The Sentence Writer
Issue 163
Here’s a completely true, but utterly frivolous, coincidence that you probably won’t believe: On Saturday, I felt a rather disturbing stutter in my writing, it was a bit too aimless, a bit too muddled, a bit too, I must admit, needless. And because needless days have a tendency to cascade into needless weeks, I’m fairly quick to adjust. A new page, a short walk, a long swim, a conversation—the frustrated writer has plenty of techniques. Eventually, I found myself in a languid skim of my books, flipping through various titles without much purpose, until I pulled down, without any forethought, Experience, Martin Amis’ 2000 memoir. This is a book that I’ve read once and skimmed countless times, with my hands, on this past Saturday, turning toward the end, when Amis the son is in the hospital watching Amis the father die, the revelation that he, too, will die a sudden line in the narrative. Now the coincidence in my life is, I want to be clear, inconsequential to the world, but that made it no less striking for me to put the book down, return to my computer, and learn of Martin Amis’ death.
Of course I was ready. The main events are these ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters. In the ordinary miracle, two people go into that room and three come out. In the ordinary disaster, well, I was going to say that two people go into that room and only one comes out. But in fact only one person goes into that room and none comes out.1
Certain writers inspire you to keep reading: the voice leaps from the page and you don’t want the conversation to end. Rebecca West, Joan Didion, Saul Bellow, among countless others, do that for me. These writers have a gravitational pull, there’s weight underneath every paragraph, the books somehow feel heavy. On my worst day, on my most distracted day, give me these books, because I’ll lose myself in the words.
Certain writers inspire you to swoon, once again, with the poetry of a perfect sentence, in the virtuosity of the fitting line. The previous category prompts you to rush, almost like you are devouring a meal, but these writers are read slower, as if you are savoring a pastry. James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Baldwin, among countless others, do that for me. When I read these writers, I am a coroner, taking apart each sentence with methodical care, performing a long and slow autopsy to determine just what triggered that perfect effect on the page.
Certain writers inspire you to put down their books and start writing. There’s no logic here, nor any separation between whether the writer is in category one or two—yet the result is different. I don’t read these writers too often, or for too long, because I find their words more like kindling for my own work, though I can’t always describe why. Susan Sontag is in this category, as is John Banville, but one writer who almost always prompts me to rush to the desk has been Martin Amis.
After Kingsley died we were all chastened by the dimensions of the void that replaced him. It goes all right for me, pretty much, because the books are still here and, therefore, so is his presence: sleeplessly available.2
If I’m busy creating categories—the critic’s inclination, according to Amis—than, for another, let’s say that there are book writers, paragraph writers, and sentence writers. In the first two categories, the attention is on shape, narrative, storyline; the writing is seen from a distance, part of a larger work, much like how any halfway-decent high school composition class teaches writing. The last category is for those writers who prefer to use microscopes while they work, by endlessly focusing on the sentence, on the crisp phrase, on pinpointing the precise sound of the first letter in a word. You end up hearing them rather than reading them. Amis was, from the beginning, a sentence writer.
To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice.3
Of course for every Amis admirer, you’ll find a detractor, primed with evidence of lackluster work, large blindspots, an unforgivable focus on the masculine, an inability to truly understand the feminine, juvenile opinions on the largest subjects—although these complaints can, in most cases, be dismissed. What’s more interesting is to picture an Amis without his flaws, as that’s probably not a writer that we’d remember. It is worth noticing that nearly all of the main criticisms against him—what some perceive as the misogyny of his characters; what some label as the offense of his political opinions—come from taking small premises and stretching them to extreme conclusions. But Amis is a fiction writer, and a fiction writer imagines, extrapolates, looks into the distance. Some people jot down stray thoughts, and they find that first idea sufficient enough; a novelist, however, keeps pulling on the string.
The Me Decade wasn’t called the Me Decade until 1976. In the summer of 1970 they were only six months into it; but they could all be pretty sure that the 1970s was going to be a me decade. This was because all decades were now me decades. There has never been anything that could possibly be called a you decade: technically speaking, you decades (back in the feudal night) would have been known as thou decades. The 1940s was probably the last we decade. And all decades, until 1970, were undeniably he decades. So the Me Decade was the Me Decade, right enough - a new intensity of self-absorption. But the Me Decade was also and unquestionably the She Decade.4
Most writers would have quit and felt rather satisfied after the second sentence. But this is a paragraph with an idea stretched to its endpoint. You can’t read Amis without noticing this ability to extrapolate, to carve deeper, to keep going long after most writers have moved elsewhere. Once you combine that with his ruthlessness about sentences, about avoiding the cliché, you come very close to that unteachable quality: a truly original voice on the page.
(Incidentally, notice that ‘right enough’ in the paragraph, and how that two-tone beat shifts the entire paragraph.)
One of his notable lines about American—“Drop me down anywhere in America and I’ll tell you where I am: in America”5—can be usurped to fit his work, as you can’t read any Martin Amis sentence without knowing that it is a Martin Amis sentence. Here’s a lengthy but illustrative excerpt from London Fields that puts us into the 1980s of Amis’ mind:
Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle - the shop, and the flat above it - had already been burgled the week before: yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was all burgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping into one another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing the same thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they had been burgled, sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled!6
That is the end of the excerpt but not the end of the paragraph, which details how all this burgling will eventually be solved, in a wonderful 80s market correction.
How nice it would be—how perfect it would be—if all readers were kept waiting in a sanitized environment, with the words on the page the very first words that they absorb. Readers are, alas, not so compliant. So a stylist like Amis hits each individual reader a little differently—each word that he writes coalesces with the memories, associations, and connotations that each reader bring to the page, which means that, in many ways, everybody ends up reading a different sentence. For me, Amis triggers a sprint to the desk, though that consequence can’t be explained by his lines. All you can conclude is that this is what original artists do. The most original voices in literature trigger volcanic reactions in readers, but the specifics are always impossible to predict. Readers find what they want in books.
On the cover of my copy of The Zone of Interest, for instance, someone has scribbled, “Sunday 12-5” and “Mon 10-8.” On the inside back jacket, there’s a long screed that’s written in a pen that’s slowly running out of ink. Apparently, my copy was, at one time, given to someone else, with a convoluted dedication that “this will explain why you don’t listen” and that “I can’t spend hour after hour fighting with you.” The other pages are, curiously, pristine. So there’s no clue as to where the novel explains these details. The Zone of Interest, by the way, is about Auschwitz.
And only a writer with a strident, distinct voice, with a knifelike focus on the individual word, can engender such a spectrum of reactions. In our most individual artists, the ones who have a throbbing, unique persona that is undeniably theirs—whether in music, painting, writing—the audience often sees specificity as a mirror.
My first Amis novel was his first novel, too, and I can distinctly remember when I read The Rachel Papers in my Brooklyn apartment on a summer afternoon. It isn’t a great novel, but it is, peculiarly, worth recommending—its flaws are necessary and almost redeeming. And I can remember the exact moment when Amis’ poise on the page hit me. Somewhere around the halfway point, I placed the book down and looked out the window—perhaps a bit too dramatically—with the awareness of something that’s obviously true but that still needs to be restated: there are no rules, which is, as a legacy for a stylist, a pretty good reason to fill a shelf.
" ... each word that he writes coalesces with the memories, associations, and connotations that each reader bring to the page, which means that, in many ways, everybody ends up reading a different sentence" .... Readers find what they want in books." Oh, yes! How many times have we tried to discuss a book with someone and found that, though we'd read the same pages, we did not capture the same meaning? ( Same with films.) In my own writing, I never trust that my meaning will be apparent to the reader. I don't mind if they "misinterpret", as long as they find something of value, something that rings true to them. It is the best we can do, I think.
Have read many an Amis piece in the last few days. This is one of the better ones. Great work.