Sentences

In an interview with the Washington Post shortly after Goldengrove was published, Francine Prose sighed, “I would really like, before this whole thing is over, for at least one review to talk about the sentences in my novel.” Before it was anything else, she said, Goldengrove was a “vehicle for me to hang those sentences on.”

Along with every other reviewer of the novel, I failed her. A little later, in reviewing Robert Cohen’s Amateur Barbarians, a lesser novel, I did discuss the sentences. But as much as I have written about Prose—with more to come in a national magazine—I have never said anything about the grammatically complete expressions of her thought.

Or does she mean something else by “sentences”? In Latin, sententiae are opinions, aphorisms, dicta. Indeed, in the Middle Ages sententiae were short passages from longer works that were copied out and rearranged for their moral or amorous wisdom—a meaning still preserved in the adjective sententious. The earliest use of the word recorded in the OED, dating from the first quarter of the thirteenth century, refers to the meaning of a passage rather than its wording.

Almost exactly the opposite is its use by contemporary writers. “I turn sentences around,” Lonoff tells Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer:That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.This may be the surest way to divide the world of literature into East and West. There are some writers for whom literary distinction is identified, at its most basic level, with exactitude of sentences. And there are other writers whose priorities lie elsewhere—story, thesis, “atmosphere,” effect, catching the wave of topical chatter. For years, when new acquaintances would ask my opinion of Stephen King, I would not know what to say, since I have never given him a second thought. Now it occurs to me why: King spares little attention to his sentences.

And I wonder if this is the real division that critics only approximate when they speak of the difference between “serious writing” and everything else. The novelist Charles Johnson attributes it to a sense of urgency:Now if you can write out of the sense that you’re going to die as soon as this work is done, then you will write with urgency, honesty, courage and without flinching at all, as if this were the last testament in language, the last utterance, you could ever make to anybody. If a work is written like that, then I want to read it. If somebody’s writing out of that sense, then I’ll say, “This is serious. This person’s not fooling around. The work is not a means to some other end, the work is not just intended for some silly superficial goal, this work is the writer saying something because he or she feels that if it isn’t said, it will never be said.”By writing as if you’re going to die as soon as the work is done, Johnson seems to mean writing with finality. Nothing is more dissatisfying than an idea that is given merely provisional statement because the writer is in a hurry to get on with it. In “An Octopus,” Marianne Moore defines her aesthetic conviction:Neatness of finish! Neatness of finish!
Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus
with its capacity for fact.But it is not neatness of finish that identifies good writing—not the quality of having been arranged and shined—but of completeness. And since the basic unit of grammatical completeness is the sentence, the basic unit of all good writing is the sentence.

A writer whose sentences are not exacting and exuberant is just not worth reading.