'Sometimes you want to let yourself vamp for the cheap seats': Cally Fiedorek on prose style

Plus our next pick from the recent releases in literary fiction

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In today’s issue:

—’it was sort of this American hyper-realism, a caffeinated realism, like if Carver and David Foster Wallace had a baby—a style of prose so chiseled, so high-functioning, that bore such perfect witness to the author’s perceptiveness that it read more like an excellent example of New Journalism than fiction. As an intellectual spectacle, or as magazine writing, this style is perfectly great, but as an emotional and sensory experience, it lacks a certain grip and aura, a certain lived-in-ness’: Cally Fiedorek’s outstanding piece on prose style. We chose her novel Atta Boy as the best-written work from our recent subscribers’ submissions.

—‘it is the story of a small child who opens her mouth to sing after her home’s destroyed by a great flood and when she does, instead of a song pouring out: flames’: our next pick of a best-written book from the recent releases in literary fiction. Our previous pick is here, where you can also find the list of books considered.

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CALLY FIEDOREK ON PROSE STYLE

What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?

I barely read at all as a kid. Tiger Beat, maybe—I was a bit of a space cadet, a pop-culture junkie. The first books I read on my own steam were grown-up literary novels and stories, DeLillo and John Cheever. I was trying to become a more serious person very quickly. DeLillo sent me down a dark, dark path. I think I’d die of embarrassment to reread those early efforts at affecting his style. Oh boy—garbage. Just complete and total garbage. Significantly worse than if I’d been shooting for Kerouac or Salinger. This was painfully self-serious prose, very strained, very hard-pressed for severity. But I couldn’t not try. Underworld had made the first case to me for writing as a heroic, world-gobbling enterprise. DeLillo made a talent for prose seem like a rare, virtuosic thing, a performative skill as spectacular and worthy of envy as any guitar god’s or Olympian’s. At first at least, that feeling of awe and envy is what makes you want to try and do it.

Thankfully the pendulum has a way of swinging back and righting itself, in writing as in life; you strike a bunch of poses, and then you relax, having gained a bit more dexterity, you hope, from those earlier contortions. I’m now a lot more comfortable embracing in my style the things about myself I used to find embarrassing—silliness, girlishness, frivolity, melodrama—but first I had to try (and fail) to sound very ominous and grim.

Speaking of virtuosity, I think I’ve broadly turned away from the virtuosic in fiction, or grown up to find that sometimes very high-performing prose offers fewer rewards for the reader than something humbler and more approachable. I’m not talking about DeLillo here—if I could write like him, I surely would!—but a few other authors come to mind. Wells Tower, guys like that. There was a style of prose I noticed a lot around the early-to-mid-2000s—I’m not a literary scholar, so I don’t know the actual term, but it was sort of this American hyper-realism, a caffeinated realism, like if Carver and David Foster Wallace had a baby—a style of prose so chiseled, so high-functioning, that bore such perfect witness to the author’s perceptiveness that it read more like an excellent example of New Journalism than fiction. As an intellectual spectacle, or as magazine writing, this style is perfectly great, but as an emotional and sensory experience, it lacks a certain grip and aura, a certain lived-in-ness. There’s something defensive and snarky about it. These were authors I was reading as a teenager in the mid-2000s and thinking, “Wow, this guy’s good, this guy’s really smart, I wanna do that,” but now I revisit some of those stories and books and it’s like listening to, I don’t know, a Shins EP or something. It’s just . . . not built to last. It’s built to make an impression, but not to last. I’m sure I’ll someday feel the same way about many, many passages in Atta Boy, by the way—you can theorize all day long about these things, but in the fog of creation, you don’t always have the luxury of following your own advice. You’re too busy hustling to get the words down.

What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Atta Boy?

I guess the big ask was to capture two very different, differently classed, aged, and gendered narrators in a way that felt strikingly varied yet cohesive. We have Rudy, a late-twenties outer-borough ne’er-do-well who’s sort of, on the surface at least, a millennial Archie Bunker, and Marley, an extremely sheltered uptown girl coming of age in a world of preposterous luxury.

The style is a real mix of the esoteric and demotic, kind of like the city in which it’s set. A balance of twenty-dollar words with five-cent ones, of lowly, profane, streetwise language with its more formal, elevated counterpart. Sometimes you want to reach for the most sophisticated, highest-minded reader, and sometimes you want to let yourself vamp for the cheap seats. My prose idol is Bellow, who does this high-low thing better than anyone. He can sound like Al Capone, Barbra Streisand, and Melville in the span of a single paragraph, and it’s still somehow all him.

Speaking again of DeLillo (are you sick of me yet?), he mentioned in one interview writing about New York City in Great Jones Street (he also did this, a lot, in “The Angel Esmeralda” sections that later appeared in Underworld) and wanting to capture what he called a “ruined sort of grandeur” to the language. NYC in the ’70s, he said, put him in mind of a European city in the Middle Ages, an ugly-beautiful, broken world full of beggars, drug addicts, lost souls, but full of its own odd dignity and holiness. I wanted to go for that a little in the opening chapter, which is set (this might be DeLillo’s and my shared lapsed Catholicism talking) at Christmastime, on the solstice, to be precise. I wanted to capture a sense of almost paganistic gloom, a sense of a degraded world in need of saving (spoiler: not gonna happen). It meant mixing in some fancier, almost liturgical language here and there, just to the left of purple. I don’t remember a single thing about middle and high school Latin, literally nothing, but I remember being really into it at the time, and I feel like the syntax must have gotten into my system somehow—the variable word order, the heavy layering of subordinate clauses—and I can see that in DeLillo’s work, too.

Do you have any stylistic tips for Auraist’s readers? 

I really recommend thinking about Latinate vs. Anglo-Saxon words in your work. English is a nice, heady ol’ grab bag of the two of them, and playing them off each other is a large part of the fun. Not to insult your readers’ intelligence, but in case it’s helpful: Latin-derived words tend to be longer, more cerebral, more formal-sounding (i.e. obdurate, consummate, iridescent, abdomen), Anglo-Saxon words shorter and more straightforward (belly, gruff, box, cry, drunk), and tend to have a more immediate, sometimes even onomatopoeic effect. Sometimes a Latinate, fancy, more academic-sounding word is exactly what’s required, but when I have language in front of me that’s not particularly vivid and I can’t figure out why, I try to swap out Latinate words for Anglo-Saxon ones, and see if I can’t get it to sound a bit rough-and-readier and more alive. It sometimes works.

Any tips specific to literary fiction?

Tom Jenks, the editor and author, told me something a long time ago that really stuck, though it’s still something I struggle to implement, and probably technically has more to do with perspective than style per se. He told me I was writing on top of the story instead of in the story. As much as possible, you want to be on the ground of the world you’re building, not looking down at it from on high. This can be very hard to bear in mind if you’re partial to more ambitious, maximalist, stylized prose like I am. I guess this “in vs. on top of” metric is sort of adjacent to the showing v. telling can of worms, but it’s a more subtle and more useful distinction, I think.

I find this sentence from Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke illustrative (style-wise, it’s not his most characteristically unhinged work, but it’s probably the most up my alley, personally):

“Skip turned his eyes anywhere, to the tiles of the floor, the walls, the cobwebbed vents in the eaves, seeking a clue as to the character of coming days.”

Johnson is sort of lightly violating the show-don’t-tell rule; he’s essentially telling you the character is feeling adrift and uncertain of his future (I haven’t read the book in a few years, but I think the protagonist has just learned his father died). But because his bewilderment is filtered through descriptions of physical, tangible details, the telling goes down easy, and feels organic to the showing. You’re right there with Skip, on the ground, in the room. The more immediate, simple, imagistic tenor of the first half of the sentence (“the tiles of the floor, the walls”) seems to yield to, and even earn, the more abstract, emotional one of the second. There’s almost a feel of kitchen-sink realism to it, perfectly juxtaposing the impassiveness of the physical world with the character’s inner grief and turmoil.

Importantly, saying “stay on the ground” isn’t the same as a proscription against fancy, elevated language. The language here is actually quite formal, even deliberately awkward (“seeking a clue as to the character of coming days”) but it works somehow. The first time I read that sentence, I thought, yes, I’m going to be stealing that transition in some form or another over and over again for a long time.

How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the miniscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?

Atta Boy is a bit of a blur now, but I’ve been stuck on the same few paragraphs for a comically long time in a new project and feel I can attest to this frustration. It’s pretty fresh in my mind. It’s not about commas or dashes or individual words—I’m not that crazy—it’s about particular paragraphs that give persistent, existential trouble. These are reread many, many hundreds of times. They’re the last words playing in your head before sleep, and the first ones upon waking. Sometimes it’s a joyful obsession, an exhilarating narcissism, like staring at a flattering picture of yourself, but usually when you’re obsessing this much it’s because something’s not working and you’re feeling very bad and very worried.

These paragraphs usually occur around a transitional point in the story when you’re trying to ramp things up a bit, trying to get the water to start boiling—to borrow a helpful phrase from George Saunders’s Substack—and the fact that the language resists your designs for it, resists that feeling of escalation and lift-off, not only brings face-value frustration, but seems to call into doubt the authenticity and worthwhileness of the project as a whole. You’ve got a lot of sentences that sort of scratch at the right meaning, but none of them quite draws blood. The buildup of meanings is somehow less than the sum of its parts—it feels approximate, leaden, contrived, abstract when it’s meant to feel visceral, aerated, immediate. The moment feels baggy when you want it to feel cinched. I could continue to mix all sorts of metaphors here. … In fact, I think I’m actively demonstrating this phenomenon right now.

I’m not sure how you get through it. It’s rarely about the words themselves, of course; it’s more often your own authorial imposter syndrome flaring up, your fear of the tremendous work ahead manifesting in excessive micromanaging of what’s in front of you. Maybe you don’t really solve the problem—you just get sick of it and move on. You find a sentence that’s close enough to your intended meaning, a kind of scaffolding, that you can just about live with, and proceed. I’m not a big fan of the “I’ll come back to that later” method of writing—in order to move on, it has to be as good as I can possibly get it—but once in a while you’ve got to let yourself stick a pin in something. Moving forward with the text will probably give you the information you need to go back and solve for x, or at least give you a sense of confidence and spontaneity and playfulness that was all but absent before—you were trying too hard to control things.

Mark Fisher railed for years about the demise of what he called ‘popular modernism’. Adele Bertei and Rob Doyle have spoken in Auraist of the increased conservatism across our century’s mainstream arts, while the corollary in contemporary prose is, we believe, the Replicant Voice. Does mainstream published prose now tend towards insipid conservatism and even automatism?

Probably. I’m sure a lot of really smart stuff has been said about fiction and the digital era, and I agree with everything Rob said in his interview. Like him, I try not to think about it too much, but when I do it’s less a concern about style or what my contemporaries are doing, and more a kind of generalized seasickness, a weariness, a feeling of “Ughhh . . . everybody’s out there yakking their heads off, shouting over one another, why add to the noise? Why bother? Why sing this little song? I should’ve been a veterinarian.” (Needless to say, it can be hard to write fiction under these mental conditions.) Then, also like Rob, I think, no, this rancor and this seasickness and this hatred for the world I’m feeling—this is the fuel. This is the dare to cut through the b.s. and make something of my own.

It's every author’s job to keep one’s head above the parapet, to find, from within what Doyle aptly describes as an era of “conformism, timidity, auto-surveillance and auto-censorship,” a tenderness for people and the world. Consider this beautiful passage from a Nabokov story, “A Guide to Berlin.”

“I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

Exquisite and festive and fragrant. Yes! That’s what we ought to be going for. Out of ordinariness and banality, something fresh and distinctive. If not something ground-breaking, at least something fun.

Over the course of submitting, publishing, and promoting a novel I’ve been deep in the rabbit hole of the literary internet, doom-scrolling Publishers Marketplace, doom-scrolling Goodreads, and for a while it really messed with my head. I’m only just now starting to recover. It’s like the banality of—instead of evil—of excellence. Every other day there’s a new must-read, startlingly original, life-changing novel with some preposterously hyperbolic blurb, and at a certain point it all just feels like a bunch of horseshit. And I’m a part of it! In promoting my book, in shouting it out the way I’ve had to, I am a part of the horseshit economy. Ugh! It’s so boring. I hate it.

Moving on with this new project, or trying to, I’ve occasionally found myself feeling paranoid about some image of a literary gatekeeper I have in my head, some Sally Rooney-loving slush-pile reader at a literary magazine (no shade to Sally Rooney—just not my cup of tea), or the assistant to the assistant to the editor at a publishing house, instinctively picturing this person’s complete hatred for—or, worse, indifference to—my work. I picture her—it’s probably a her—almost like a Gen-Z-Brooklynite version of the David Walliams “computer says no” character from Little Britain. (Please YouTube if you’re not familiar.) Someone reading the first few pages of Atta Boy who’s just like, “Huh? Sorry . . . no . . . just, no . . . not worth the trouble.” I sometimes get very upset and very jammed-up thinking about this person, and I can’t write, and then I think, no, no, I need to put this away . . . this preemptive rage is bad for me, It’s bad for my intellect, my writing, my soul. This terror of the algorithm, this terror of those beholden to its workings. You’ve got to put that shit away, and keep writing.

The fact is, everyone’s just doing their best (I think). There’s no committee of tastemakers. There’s no conspiracy of minions or satanic cult at the heart of the publishing and literary industries. (Not yet at least—ask me again when the robots take over!) For now, there are just a bunch of individuals, tired and underpaid, in need of lunch or a nap, making decisions. Reading your work, or more likely ignoring it, falling in love with it, or more likely not. My point is, you can’t make them fall in love with you. There’s no set of words or stylistic choices so luminous, so effervescent, so convincing it will sway them to your side if your book is simply not their bag. You can control the words on the page (to some extent), but you can’t control the way those words register in the brains and hearts of different readers with wildly different life experiences, associations, agendas, and tastes—that’s an alchemy that there’s no accounting for, and no predicting. You have to be yourself. You have to focus on doing the best work you can, making the prose as alive and as exquisite and as festive and as fragrant as you can, and you have to send it out to many, many people, and hope and pray that one of them will be like, “Okay, yeah . . . this is worth it . . . come on in.” So, yeah, whatever’s going on out there, just, please, try as much as possible to ignore it and do your own thing. We need you to.

I’m sorry my response to your very thoughtful, specific, and well-intentioned question turned into a bit of a half-time speech. I think I’m just in need of one, too.

Cally Fiedorek is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Susan Kamil/Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction. She lives in her native New York City with her family. Atta Boy is her first novel. 

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If I have to name it

all my language won’t be enough— allergy that shoots through the bone

blood turning against itself

queer planet spit out of its sun

documents in the oven before the soldiers come

every cell wall tongue-kissing traffic

every organ sunbathing on its ruined mattress

There’s this myth I love most about fire. And even though I can remember almost everything now, I can’t for the life of me recall where it’s from. Maybe a book, or maybe it’s buried somewhere in the blood. That’s one of the few hazy bits, the origins of things – film decays as it turns in its projector. It isn’t the Greek, that famous thievery, where a man’s liver is eaten by an eagle only to regrow again and again. Or those other thieves the Coyote, the Beaver, the Rabbit, the Mantis, the Crow, the Dog, the Spider. It’s not the giant bear who hoards the stars to keep warm against the great black blanket of the sky, then lets one fall down to earth after seeing all humanity shiver. Not lightning. Not stone. Not two cities punished for their wont of pleasure. Not three men made to walk through fire to test their faith and – Hosanna – they survive. No, it is the story of a small child who opens her mouth to sing after her home’s destroyed by a great flood and when she does, instead of a song pouring out: flames.

.

I hear the crowd before I see it. Leaving the park behind, I make a right, and Fifth Avenue is just sitting there between skyscrapers like a father waiting up past curfew. Gucci and Prada models glare at each other from their rented billboards – two white women trapped in time inside their photoshopped faces and borrowed clothes. I mistake the crowd out front of the Apple Store for the protest before hearing the drums in the near distance and realise these people are just waiting in line for a more expensive way to tell time. To adorn their wrists in surveillance. The drums pulsing a few blocks away sound larger than they are, spreading some old and nearly forgotten language.

When I arrive, I find the protest is just a few dozen folks inside their dark jackets inside this unseasonably warm late winter day. Two people behind megaphones are attempting to scold shoppers into joining them, begging passers-by while letting them pass. Yelling over each other, turning the street into a kind of atonal dystopian sound installation. I’m wearing a red sweatshirt that reads USA and can’t stop sweating inside this ironised and ironed-on country. It’s impossible not to feel how small we are below these buildings, beside all this endless traffic.

A pigeon with one fucked-up foot is hobbling on the sidewalk in a loose infinity sign. When the sun hits its neck just right at least one thing is expensive and not dying.

.

The last time I see Edwin it’s the holidays. I’m on our old block smoking a Camel Crush beneath the LED streetlights the county’s just installed; all the shadows are new and unnatural, casting weird fractals across the ground. On this annual Thanksgiving trip home, junior year, everything’s smaller in the worst possible way. My father looms like a religious potato bug. My old room, a shrunken cotton t-shirt.

Edwin at least still has the old pickup, and I can hear its rust wheezing around the corner before seeing him pull up in front of his mom’s house. He steps out with a grimace and has a new scar on his left cheek that looks like teeth marks or a cross-section of lasagna. He nods at me, as if he’s trying to remember my name. I watch in real time as he fails to place me in a time and place.

Hey, he nods my way, and I nod back Hi, hiding my silverpainted nails in my pocket. How you been? I ask. Yup, he replies. Then walks away forever. I bite down and my mouth floods with menthol.

.

1st Degree (superficial):

At ten, I try surprising my parents with breakfast. Light the cardboard match and watch gas eat the whole book of matches, crafting a strange living flower there on the stove. The bloom quick-changes the skin on my right hand, white and frothing. It’s moments later I feel the pain, like a dozen crows trying to argue their way out of me. I try to scream but it’s just crows streaming out of my mouth.

Dad takes me to the ER, where a syringe lowers me into a dull synthetic quiet. Through the bandages, and the nurses, and the medicines, he calls it a lesson. Says, this pain means I’ll never do it again. I nod my head and the many crows nod along in silent bewilderment. We get ice-cream, mint chocolate chip, but only after we’ve all stopped crying.

.

2nd Degree (partial thickness):

Twelve and smoking for the first time. Surrounded by other little dirtbag Jews after Hebrew School performing at toughness on the school playground with someone’s mom’s stolen pack of Winstons. We are learning to control fire, to take a burning thing inside us, and then let it go. For the hour, we become gods lording over the blacktop, talking shit about each other’s mothers who we mostly adore and would die of embarrassment if they ever overheard. Temporary gods of smoke, of the surface of things, gods of nicotine breathing like little dragons in our graphic anime tees and second-hand JNCOs, in our filthy Chucks. Gods of new plagues and old locusts. Gods of being noticed. God, someone please notice me. Only, dear god, please not too closely.

Longlisted for the National Book Award

In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezra's ever loved, every place they've felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant. Unfolding in fragments of memory, Ezra dissolves into the family, religion, desire, losses, pains and joys that made them into the person that's decided on this final act of protest.

Told in lyric fragments that span both lifetimes and geography, Yr Dead is a queer, Jewish, diasporic coming of age story that questions how our historical memory shapes our political and emotional present. Visceral, propulsive, and at turns fluorescently beautiful and fluorescently tragic, Yr Dead is the electric debut novel from award-winning writer Sam Sax, one of our most dynamic and imaginative writers.