Narrative Flow, Interrupted
I’m reading a book at the moment, The Alienist by Caleb Carr. When I say “reading”, I mean that I’m listening to a performance of it on tape as I drive. Whenever I listen to an audiobook, I try hard to differentiate between the book itself and the performance by the vocal artist. After all, while the author’s words would be the same regardless, an interpretation by a different artist would give a different feel to the book. Different gender, accent, choice of vocal intonations, etc. all make or break the performance.
As it happens, this performance is not the best. One of the characters has a German accent which slips a bit every now and then, taking me out of the story. Other accents are similarly squishy. However, what I want to talk about here is the writing. Specifically, I want to say a few things about Mr. Carr’s sentence structures, and why I find one aspect of his writing really annoying.
I’m not talking about the frequently clumsy infodumps or the ham-handed recitations of facts about New York in 1896. It’s pretty clear that Mr. Carr looked at some microfilm of the New York Sun or the New York World and made careful notes about who was performing at Madison Square Garden in April 1896, so he could have his characters go to Madison Square Garden and say, “we saw performer A, then performer B, then C, then D, then E, then F, and finally G.” The menu for a fancy dinner at Delmonico’s must have been in the paper, too, because his characters go to Delmonico’s and say, “we ate a dish of A, then a dish of B, then C, then D, then E, then F, and finally G”. Mr. Carr does that a lot, figuring that if a little bit of factual description is good, then a lot of it must be really, really, really good.
No, I’m talking about his choice of sentence structure.
Very frequently, he wants to put some event or observation in context. A person goes somewhere or does something, and the place he goes or the thing she does is significant for some other reason. This wouldn’t bother me so much if it weren’t done in such a digressive and jarring manner. I wouldn’t even mind that it’s done solely to add more of that damned atmospheric verisimilitude. If I had the text in front of me, I could quote directly, but since it’s an audiobook, allow me to paraphrase:
The hansom cab rolled at what any sane person would have considered a dangerous pace, careening through streets that were, because of the intermittent rain of yesterday and the low overnight temperatures which had succeeded it and had persisted through into the morning, quite icy.
Look at that sentence. See how there’s a huge subtending clause between the verb “were” and the adjectival phrase “quite icy”? Consider the following revision:
The hansom cab rolled at what any sane person would have considered a dangerous pace, careening through streets that were quite icy because of the intermittent rain of yesterday and the low overnight temperatures which had succeeded it and had persisted through into the morning.
The second version seems like a bit of a run-on, but it’s much clearer to me. Mr. Carr does this logos interruptus thing a lot. By that I don’t mean to say that he did this once or twice, causing me to notice them the way one would notice an intact, toothbreaking peppercorn atop an otherwise cromulent salmon filet. No, he has these throughout the book, causing me as the reader to be ever wary for them, as though the salmon filet hadn’t been deboned before serving.
Another sentence structural device he likes to use—sometimes employing them for the sake of long digressions which could easily be placed in another sentence entirely—is em-dashes. Notice how I used them in the preceding sentence? That was a huge offset em-dash phrase interrupting what would otherwise be a fairly short sentence. It’s fundamental to Mr. Carr’s style of writing, at least for this book. The voice artist who is doing this audiobook version of The Alienist makes heroic efforts with pauses and intonation to make the sentences clear, even with these em-dash offset phrases, but really, with that kind of fractured sentence structure, the poor guy is fighting a losing battle.
It makes me wonder if Mr. Carr ever read his own work out loud, or indeed, if any beta reader or editor along the way ever read it out loud. If they had, they would have noticed these stumbling sentences.
Do you read your work out loud? Or have it read to you, either by a friend or a computer program?
I quite often read my work out loud. Sometimes I read the whole thing, sometimes I read only the phrase I can’t seem to get “just right”.
Reading it out loud certainly gives a different feel to the words.
I read mine out loud all the time, as I go along. Then I read it again once it’s done. I do it sotto voce, not in full audiobook performance voice, but that’s enough to catch stumbles and clumsy sentence structures.
When I write, I often try reading it in my mind. It helps a lot. In addition, I read it out once I’ve finished.
But another thing that I’ve found that helps is getting someone to translate your work for you. I say this because I have often translated non-fiction pieces in particular for people and invariably find passages where the author is just not clear. Giving your work to someone to translate can help a lot.
That’s an interesting approach. I can’t say that I’ve ever had anyone translate any of my work, but I can see how it would highlight bumps in the prose.
Very nice. Now you have me self conscious. Maybe I should hire you to edit my poetry CD I just produced in the studio.
I often read my work out loud, now and again I read it to hubs and realize a few stumbles. But you are right indeed, read your work aloud is what I have told students and performers for open mic night.
Poetry is different, though, since it MUST be read aloud. The cadences of poetry are part of the art. Prose sometimes doesn’t get that attention, unfortunately.
Piker. Here’s how a true master does it:
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
–Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
I agree with you about the subtending clause, but frankly what that sentence needs is more periods. The thing I probably do most in my rewrites is break sentences into shorter sentences.
I read all my poetry aloud to myself; prose, not so much. But then, I don’t write nearly as much prose.
There are at least six ways that sentence could be re-written, any one of which would be easier to follow than the original. But I agree, Bulwer-Lytton is the standard against which all other turgid prose must be compared.
Toche Tiel! I was thinking the same thing!
I slogged through the Alienist, and I remember thinking at the time how much I would have enjoyed it at half the size.
Yep. It’s almost like the author picked it up at some point and said, “Hmmm… only 2 pounds. Needs another pound, at least.”
You get those kinds of asides and that style of writing quite a lot in literature from the late eighteenth to late nineteenth century but I don’t know, it’s somehow less annoying than when contemporary novelists try to copy it. I like to be historically accurate but one or two pertinent details are worth more than a catalogue of irrelevant data.
And yes, I do read my work aloud. I especially have to with my first person work to make sure it sounds like natural speech.
I certainly hope that this was a stylistic choice intended to mimic that kind of writing. As a result of this book, though, I’ve put this author on my “Don’t bother to read” list.
Yes, reading aloud is a necessity for me — and for my writing. I either do it myself, most often, or let the computer do it for me.
The latter has managed to catch things, or cause things to catch my ear, that my own aloud reading didn’t.
I’ve never tried to have a computer read to me. Maybe I’ll give that a shot, thanks.
Sometimes I read it aloud (more likely to do that for copy than for fiction). And I am guity of major em-dash digression and interlocutory phrases (if that’s what they’re called).
Be gentle — I like semi-colons, too.
There’s a lot wrong with that sentence but I have to say, I preferred the original to your version. Yes, it was clearer but it lost the dramatic impact that the word ‘icy’, placed at the end, gave it. Having said that, I would cut that whole explanation for the icy conditions. Does he think his readers are so ignorant they don’t know how ice is made? And even if they are, why do they need to know?
Also, the word ‘rolling’ suggests a leisurely pace to me, so that the phrase ‘dangerous pace’ confused me. That annoyed me more, I think.
All in all that is one awful sentence. Remind me to never read any of his books. Thanks!