… is what you get after a month of not bloggin’! Oh, my aching joints.  As a means of re-entry, I thought I’d take on something that seems, for now, manageable.  The sentence.

We went to hear Claire Messud a couple months back, thanks to the generous donation of two tickets by Mary Ross, a fabulous Lighthouse member.  (Thanks, Mary!) I jotted down a couple of Messud’s lines:

The long sentence, to me, is the only way to fully capture reality.

And

My apprehension of the world is entirely digressive. 

Both of these things bear out in her novels, if you’ve read any of them (which I have, and I enjoy very much). Here’s a random couple of sentences from Emperor’s Children:

She showered, dried, and dressed in the bathroom in the hall—the house was Victorian, and had only the one bathroom in spite of four bedrooms—and emerged in her favorite blush turtleneck beneath the avocado angora cardigan she had knitted last winter. In truth, she had knitted it for her niece, Marina—God only knew why, because they weren’t close; except that she loved to knit and had already made a dozen sweaters for her daughter and her grandkids.

Now, some can (and do) take Messud to task for her long sentences, as we see in that democratic literary metropolis known as “Amazon Customer Reviews,” which is where one can lurk, like an anthropologist, and study what the reading masses think:

I agree with other reviewers. It appears the author likes very long sentences; many paragraphs are absolutely incomprehensible. Are we to be impressed with the overuse of commas and dependent clauses so that it often takes two or three readings to render a sentence understandable? If this is the new era of grown-up writing, I’ll stick to my mysteries and nonfiction.
                                                                 –D. West “Bones” on Amazon

No doubt, Bones is off with a Grafton novel as we speak, hoping she doesn’t run out the alphabet.  Great! More power to Bones. 

So, instead of spending time defending Messud’s sentences for what they are–intentional, crafted, artful digressions that reflect the very vision or “apprehension of the world” that comprises her signature, I might pause here to point out that I, too, love tight sentences. I’m in the middle of Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke right now, and the tight prose, the clean sentences–you could dive into them and come out squeaky clean! Also, who doesn’t like a nice direct sentence from, say, a writer like Tobias Wolff? But I find it equally lovely to get messy in a sentence, to follow the associative currents that ripple through an occasional Woolf, Munro, Messud, or Faulkner line. 

What about you? What do you think? Can we all just get along, sentence minimalists, maximalists, and those who go both ways?  

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