Gilead and Pearl

Monday night I made another one of my periodic trips out to the 92nd Street Y, this time to see Marilynne Robinson read from Gilead. She was introduced by Meghan O’Rourke, who talked briefly about the experience of working on the NYT profile of Robinson she wrote last fall, after which there was prolonged applause as the author walked across the stage to the podium, to the point where I would not have been surprised if there had been a standing ovation.

Robinson certainly would have deserved one; the passages she read from Gilead, in which the narrator describes the process of falling in love with the woman who became his second wife, were incredibly captivating, and one felt a genuine humanness to the character’s voice, both in the authenticity of his emotions and in their expression.

It was a rich and vivid peek into another person’s life—and a markedly different experience, at least to my mind, than that offered by the second reader, Mary Gordon. The audience was told quite a few times, as Gordon introduced sections from Pearl, that “I wanted to talk about” what I’ll call Issue X and Theme Y (a typical example of which was “what happened to the political faith of my cohort”). It’s not that Pearl is a bad book—it’s just that writing a novel because one wants to “talk about” something creates a fundamentally different end product than doing so because one wants, say, to tell a story, and I found both the passages Gordon read from the novel and the beginning chunks I’d read earlier that day to possess a certain detachment, to treat the characters as objects of study rather than vibrant presentations, a feeling that was intensified by Gordon’s use of a first-person narrator of near-omniscience.

And I realized by the end of the evening that, as an individual reader, and at the broadest levels, I’m simply drawn more intently to novels in which—again speaking broadly, and from my own reaction of the portion of Pearl I’ve read so far, which is admittedly not the entire book, so I apologize for whatever disservice I may be doing both author and book—issues, if they exist at all, appear to emerge organically out of characters’ lives, rather than those in which characters’ lives illustrate issues.

16 March 2005 | uncategorized |

Linguists on Literature

People go to great lengths to attack the “history” Dan Brown spins in The Da Vinci Code, but if you really want to discredit him, there’s a much easier way: Geofrrey K. Pullum of Language Log explains why his prose style sucks.

Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that’s why.

Meanwhile, one of his blogging partners, Mark Liberman, is puzzled by the prose stylings of Matthew Pearl as evidenced in The Dante Club:

For the first few dozen pages, I figured that Pearl was just trying to give his prose a 19th-century tone by using awkward constructions, making up unexpected figures of speech, and substituting rare words for common ones… a much more plausible hypothesis is that Pearl graduated from a slightly different Harvard University, in a universe slightly different from our own, and read a body of English and American literature that is also just a bit different.

3 May 2004 | uncategorized |