Sorry about the late post, but first I had to load three goats into a trailer, and then I had to take a shower, and then I got distracted by a good idea I had for expanding my nascent memoir introduction. I did leave a quick teaser in the comments for yesterday's post, just in case you were breathlessly waiting for more bile about the popular novel.

I do, however, feel less bilious today (and if that's not really the adjective form of bile, it ought to be). Olive Kitteridge did improve somewhat as I advanced toward the ending, though I am loath to say that it ever became excellent. Mostly I think it was the accretion of time spent with the characters, not the writing itself, that made me feel more kindly about it. And there's no doubt that interest in the characters is a sign that something good is percolating.

But let us return to yesterday's three random passages. First, the Byatt:

from The Children's Book

Tom was not only sunny, he was sunburned. Everywhere exposed to the sun had been painted a ruddy-tanned colour, with paler hairs gleaming on it. The V of his shirt-neck, the bracelet of colour-change on his upper arms, various zebra-gradations of gold on his calves and thighs.

This passage is all about color and patterns, and it's characteristic of Byatt that she forces the reader to look, look, look, look. As soon as you think she's said everything she needs to say, she says more. If Elizabeth Strout had been describing Tom, we may never have advanced past the first sentence, let alone to the third, let alone to that final clause and those "various zebra-changes of gold on his calves and thighs." One understands that this writer has been reading Milton, who overstimulates the reader's imagination in  just the same way. Check out his description of the angel Raphael in book 5 of Paradise Lost, and you'll see what I mean:

A Seraph wing'd; six wings he wore, to shade

His lineaments Divine; the pair that clad

Each shoulder broad, came mantling o'er his breast

With regal Ornament; the middle pair

Girt like a Starry Zone his waist, and round

Skirted his loins and thighs with downy Gold

And colors dipt in Heav'n; the third his feet. . . . 

[etc., etc., and it does go on for a while]

In contrast, the passage from Strout's Olive Kitteridge is nothing at all like Milton. This is not a bad thing (I am the first to agree that this world can have too much Milton), but the excerpt does employ, to a tiresome degree, what Charlotte Gordon calls word bundles--those convenient prepackaged word combinations that are so predictable that we almost overlook their descriptive capabilities: "lovely woman," "perfect skin," "quite thin."

from Olive Kitteridge

Angie, in her youth, had been a lovely woman to look at, with her wavy red hair and perfect skin, and in many ways this was still the case. But now she was into her fifties, and her hair, pinned back loosely with combs, was dyed a color you might consider just a little too red, and her figure, while still graceful, had a thickening of its middle, the more noticeable, perhaps, because she was otherwise quite thin.

It's not that we don't see this woman; it's more that the writer doesn't allow our visual imagination to concentrate on her. This style of writing has its place in a novel; and if Strout wants her readers' attention to glide indeterminantly over Angie, she's done a good job here. The problem is that much of the book incorporates this style, which is why it makes me feel as if I've been smothered in a blanket.

The Updike excerpt is quite different from both the Byatt and the Strout.

from Rabbit Is Rich

Harry realizes why Nelson's short haircut troubles him: it reminds him of how the boy looked back in grade school, before all that late Sixties business soured everything. He didn't know how short he was going to be then, and wanted to become a baseball pitcher like Jim Bunning, and wore a cap all summer that pressed his hair in even tighter to his skull, that bony freckled unsmiling face. Now his necktie and suit seem like that baseball cap to be the costume of doomed hopes.

Now, I know plenty of people who dislike Updike's writing, but I have never heard any one of them fault the vigor of his prose. He may sometimes overload us with information, but he is masterful at controlling time; in this brief passage he takes the reader from the present to the past to the present, as he also physically describes Nelson, as he also emotionally describes Nelson, as he also hints at Harry's fraught relationship with Nelson. Three sentences! Plus exact details!

I often wish I could write like Updike, and I often wish I could write like Byatt, but I have to say that I have no interest in writing invisible prose like Strout's. I'd rather overdo it than underdo it, any day of the year. At least as far as writing mistakes go, a sunlit voyage over a cliff is a far better fate than a neat hole in the grass.