke Ripley, and here is what I call my life: I own a stable of thirty horses, and I have young people who teach riding, and we board some horses too. This is in northeastern Massachusetts. I have a barn with an indoor ring, and outside I’ve got two fenced-in rings and a pasture that ends at a woods with trails. I call it my life because it looks like it is, and people I know call it that, but it’s a life I can get away from when I hunt and fish, and some nights after dinner when I sit in the dark in the front room and listen to opera. The room faces the lawn and the road, a two-lane country road. When cars come around the curve northwest of the house, they light up the lawn for an instant, the leaves of the maple out by the road and the hemlock closer to the window. Then I’m alone again, or I’d appear to be if someone crept up to the house and looked through a window: a big-gutted grey-haired guy, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, staring out at the dark woods across the road, listening to a grieving soprano.
Before reading this, I hadn’t realised that you could begin to reveal your world so plainly, almost with a sense of weariness for how overly familiar it is to your characters. I didn’t know how much effort a simple declaration could save you—“This is in northern Massachusetts”—nor that you could move with such grace between the eternal and internal—“I call it my life because it looks like it is, and people I know call it that, but it’s a life I can get away from when I hunt and fish, and some nights after dinner when I sit in the dark in the front room and listen to opera.” The story also made me aware of the power of a pitch-perfect detail, how the right one will do so much more for your scene than any number of high-flying adjectives will.
For some time after, I wrote a lot of old protagonists made weary by the world around them.
Unfortunately, I must answer yes to the second question. I do understand the implied hope within it, of there being something so indelibly human in writing that will forever evade the grasps of machines. However I think we’re only at the beginning of understanding what we’re dealing with. The AIs will be able to write like Dubus above, as well as Dante, Wharton, what have you. In fifty years’ time, questions like the one just asked will have assumed an air of dramatic naïveté.
The new question, when that time comes, will be in what we choose to value. I follow competitive chess, a world that has already had its own reckoning with the machines. The computers and phones on which your audience is reading these words would defeat the #1 ranked chess player Magnus Carlsen 100 times out of 100. Somehow, though, there remains only a fraction of chess fans who follow the computer chess competition cycles, as opposed to the comparatively idiotic games of merely human grandmasters. We are still drawn to the foibles of human players, not in spite of their malleable, error-prone minds, but because of them.
It is the experience of the human chess player—as in, not the measure of their expertise, but the fact that it required a lived life to achieve it—that draws us. In seeing them, a measure of ourselves reflects on the possibility of we, too, having maybe been able to do as much, had life gone differently.
So too with writing. A memoir is beautiful not just for the power of its writing, but because in reading it you understand that that happened to someone. In a novel we know that, albeit in a much more abstracted sense, the author lived through these moments in their mind. A computer that churns out excellent prose will nonetheless never churn it out from experience, and the work will not speak to us in the way.
Will there be instances that slip through, where a much lauded work of fiction is later revealed to have been written by an AI? Certainly. But we will treat them like forged paintings. Impressive just a moment before, then suddenly devoid of value once it is revealed that no original spirit went into its crafting.
So I think; so I hope.
Read on at the link below.
Masterclass on prose style from Eskor David Johnson, shortlisted for the First Novel Prize
Eskor David Johnson is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago and the United States. His writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. A graduate of Harvard University and the …
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