The first thing I fall in love with in a book is the writing. I suspect I’m not like most readers in that regard. I suspect most readers gravitate toward a compelling character or a good hook, and while those are all good things to have in my view, the one indispensable thing that sets apart books I love from books I merely like is style.
The metaphors and figures the author deploys are capable of doing so much more than conveying the simple action of a story. They set the bounds of the world and define the framework through which characters perceive it. Unusual sentence structures, word choice, or a lack of complete sentences entirely shape the reading experience.
Start with Wolf Hall’s controversial close third-person perspective, in which the pronoun “he” is used where other writers might simply have chosen to write in first-person.
He is surprised. Are there people in the world who are not cruel to their children? For the first time, the weight in his chest shifts a little; he thinks, there could be other places, better. He talks; he tells them about Bella, and they look sorry, and they don’t say anything stupid like, you can get another dog.
This choice, love it or hate it (I happen to love it), brings an intensity to the text. These few, brief pointed lines are the literary equivalent of impressionistic brushstrokes, Mantel gives us the man, Cromwell—a man inescapably conscious of his own image, the hero of a narrative he weaves in his memory—and the villain, too. There’s no “I,” just Cromwell, his thoughts, but at a slight remove, as if hazy, drifting just behind his shoulder, while his form darkens the doorway of history.
Or, to keep on the topic of perspective: take the use of second-person perspective in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
So you quit each game they made you play. Two weeks of chess, a month in Cub Scouts, three minutes in rugger. You left school with a hatred of teams and games and morons who valued them. You quit art class and insurance-selling and masters’ degrees. Each a game you couldn’t be arsed playing. You dumped everyone who ever saw you naked. Abandoned every cause you ever fought for. And did many things you can’t tell anyone about.
This is the voice of the satirist, but also the voice of the protagonist’s own self-judgments. The style is mocking, and forthright, more direct and more modern than Wolf Hall, and the narrator here is far more capable of dissecting Maali than Cromwell’s “he” is of seeing himself clearly. Within the framing of the story, this narrative voice is born at the moment of Maali’s death, one of the many “I’s” and “You’s” that split from him during that traumatic moment. The story is told through the lens of Maali’s own self-loathing. It’s a choice that not only makes for riveting reading, but it also serves to make the prickly, selfish, and insecure Maali compelling.
When reading historical fiction, I expect the style to transport me. The rhythms and use of language are windows into a way of thinking and structuring the world, and those ways of thinking should feel different from my own. If I catch myself thinking, “this is a story about the past being told by a twenty-first century writer,” the spell is broken. I might still enjoy the book, but I can never love it.
I’ve written about The King Must Die before, but it’s one I return to again and again for how it marries its formal, gently archaic style to Theseus’s particularly bronze age attitudes toward the world:
I have never loved better any warriors serving under me than these, my first command. They were men of another country, of different blood; at first we had barely known each other’s language, and now we no longer needed it; we knew each other’s mind as brothers do for whom a look or a laugh is enough.
One can easily imagine an editor taking the knife to that first sentence, to make it more direct, less apt to back into the thought. But it would be a far worse sentence for it because in the process it would lose the essential voice of Theseus—the essential grandeur of his own self-narration, and the literary quality of ancient Greek storytelling.
By contrast, take 19th century journal recreated for To The Bright Edge of the World:
An unnerving discovery, yet I am not sure how much to draw from it.
This evening as we sought a place to sleep beneath the protection of spruce trees, Tillman came upon a bone. It was broken on one end. Near the break, teeth marks had scraped at the bone, as if the marrow had been sucked. It was weathered, but not so old as to be worn completely clean. Several strands of sinew were still attached. I asked what kind of bone it might be.
— Leg of some sort, Samuelson said.
— What’s been chewing on it, that’s what I’d like to know, Tillman said.
Note how the sentences here are as simple, unadorned and direct as Theseus’s are grand. This style fits the period as well as the material reality of journal-writing. Note how the dialogue isn’t indicated by quotation marks, but by dashes, as if quickly scribbled in a journal, rather than carefully punctuated and recorded. In other passages, the journal makes ample use of the ampersand (&) to illustrate the same thing—evoking not just the content of the writing, but the materiality of it. Who has time to write out the word “and” by hand?
The style also draws out the character: an observant, scientific thinker, whose rational mind is struggling to make sense of the inexplicable. His journal walks a line between a record of scientific observations and a means of processing the complex spiritual forces he comes in contact with in the wilderness of Alaska, playing out the character’s own struggle in the prose itself.
Lately I find myself reading more work in translation. Such books can be very rewarding stylistically, as the translator’s struggle to convey the structures and rhythms of another language can lead to sentences with a novel cadence to the English ear.
The writers I admire most are those who can work in a variety of styles, as the story requires. Virginia Woolf is a favorite for this reason. Between the lyrical stream-of-consciousness of To the Lighthouse, the prose poetry of The Waves, and the mock-biography of Orlando, her work continually surfaces fresh experiments and playfulness with language.
Like any writer, I have stylistic quirks I gravitate to, as a matter of taste and, to a certain extent, habit. But one of the things I try to do when starting a new book is to figure out exactly what style fits the story best. (This practice comes from my experience as a video game writer, where style often follows the game’s design. Some games allow space for narrative to breathe, in others you must pack as much meaning as possible into as few words as possible.) I look at character—their education level, their experiences and points of reference (how well read are they? have they ever even seen the ocean?)—and time period and explore from there, sometimes drafting the first couple of pages many times over until I’ve found the style I’m looking for.
What do you look for stylistically in a book? Are there any books whose style you fell in love with? Hated?
For my first novel, I fancied myself a literary writer. I grew up loving Conrad and Flannery O'Connor so when I pathetically explored my own writing artistry, my editors course corrected me back into commercial fiction. Truth is I lacked the talent and finesse for lovely prose and I think they recognized that early. Maybe I gave up too early, on trying, as well. Who knows.
Basic bitch writing for me. I still love it, though. Prose, I mean. When I write short stories no one will ever see, I get to really explore my creative muscles.
Once again, your post adds several books to me 'to read' list!
100%. I don't often step back to analyze what it is about a book's style that grips me, but I can tell that's what is happening. I was in a book group that read /The Secret River/ by Kate Grenville this year, which was a historical fiction-based-on-nonfiction-kinda, set during the colonization of the land around Sydney, Austrailia. We had a long discussion about the use of Italics instead of quotations, and how it added to the surreality of the experience, the blending of the people with the landscape, the dehumanization of the settlers who were dehumanizing others.... it was a stylistic choice that almost became a framing device.