As an editor, you bet I’m in favor of short sentences that
get to the point. No reader wants to navigate sentences filled with unnecessary
asides that obscure the writer’s meaning. That said, I appreciate writing that
takes risks, that aims to break conventional writing rules—and succeeds.
In the October issue, Cindy O. Herman offers a delightfully
humorous response to Francine Prose’s admiration for certain wordy sentences by
masterful writers. To be fair, in her wonderful book Reading Like a Writer,
Prose writes that she’s not praising the length of the sentences. “The marvel,
of course, is not how long the sentence is,” she writes about a specific
sentence by Virginia Woolf, “but how perfectly comprehensible, graceful, witty,
intelligent, and pleasurable we find it to read.” Of course, the sentence she’s
referring to is long—181 words.
In most cases, shorter sentences really are better. In rare
instances, though, a great writer can break this rule. I recently read Colum
McCann’s award-winning book Let the Great World Spin and was struck by a couple
of very lengthy but powerful sentences. I’d like to share one of them here
(warning! this passage contains spoilers):
Yet the plain fact of the matter is that it happened and
there was nothing we could do to stop it—Corrigan at the wheel of the van,
having spent all day down in the Tombs and the courtrooms of lower Manhattan,
driving north up along the FDR, with Jazzlyn beside him in the passenger seat,
her yellow high heels and her neon swimsuit, her choker tight around her neck,
and Tillie had been locked away on a robbery charge, she had taken the rap, and
my brother was giving Jazzlyn a lift back to her kids, who were more than keyrings, more than a flip in the air,
and they were going fast along the East River, hemmed in by the buildings and
the shadows, when Corrigan went to change lanes, maybe he hit the indicator,
maybe he didn’t, maybe he was dizzy or tired or out of sorts, maybe he’d gotten
some medicine that slowed him or fogged his vision, maybe he tapped the brake,
maybe he cut it too hard, maybe he was gently humming a bit of a tune, who
knows, but it was said that he was clipped in the rear by a fancy car, some old
antique, nobody saw the driver, a gold vehicle going about its everyday
applause of itself, it caught the back end of his van, nudged it slightly, but
it sent Corrigan into a spin across all three lanes, like some big brown
dancing thing, elegant for a split second, and I think now of Corrigan gripping
the steering wheel, frightened, his eyes large and tender, while Jazzlyn beside
him screamed, and her body tightened, her neck tensed, it all flashing in front
of her—her short vicious life—and the van skidded on the dry roadway, hit a
car, hit a newspaper truck, and then smashed headlong into the guardrail at the
edge of the highway, and Jazzlyn went head-first through the windshield, no
safety belt, a body already on the way to heaven, and Corrigan was smashed back
by the steering wheel, which caught his chest and shattered his breastbone, his
head rebounding off the spidery glass, bloody, and then he was whipped back
into the seat with such force that the metal frame of the seat shattered, a
thousand pounds of moving steel, the van still spinning from one side of the road
to the other, and Jazzlyn’s body, only barely dressed, made a flying arc
through the air, fifty or sixty miles per hour, and she smashed in a crumpled
heap by the guardrail, one foot bent in the air as if stepping upwards, or
wanting to step upwards, and the only thing of hers they found later in the van
was a yellow stiletto, with a Bible sitting canted right beside it, having
fallen out of the glove compartment, one on top of the other and both of them
littered with glass, and Corrigan, still breathing, was bounced around and
smashed sideways so that he finished up with his body twisted down in the dark
well by the accelerator and the brake, and the engine whirled as if it still
wanted to go fast and be stopped at the same time, all of Corrigan’s weight on
both of the pedals.
This sentence reenacts the car accident in heartbreaking
detail for the readers so that we feel like witnesses to the crash. Each event
and detail tumbles after the next with such momentum that we feel the truth of
the very first part of the sentence—“the plain fact of the matter is that it
happened and there was nothing we could do to stop it.” Sure, McCann could have
broken up this run-on sentence into smaller ones, but the passage would have
lost some of its energy and perhaps some of its emotional impact. And that it
comes in at 543 words doesn’t really seem to matter.
—Sarah C. Lange, associate editor