The confessions of a sentence junkie may not have the inherent squalid drama of accounts by opium eaters, World of Warcraft addicts or even chocoholics, but the self-revelation can be every bit as fraught.
In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose tells the story of young author she knows who, when asked by his high-powered agent what subjects he was most interested in writing about, confessed that “[w]hat he really cared about, what he wanted most of all was to write … really great sentences.”
His agent told him, after a sigh (no doubt a heavy one): “Promise me that you will never, ever in your life say that to an American publisher.”
It has been a decade since the infamous A Reader’s Manifesto was published in The Atlantic Monthly. This screed by one B.R. Myers, which flayed the prose of E. Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and others, waged an attack on what he called “the sentence cult.”
As a card-carrying cult member, I can still recall the sting of the assault. Myers’s primary targets were reviewers who felt compelled to tell the reader “some nonsense about sentences that ‘slither and pounce,” blinded by the pretension and vapidity of contemporary literary fiction. (An extreme example, but it’ll do: In a Globe and Mail review in 2000, I spent the first four paragraphs waxing ecstatic over Rick Moody’s way with a sentence.)
Worse yet, the examples Myers used to lay waste to DeLillo and Moody, the novel White Noise and the short story Demonology are in my junkie pantheon.
The highest praise non-members of the cult can give a book is the wan “The writing doesn’t call attention to itself.” In other words, just get on with the story so that the reader can pretend it wrote itself. (A twist on Roland Barthes’s death of the author?)
The go-to guy for these puritans, who no doubt have Strunk & Whites’ The Elements of Style tattooed on their chests, is Elmore Leonard: “If it sounds like writing, I take it out.” (The advice of those spoilsports Strunk & White would eviscerate the King James New Testament, with its rule-breaking sentences beginning with prepositions and replete with oddly placed italics. (A personal favourite: “For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie”: Revelations 22:15)
So hail the new junkie king, Stanley Fish, and his slender but potent volume How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One. Fish, a distinguished law professor and literary theorist, and a New York Times columnist, is the anti-Strunk & White. (In fact, he has a chapter titled Why You Won’t Find The Answer in Strunk and White.) Fish belongs to the “tribe of sentence watchers” who exalt over the performance of a sentence in the same way sports junkies exclaim while watching highlights; “[Y]ou know,” he writes, “the five greatest dunks, or the ten greatest catches.”
In a joyful and lucid manner, Fish demonstrates that the issue is not an oppositional “style versus content” or “style versus substance,” but that style IS substance: “The shaping power of language cannot be avoided. … We can only choose our style, not choose to abandon style, and it behooves us to know what the various styles in our repertoire are for and what they can do.”
Fish finds slam dunks everywhere from Milton to Martin Luther King Jr., from Henry James to Hemingway, from Joyce to a quote from Joan Crawford.
