Recently I tried to read in Edgar Rice Burroughs – my boyhood favorite – Lost on Venus; and I was appalled at how bad the writing was. Using the word “hideous” to describe the snakes, for example, four times in two pages. The melodramatic action was compelling enough, but rather simplistic and juvenile, after all; and I found the dialogue forced and artificial. Clearly written in 1935.
Jack Vance, for that matter, with a much richer vocabulary, diction, and depth and subtlety of style, also was also quite wedded, at least in Rhialto the Marvellous, to an arcane and floral, formal diction harking perhaps to the medieval romance, to Sir Walter Scott or the Restoration period. It certainly carries no cachet for the ultra-realist, minimalist, digital sensibility of today. Yet it is a rich diet that, while not in current fashion, offers a luscious ripeness for a lover of the language.
The same could be said of Thomas Mann, Henry James, or other greats of the past, formalists outside the particularly American mode of, say, Hemingway and Faulkner. Reading also quite a lot in Knausgaard, I catch the naïve drift of a Salinger, a Kerouac, a Henry Miller, free flowing and self-confident, unpretentious in relaying the emotional life through mundane detail… apparently the formula readers crave.
See also:
Review of House of Cards (TV series)
Review of In Persuasion Nation, by George Saunders
Review of The Book of Small, by Emily Carr
