by
James Wood
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The style could be called commercial realism. It lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling, itself derived from the more original grammar of Flaubert; and of course it didn't end with Greene. Efficient contemporary realistic narrative, elegantly finished, still sounds pretty much like this. Here is John le Carre, from Smiley 's People:
Smiley arrived in Hamburg in mid-morning and took the airport bus to the city centre. Fog lingered and the day was very cold. In the Station Square, after repeated rejections, he found an old, thin terminus hotel with a lift licensed for three persons at a time. He signed in as Standfast, then walked as far as a car-rental agency, where he hired a small Opel, which he parked in an underground garage that played softened Beethoven out of loudspeakers.
This is nice writing, for sure, and by the standards of contemporary thrillers it is magnificent (the 'thin' hotel is very good). But the detail selected is either reassuringly flat (fog, cold, the Opel car), or reassuringly 'telling': it is nothing out of the ordinary. The hotel is dabbed onto the canvas with its lift that can only carry three, the garage by its Beethoven. The selection of detail is merely the quorum necessary to convince the reader that this is 'real', that it 'really happened'. It may be 'real' but it is not real, because none of the details is very alive. The narrative, the grammar of the realism, exists in order to announce to us: 'This is what reality in a novel like this looks like—a few details that are not extraordinary but nevertheless tastefully chosen and executed, enough to get the scene going.' The passage is a clever coffin of dead expectations.
And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit's house to its foundations [...]
this makes me melt
So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world—the language that fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. [...]
Nabokov's is a highly self-serving and romantic view of the author, who seems to have no indebtedness to any other author; indeed, in Nabokov's mythology, this writer, who fashions humans from ribs, is God Himself, which might well mean Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov.
ahahah
[...] For details represent those moments in a story where form is outlived, cancelled, evaded. I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them. Details are not, of course, just bits of life: they represent that magical fusion, wherein the maximum amount of literary artifice (the writer's genius for selection and imaginative creation) produces a simulacrum of the maximum amount of non-literary or actual life, a process whereby artifice is then indeed converted into (fictional, which is to say, new) life. Details are not lifelike but irreducible: things-in-themselves, what I would call lifeness itself. [...]
[...] fiction's chief difference from poetry and painting and sculpture--from the other arts of noticing--is this internal psychological element. In fiction, we get to examine the self in all its performance and pretence, its fear and secret ambition, its pride and sadness. It is by noticing people seriously that you begin to understand them; by looking harder, more sensitively, at people's motives, you can look around and behind them, so to speak. [...]
What do writers do when they seriously notice the world? Perhaps they do nothing less than rescue the life of things from their death--from two deaths, one small and one large: from the 'death' which literary form always threatens to impose on life, and from actual death. Which is to say, they rescue us from our death. I mean the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us--the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavours, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention. [...]
[...] But a life without stumbling is also unimaginable: perhaps to be in between two places, to be at home in neither, is the inevitable fallen state, almost as natural as being at home in the first place.
Almost. But not quite. When I left England eighteen years go, I didn't know then how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have known? It's one of time's lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, perhaps even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth is the slow revelation that I made a large choice many years ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life--indeed how life is lived. [...]
the endless and impossible journey, etc
There are two absolutely lancing sentences in this story: “In that minute he had told it all and was quite amazed to find that the story had taken such a short time. He had thought he could go on talking about the kiss all night.”
What a serious noticer a writer must be to write those lines. Chekhov appears to notice everything. He sees that the story we tell in our heads is the most important one, because we are internal expansionists, comic fantasists. For Ryabovich, his story has grown bigger and bigger, and has joined, in real time, the rhythm of life. Chekhov sees that Ryabovich, painfully, does and doesn’t need an audience for his story. Perhaps Chekhov is also jokily suggesting that, unlike Chekhov, the captain wasn’t much of a storyteller. For there is the inescapable irony that Chekhov’s own story, while taking a bit longer than a minute to tell, does not take all evening to read: like many of his tales, it is brisk and brief. Had Chekhov told it, people would have listened. Yet Chekhov also suggests that even the story we have just read—Chekhov’s brief story—is not the whole account of Ryabovich’s experience; that just as Ryabovich failed to tell it all, so perhaps Chekhov has failed to tell it all. There is still the enigma of what Ryabovich wanted to say.
loooove this
But just as Ryabovich’s one-minute story is not really worth telling, is not really a story, so the shapeless story that would take all evening is too shapeless, is not enough of a story. Ryabovich, one suspects, needs a Chekhovian eye for detail, the ability to notice well and seriously, the genius for selection. Do you think that Ryabovich mentioned, when he told his tale to his fellow-soldiers, that the darkened room smelt of lilacs, poplar, and roses? Do you think that Ryabovich mentioned that when the woman kissed him, his cheek glowed, as if brushed with peppermint? For details represent those moments in a story where form is outlived, cancelled, evaded. I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them. Details are not, of course, just bits of life: they represent that magical fusion, wherein the maximum amount of literary artifice (the writer's genius for selection and imaginative creation) produces a simulacrum of the maximum amount of non-literary or actual life, a process whereby artifice is then indeed converted into (fictional, which is to say, new) life. Details are not lifelike but irreducible: things-in-themselves, what I would call lifeness itself. The detail about the peppermint, like the tingle felt by Ryabovich on his cheek, lingers for us: all we have to do is rub the spot.
For some weird reason, the lithub preview replaces a few sentences near the end with "But if the life of a story is in its excess, in its surplus, in the riot of things beyond order and form, then it can also be said that the life-surplus of a story lies in its details." which i kinda like better