Slog

Christopher Frizzelle wrote the books lead this week. It’s about a Middle Eastern restaurant, a magazine, a very good book about writing, and, most especially, sentences:

Wood unearths tons of even better examples of intimate third person—aka “free indirect style”—from the work of “its founder,” Gustave Flaubert, as well as Henry James, Nabokov, James Joyce, John Updike (who supplies an example of third-person intimate done poorly), David Foster Wallace (whose fiction “prosecutes an intense argument about the decomposition of language in America, and he is not afraid to decompose—and discompose—his own style in the interests of making us live through this linguistic America with him”), and, wonderfully, Robert McCloskey, whose children’s book Make Way for Ducklings has this sentence in it: “Just as they were getting ready to start on their way, a strange enormous bird came by.” That “strange” belongs to McCloskey’s removed but not totally removed third-person narrator, who is right there inhabiting the confusion of the father duck at the sight of a swan-shaped boat.

It’s been a while since we’ve read a story like this from Frizzelle—ever since some schmuck took over the books section and started writing endlessly about teenage vampire novels—and it’s really wonderful. Give it a read, won’t you?