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November 12, 2007

More Jayne Anne Phillips

Early in "Fast Lanes," the narrator learns that her father is sick, and she needs to get across the country. A young man named Thurman offers her a ride. There is sexual tension between them, and also a hint of menace. (Thurman is a stranger, after all, and the narrator is contemplating a long car trip with him.) They are discussing arrangements when the narrator says, "Thurman, is this a kissy-poo number?" I could spend an hour talking about this sentence alone. In the most basic sense, the narrator is asking Thurman whether he expects her to sleep with him. But "Thurman, is this a kissy-poo number?" is so different in tone and effect from "Thurman, do you expect me to sleep with you?" or "Thurman, are you telling me you think I'm going to screw you?" that it changes the scene entirely. The tenuous balance of control between the characters, the way "number" places the power in Thurman's hands even while undercutting that power, the way "kissy-poo" is both flirtatious and emasculating, even the way the word "Thurman" at the beginning of the sentence adds tension by creating the slightest pause--all this has a profound impact.

I have my students rewrite passages of published work such that the content, narrowly construed, remains the same but the word choice, the tone, is sufficiently different to change the meaning of the passage.

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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