Reality Hunger (40 page)

The merit of style exists precisely in that it delivers the greatest number of ideas in the fewest number of words.

How much can one remove and still have the composition be intelligible? This understanding, or its lack, divides those who can write from those who can really write. Chekhov removed the plot. Pinter, elaborating, removed the history, the narration; Beckett, the characterization. We hear it anyway. Omission is a form of creation.

The Canterbury Tales
, a compendium of all the good yarns Chaucer knew, has lasted centuries, while the long-winded medieval narratives went into museums.

As Stephen Frears, the director of
High Fidelity
, worked to translate the best moments of the Nick Hornby novel on which the movie was based, he found to his surprise that the best moments were the voice-overs, especially the direct speeches of Rob Gordon (John Cusack) to the camera. Frears said, “What we realized was that the novel was a machine to get to twelve crucial speeches in the book about romance and art and music and list-making and masculine distance and the masculine drive for art and the masculine difficulty with intimacy.” This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.

I’m a third of the way through Thomas Bernhard’s
The Loser
, and at first I was excited by it, but now I’m a little bored. I may not finish it.

It’s so beautiful and so pessimistic.

Yes, but it doesn’t hold one’s interest the way a nineteenth-century novel does. I’m never bored when I’m reading George Eliot or Tolstoy.

I am.

And you’re not bored when you’re reading Bernhard?

I’m bored by plot. I’m bored when it’s all written out, when there isn’t any shorthand.

In order to make it easier to handle, Darwin would cut a large book in half; he’d also tear out any chapters he didn’t find of interest.

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book—what everyone else does not say in a whole book.

genre

The lyric essay doesn’t expound, is suggestive rather than exhaustive, depends on gaps, may merely mention. It might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic. It often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically, its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole. It partakes of the poem in its density and shapeliness, its distillation of ideas and musicality of language, and partakes of the essay in its weight, its overt desire to engage with facts, melding its allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form. It gives primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information, forsaking narrative line, discursiveness, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation. Generally, it’s short, concise, and punchy, like a prose poem. It may, though, meander, making use of other genres when they serve its purpose, sampling the techniques of fiction, drama, journalism, song, and film. The
stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme. It stalks its subject but isn’t content to merely explain or confess. Loyal to that original sense of “essay” as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense, the lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of idea, circumstance, and language—a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning. While it’s ruminative, it leaves pieces of experience undigested and tacit, inviting the reader’s participatory interpretation. Its voice, spoken from a privacy that we overhear and enter, has the intimacy we’ve come to expect in the personal essay, yet in the lyric essay the voice is often more reticent, almost coy, aware of the compliment it pays the reader by dint of understatement. Perhaps we’re drawn to the lyric now because it seems less possible and rewarding to approach the world through the front door, through the myth of objectivity. Similitude often seems more revealing than verisimilitude. We turn to the writer to reconcoct meaning from the bombardments of experience: to shock, thrill, still the racket, and tether our attention.