But, oh, his language! Thick, chewy, sensuous sentences just dripping with adjectives and similes and multi-syllabic words - sentences of epic proportions. And because he writes of the Lowcountry, the land I was also born in and deeply love, he's even more likely to make me swoon.
Take the very first sentence of the Prologue of The Prince of Tides, for example:
My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call. (Me, too!)
And these, also from Prince, to capture but a few:
I was the son of a beautiful, word-struck mother . . .
My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides.
There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
My enemy was indeterminancy . . .
And one particularly fecund paragraph on page 277 of my hardback edition of the book, that includes this sentence:
There is a river, the town, my grandfather steering a boat through the channel, my sister fixed in that suspended rapture she would later translate into her strongest poems, the metallic perfume of harvested oysters, the belling voices of children on the shore . . .
Heavy sigh.
Decades ago I read William Faulkner's novel, The Unvanquished. He unforgettably describes one of the characters, Druscilla, standing in a yellow ballgown under the crystal chandelier, holding out a pair of dueling pistols, as "the Greek amphora priestess of a succinct and formal violence." I love that. And there is Norman McClean, author of A River Runs Through It, who wrote this and gave me the shivers:
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about.
I wanna write large and lofty and lyrical prose like the big boys.
Great examples from the books and other works. I too enjoyed the words he used, even though I had to look many words up for the meaning. From the wording in your blog post, you are well on your way to writing like Conroy.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, "My wound is geography" is one of the best opening sentences in fiction. Certainly it is up there with "Call me Ishmael" and "You better not never tell nobody but God." Conroy does have a nice turn of phrase.
ReplyDeleteI love the poetry woven throughout the book from beginning to end, which makes me feel the atmosphere of the marsh, of the shrimpboat, of the isolated house on the island, of the isolated house in Atlanta near the dark woods, and of the therapist's office and home, with a troubled family. A masterpiece.
ReplyDeleteKatleen, what a lovely last line. Same here, but I'm hoping that the ladies got a little of the big boys in them, too!
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