Gary Lutz examines the well-turned sentence in The Believer:
It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out
what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what
prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain
remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and
all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually
every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost
every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a
definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who
recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the
place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a
reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now
yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to
write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the
sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of
consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated
from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear
as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. I once later tried to define
this kind of sentence as “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance
of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing,
tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.” The
writers of such sentences became the writers I read and reread. I
favored books that you could open to any page and find in every
paragraph sentences that had been worked and reworked until their forms
and contours and their organizations of sound had about them an air of
having been foreordained—as if this combination of words could not be
improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity.
Lots of examples therein, including:
A sentence that I have spent an almost pathological amount of time
gaping at since the turn of the century, a sentence that always leaves
me agog, is the opening sentence in Sam Lipsyte’s story “I’m
Slavering,” in Venus Drive: “Everybody wanted everything to be
gleaming again, or maybe they just wanted their evening back.” The
paraphrasal content of the statement informs us that high hopes for a
return to a previous wealth of life or feeling are inevitably going to
have to be scaled back and revised immediately and unconsolingly
downward. If you tweak the verb tense from the past to the present, the
sentence is even more self-containedly epigrammatic in its encompassing
of our shared predicament of disappointments. It’s a richly summational
sentence, not the sort of sentence you might expect to find at the very
outset of a story—but there are writers whose mission is sometimes to
deliver us from conclusion to conclusion instead of necessarily bogging
us down in the facts, the data, the sorry particulars leading to each
conclusion.
We await a certain someone's response....
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