The paragraphs I’ve discussed in this series for far tend to be the ones that lead in surprising directions. These paragraphs exploit our expectation that paragraphs will be coherent, creating surprise and, often, humour when we realize, by the end, that we’ve drifted into something new. This drift, retrospectively, can be indicative of a certain state or tendency in the narrator: evasiveness, repression, distraction, whatever.

The paragraph I’m quoting this time, from Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), is similar, though its shift is the opposite of gradual. For context, the paragraph begins when the narrator, Julius, arrives at a tax office to meet with an accountant called Parrish, who’s asked Julius to pay by cheque. Julius has forgotten the cheque and, when he tried to take cash out of an ATM, realizes he can’t remember his PIN. Now here’s the paragraph:

When I finally sat down with Parrish, I told him that I had neglected to bring my checkbook. I said nothing about the cash machines. He was solemn, and as he adjusted his cuff links, I had the feeling of having disturbed a carefully calibrated universe. I apologized, and assured him I would put the check in the mail right away. He shrugged, and I signed the tax paperwork he had prepared for me. I was awed by this unsuspected area of fragility in myself. It was an insignificant portent of age, the kind I tended to smile at in others, the kind I took as a mark of vanity. I thought of the few white curls that had sprung up and were now nestled in the black mass of my hair. I used to joke about them, but I knew also that the entire head of hair would someday change color, that the white strands would multiply, and would win eventually, that if I lived to old age, like Mama, there would be hardly any of the black ones left.

Teju Cole. Open City. New York: Random House, 2011, p. 162.

When I first read this paragraph, I initially believed I’d missed something. On second read, I realized that, no, I had not missed an important connection between the somewhat uncomfortable encounter with Parrish and the reflections on white hair. It’s just that the paragraph simply shifts topics halfway through, without any obvious motivation or signal. In fact, Cole is extra tricky in making this happen: he delays telling us what “this unsuspected area of fragility” is, and even defers telling us that this fragility is “in myself,” so it’s easy to enter the white-hair half of the paragraph still believing that we’re talking about Parrish. My first reading, I thought Julius was commenting on Parrish’s fragility (to, say, a situation that didn’t go as expected, no matter how mundane), but then I read “in myself.” It took me a while to realize that what was happening was an interesting conflict between what I expect in a paragraph (a single focus or topic) and what Cole was giving me. The use of the word “this” in “this unsuspected area of fragility” is particularly tricky: it could be “this” as in “previously mentioned/hinted at,” suggesting that Julius is still talking about the same thing as before (this is how I first read it) but it really is “this” as in “a particular,” like in the impression “I met this guy who…”

Overall, the impression is one of Julius suddenly becoming abstracted or detached from the social situation he’s in with Parrish and reflecting (probably not for the first time) on a private worry about signs of aging. Cole performs a bit of a risk, then: he constructs a paragraph that is, by most definitions, not a good paragraph, in order to reveal something quite subtly but effectively about what’s happening in the narrator’s mind during the encounter he is reporting.

A novel’s first paragraph bears a huge burden, and very few novels bear it as well as Muriel Spark’s final one, The Finishing School (2004). Spark is, I think, one of the greatest prose stylists of the 20th century and at least two of her novels–The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means–are about as perfect as I think a novel can be. The Finishing School is not in that category. But its opening paragraph is one for the ages:

“You begin,” he said, “by setting the scene. You have to see your scene, either in reality or in imagination. For instance, from here you can see across the lake. But on a day like this you can’t see across the lake, it’s too misty. You can see the other side.” Rowland took off his reading glasses to stare at his creative writing class whose parents’ money was being thus spent: two boys and three girls around sixteen to seventeen years of age, some more, some a little less. “So,” he said, “you must just write, when you set your scene, ‘the other side of the lake was hidden in mist.’ Or if you want to exercise imagination, on a day like today, you can write, ‘The other side of the lake was just visible.’ But as you are setting the scene, don’t make any emphasis as yet. It’s too soon, for instance, for you to write, ‘The other side of the lake was hidden in the fucking mist.’ That will come later. You are setting the scene. You don’t want to make a point as yet.”

Muriel Spark, The Finishing School, Doubleday, 2004, pp. 1-2

The meta- aspect of this opening is fun and clever, but that’s not what makes this paragraph so great. It’s the way it builds, with constant small repetitions that slow our progress, to that hilariously profane “emphasis” right by the end–where, by the way, the experienced reader of paragraphs expects to find their emphasis. It doesn’t hurt that Spark is not an author to throw around swear words lightly. As far as I remember, this is her only f-bomb. (I could be wrong.) Anyway, I have forgiven this rather weak novel of Spark’s solely on the thrill this opening paragraph gave and still gives me.