Over lunch yesterday I showed a writer friend the first page of John C. Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts (Vintage 1985). I asked him whether the opening paragraphs made him want to read on. He didn't answer that question, though his handing of the book back to me without a request to borrow it hinted in the negative direction. But he did describe Gardner's writing as "mannered." This morning I opened Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (Harper & Row, 1983) and stumbled by chance on this passage:
If a writer cares more for his language than for other elements of ficition, if he continually calls our attention away from the story to himself, we call him "mannered" and eventually we tire of him. (Smart editors tire of him quickly and reject him.) (p. 11)
Here are the first three sentences of MG:
Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house in Binghamton's West Side -- "the nice part of town," everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts) -- made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn. He'd intended to split the thing in two, though perhaps the intent was not quite conscious. In any case, no such luck.
Is that "mannered" writing? My friend and I will agree that that writing like this won't make you any money. So perhaps the writing is mannered by the standards of the trash that sells. But I'd say it is good writing, in part because of and not despite the elaborate syntax. I shudder to think what some contemporary bonehead of a thirty-something editor would do to the opening sentence -- assuming he had the attention span to get through it. Back in 1985, those three sentences drew me into the novel, all 590 pages of which I read. And I dip into it again from time to time, rereading marked passages.
A curious bit of trivia: on page 486 there is a reference to "Castaneda -- Carlos not Hector -- . . . ." Sic transit gloria mundi: Hector is as little read today as Gardner. I don't know whether anyone still reads Carlos. But I do know he is less worth reading than the other two.
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