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.

It’s been ages since my last contribution to what I hoped would be a large archive of posts on fantastic paragraphs from fiction and other sources. Two or more years in, I’m only posting my fourth paragraph, and all so far have been from fiction. Oh well. I’ll get on it this year.

This paragraph is from my favourite contemporary novel and a strong contender for my favourite novel ever: Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (2015). The whole book is a master-class of prose style, featuring one of the most singularly eccentric and lively narrators I’ve ever encountered–this narrator inhabits that rarefied sphere of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable. And this is my favourite paragraph in this novel.

It begins so that you’ll think it’ll be a paragraph about gardening–then drifts hilariously toward an entirely different, if not completely unrelated, conclusion:

But the potato plants were still growing! I went over to see my upbeat boyfriend many times and the potatoes and spinach and broad beans didn’t mind one bit and sometimes while I was away I would lie in bed next to him unable to sleep and think of the potatoes and spinach and broad beans out there in the dark and I’d splay my fingers towards the ceiling and feel such yearning! I could recall the soil very well, how dark it was and the smell of it — as if it had never before been opened up, and the canal was nearby, and the moon was always overhead, and spiders would get off their webs for a bit and tentatively come into contact with the still edges of things. We didn’t get along very well but this had no bearing whatsoever on our sexual rapport which was impervious and persuasive and made every other dwindling aspect of our relationship quite irrelevant for some time. We wrote each other hundreds of lustful emails, and by that I mean graphic and obscene. It was wonderful. I’d never done that before, I’d never written anything salacious before, it was completely new to me and I must say I got the hang of it really very quickly. I wish I’d kept them, I wish I hadn’t become quite so unhinged when finally we acknowledged that eighteen months was pretty well as much as we could expect from a relationship based almost entirely upon avid fornication, and thereupon rashly expunged our complete correspondence, which, by then, amounted to almost two thousand emails. I won’t be able to write emails like that again you see – that’s to say I won’t be able to write emails like that for the first time again. And that really was what made them so exciting – using language in a way I’d not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I’d never before attempted to linguistically lay bare. It was very nice I must say to every now and then take a break from cobbling together yet another overwrought academic abstract on more or less the same theme in order to set down, so precisely, how and where I’d like my brains to be fucked right out.

Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond, pp. 15-16)

I bet no one expected to end here based on the beginning. This is only a teaser of what is a superlatively great novel. It’s got no plot, and its action is all in the voice, so be warned. But it’s worth it, so worth it.

It’s been a while since I last posted at all, let alone in this series of posts on fantastic paragraphs and sentences. It’s not that I haven’t been reading a lot–I have, and a lot of it has been great. But this series of posts is on those rare paragraphs that can stop me in my reading tracks, and those are very few and far between.

But last night I finally encountered one. It’s about halfway through Helen DeWitt’s supremely strange novel Lightning Rods (2011). Here is the paragraph:

For the next couple of days Joe tried to put a brave face on things. He tried not to think about the PVC with a slit in the crotch which the Equal Employment Opportunities Act was going to force him to implement. If he thought about it he was just going to get depressed, and in sales you can’t afford to get depressed. You can’t afford to go around thinking. What’s the point? That negative take on the product will communicate itself to the customer, and before you know it all the hard work you put into getting your foot in the door will be down the drain.

Helen DeWitt. Ligthning Rods. New York: New Directions, 2011. p. 183.

I must say that this paragraph is rather less bizarre in the larger context of this consistently bizarre book, but even so this one stood out. Actually, it was really the second sentence in particular that stood out, making me stand back and reread the whole paragraph a few times–after I laughed, that is. Anyway, this entry really falls under both fantastic paragraphs and fantastic sentences.

What makes the second sentence a great sentence? Well, the fact that there was no way anyone–including a reader accustomed to the weird logic of DeWitt’s novel–was going to predict where it would go based on the beginning is one part of the answer. There’s something about the juxtaposition of PVC pants “with a slit in the crotch” and the “Equal Employment Opportunities Act” that is hilariously surprising, let alone the fact that in the character Joe’s head, the latter is somehow forcing him to adopt the former as a business strategy. There is also the word “implement,” which is amusingly out of whack with the register of the rest of the sentence, making it end on a discordant note.

I have more trouble accounting for what makes this a great paragraph. Its construction is unremarkable, actually, and in the context of the novel pretty much par for the course. I think it gets its greatness from elements that make the narration in this book so great in general, and that fantastic second sentence gives it something extra. I do love how DeWitt infuses her narrator’s language with the cliches and clunky idioms of business-ese, and it is the mixing of two such metaphors (“getting your foot in the door” and “down the drain”) that leaves the reader on such a funny note right at the end.

If I had to generalize what makes the second sentence and the whole paragraph fantastic then–so we might pick up something useful from an example that may appear too eccentric to teach us anything–I would say that DeWitt knows exactly that the power of a sentence and paragraph lies in the ending. An unexpected ending can make you re-view the whole, getting you to pay attention or perhaps allowing you to savour the shifts that got you to that particular end–all details you might have overlooked as you moved through them the first time around.

This is Frank Kermode’s “sense of an ending” applied to the level of sentences and paragraphs as opposed to larger units like novels–or human lives, or historical epochs.

In my last post in the “Fantastic Paragraphs” series, I considered a paragraph from a novel, whose construction–and deviations from our expectations of what a paragraph should do–reveals a lot about the mind of the narrator. Here, I quote a paragraph that I credit with driving home to me the genius of James Joyce.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was the first Joyce book I read, and the one I have read the most. I have a chapter about it in my book, as well as a short article about it in James Joyce Quarterly. Though many people find it less charming than Dubliners and less humorous than Ulysses, I still love this novel. I also love to teach it. But on my first reading, I struggled through the first pages. To be honest, I barely understood anything. But when I reached the paragraph where the hero Stephen Dedalus, still a young boy at boarding school, lies in his bed in the dormroom and tries to imagine where the prefect goes to after putting him and the other boys to bed, I suddenly realized why James Joyce is so often considered one of the best stylists in English:

The prefect’s shoes went away. Where? Down the staircase and along the corridors or to his room at the end? He saw the dark. Was it true about the black dog that walked there at night with eyes as big as carriagelamps? They said it was the ghost of a murderer. A long shiver of fear flowed over his body. He saw the dark entrance hall of the castle. Old servants in old dress were in the ironingroom above the staircase. It was long ago. The old servants were quiet. There was a fire there but the hall was still dark. A figure came up the staircase from the hall. He wore the white cloak of a marshal; his face was pale and strange; he held his hand pressed to his side. He looked out of strange eyes at the old servants. They looked at him and saw their master’s face and cloak and knew that he had received his deathwound. But only the dark was where they looked: only dark silent air. Their master had received his deathwound on the battlefield of Prague far away over the sea. He was standing on the field; his hand was pressed to his side; his face was pale and strange and he wore the white cloak of a marshal.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

More than anything, it’s the repetition–reminiscent of a folksong–that gets me. “He wore the white cloak of a marshal; his face was pale and strange; he held his hand pressed to his side” halfway through the paragraph is mirrored by “… his hand was pressed to his side; his face was pale and strange and he wore the white cloak of a marshal.” I have never been able to account for the effect this repetition has on me, but it was profound and immediate. My marginal note in my copy of the novel is, for the last sentence of this paragraph, “best line in the novel.” It’s not just repetition, obviously. It’s a pretty typical example of one of Joyce’s favourite rhetorical figures: chiasmus, or crossing-over. Rather than repeating the same elements in the same order, Joyce repeats them like this: A B C D | D C B A. He does this all the time in his early fiction, but to me this paragraph’s last sentence is the most memorable instance in his writing.

Now it might sound like I’m not talking about a fantastic paragraph but, rather, a fantastic sentence. But I think this fantastic sentence, coming at the end of the paragraph, makes the whole paragraph so suitably strange and spooky, filled with the awe, fear and curiosity of a young boy at night in a strange place…

When it comes to paragraphs in academic writing, I can think of no better approach than Joseph Williams’s as explained in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. I often teach a distilled version of Williams’s model for coherent and cohesive paragraphs, but his explanation is far more nuanced and capacious than what I cover in workshops.

But for this series of posts what I’m interested in is primarily the ways that creative writers use and abuse the form of the paragraph for effects of various kinds: humour, surprise, reflections of a character’s deranged mind, etc. These strange and interesting paragraphs get much of their power from how they deviate from our expectations of what a paragraph should do.

My first “case study” is a paragraph early in one of the most incredible novels I’ve read recent, Gerard Murnane’s Border Districts (2017). Impossible to explain, this novel is one of my top-ranked books of recent years, generally similar–but only very generally–to other amazing novels including Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond. I think you can get a fairly good sense of the novel from the paragraph I quote, in which the elderly narrator reflects, over the course is many paragraphs, on his Catholic upbringing. Here it is:

The Holy Ghost, called nowadays the Holy Spirit, was sometimes referred to as the forgotten person of the Blessed Trinity. Not only did I never forget him; he was by far my favourite of the three divine persons. When I was in my tenth year and attending a school conducted by a different order of brothers from those mentioned earlier, my class teacher was a young layman who was in love with the Virgin Mary. He claimed no more than to have a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin, as he mostly called her, but I, who was continually falling in love with personages known to me only from illustrations in newspapers or magazines or from fictional texts–I never doubted that my teacher was truly in love. More than thirty years later, while I was reading some or another passage in the fiction of Marcel Proust about the odd ways of some of another character in love, I remembered that my teacher of long ago would use any pretext for bringing the name of his beloved into classroom discussions. I sensed that my classmates were embarrassed by our teacher’s special devotion, as he called it, but I felt a certain sympathy for him. I was not in love with Mary, but I felt as though I ought to have been so. Of course the name Mary hereabout denotes a mental image. My trouble was that I had never seen on any picture or statue of Mary such a face as I was apt to fall in love with. More than ten years later, I saw too late just such a face as would have won me over earlier. I have not forgotten that this paragraph began as an account of my liking for the Holy Ghost.

Gerard Murnane, Border Districts (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2017): 25-6.