I have a friend named Francine who has great taste, and every two months she'll recommend me a book, and I'll read the book, and it's almost always excellent.
For myself I think I would replace story with something a little harder to define like emotional and atmospheric experience. Even this would still be opposed to the people who claim to enjoy only style and be entirely careless of what that style is being used to communicate. I don't think those people do enjoy only style either. I think they're very confused. I can understand enjoying only things you think have a good style, and looking at other things that contain elements you would otherwise like and saying, if only they were well-written! I can understand feeling that a talented writer can elevate any content and make it worthwhile. But that's not the same as believing that when you read something well-written you are tossing the content over your shoulder as a valueless by-product, treasuring only the shell.
LOL. I loved this line! "But that's not the same as believing that when you read something well-written you are tossing the content over your shoulder as a valueless by-product, treasuring only the shell." What a bon mot!
I enjoyed this. It made me think of being in a writing workshop with this woman who wrote long, plotty, very romantic stories. The other writers in the class gave her a lot shit about the way she wrote, but her stories were the ones I looked forward to the most, because there was always the drive to find out what happened next. That’s a pretty strong drive!
That being said, I’m staring at four of my favorite books of all time on the shelf right now—books I’ve read multiple times each—and I can’t remember the plot very well of any of them. I can remember characters as well as I remember my real-life friends, I can tell you how it feels to read the books, and I can quote lines from all of them off the top of my head. But if I was asked to give a detailed plot summary of any of them I simply couldn’t do it.
Congratulations!! And thanks for a fun read. Your take on the plot problems of Huck Finn brought to mind an essay on that very subject by George Saunders; I can look for it if you’re interested.
I'd love that! I have an essay on Huck Finn coming out and have been too lazy to do the thing you're supposed to do, where you dig up everything everyone has ever said on the topic.
What I discovered about Proust after having read the whole thing once is that I can get my Proust fix by re-reading parts of the first volume. I have my favorite bits like snob LeGrandin rebuffing Marcel's father. Or Swann's imprecations to himself against the Verdurins that prove to be all bark and no bite. Or the comparison of the great-Aunt with Louis 14th. Or the wonderful cut by the Princess de Guermantes of her anti-semitic cousin. In a way I'm reading it by writing this comment!
And I generally hate books devoid of plots!
I liked Fleishman, and I liked Long Island Compromise even more.
Wow you liked LIC?! Okay, maybe I'll give it a try. I heard it wasn't quite up to snuff.
I really like the parties and the gay stuff in Proust--for me it doesn't really get good until the third or fourth volume. Then that middle volume (The Prisoner and the Fugitive) is so dull! That's the point where, to me, on my last re-read, the repetition got to be a bit much.
It (“They”) is pretty thin, in that it’s not much plot…it’s more feeling and atmosphere. I tend to enjoy that type of novel more than other people (note to self to make that clear of I’m reviewing that type of book in the future.
It's okay, you didn't do anything wrong! I already owned the book and was glad of the impulse to read it--I wouldn't have finished at all if I'd hated it.
It feels as if when people talk about plot there is a confusion of 1. actual events that drive the story forward 2. the movement of a protagonist from one psychological state to another 3. the initial premise of a book.
Herzog, which I read last year and loved, is an incredibly beautiful novel on the sentence level. But the sentences are beautiful bc of both their internal qualities of pure sound and rhythm and descriptive accuracy and also because they are so accomplished at revealing the mind of the protagonist, who by the end of the book has been transformed internally even though the actual events that happen are relatively few. And the premise, a nebbishy academic deals with his divorce, is the sort of thing I would have sworn a few years ago I would never touch, it used to seem to me a betrayal of the imaginative possibilities of prose to use it for such quotidian, bourgeois concerns. But ofc I was an idiot, there are whole worlds within Herzog, the whole book feels so much more alive and inventive than a lot of books that are fantastical on the surface. Then there are a lot of books with great premises that make you want to read them immediately, but that fail in the execution.
I never really remember the sequence of events that happens in a novel so much as I remember moments, characters, and situations. So I think the books I like that have a lot of actual stuff happening tend to be either picaresque or tragic, bc the picaresque has so many opportunities for memorable setpieces and the tragic has the pervading mood of melancholy and inevitability that builds and builds. Mason & Dixon would be a good example of the former and (to pick a popular fiction/genre example) The Friends of Eddie Coyle the latter.
Separately, it's funny that the "underappreciated classic" label has been so thoroughly devalued that the quote on the cover of Princess of 72nd St. has to be like "no, really!"
I thought that cover quote was funny too! The forgotten classics business might've gotten a little too big, honestly...but when you compare it to the rest of publishing, you're like, well, at least the forgotten classics are usually at least somewhat-good. Even with a mediocre one, you don't despair at the fact that this got published.
Yes, there's a certain imprecision when we talk about all the elements of a story. There's certainly a way of describing a book that makes it sound just like every other book. In my post I'm aware that I made some false equivalences (sentences = style and plot = story). I just think it's all kind of one big ball--different things about a book strike different people differently, but usually when we come together and discuss it, we're able to agree that actually, we read the same book, with the same features. I haven't read Herzog, but I've read a few other Saul Bellow novels (my favorite is Ravelstein) and I agree I cannot remember the first thing about the plots! Does Ravelstein actually have a plot at all? I have no idea. All I remember is the inimitable portrait of Ravelstein himself, in all his languor and self-importance. With some writers, it doesn't necessarily make sense to discuss the story when discussing their work.
Agreed, I’ve learned to take the hype with a grain of salt but they’re usually worth reading at the least and sometimes they are truly great. And I’m glad more of them are popping up — I really like McNally editions and I’m excited about the one Brandon Taylor is involved in.
I love Ravelstein, it doesn’t have much of a plot per se but it definitely has an arc where through Ravelstein and then through his own near death experience the protagonist comes to some sort of terms with the fact of his own mortality. Which is kind of the plot (or character arc or whatever you want to call it) of every Bellow book I’ve read.
Thanks for a provocation to work out some better thoughts about this.
Perhaps it matters what we mean by "style." If style *only* means formally pretty sentences, then I don't think I agree that story and style are the same thing, or that the sentences are automatically good because the story is good. I've read books that, as a whole, transcended their bland/rough/average prose, perhaps with a thrilling plot, lots of brilliant ideas, or a creative, thought-provoking world. It's difficult for a truly good book to transcend bad prose, but I think a good book can have unremarkable or average prose, where I can think "that was good, but I wish the writing had been a little more polished or felicitous."
But maybe if we define style more broadly, then the boundaries between style and plot begin to blur. Style might also be a mood or emotional state, a general aesthetic logic, that governs the way events are sequenced and paced, how things are given to the reader to perceive (perhaps with a lot of sensory detail, imagery and metaphor, perhaps with little). In that case, what might appear a bland, functional sentence out of context is part of a stylistic whole that works or is "good." Style gets harder to separate from plot; its a tonal or aesthetic logic that determines both what the information is and how it is dispensed.
Maybe we also think about plot in a too-narrow way as merely the literal actions a character takes, merely "what happens" in the most limited active sense. But I don't think there is any such thing as a plotless book! There can be an entire "plot" in a story even if a character sits in a chair and thinks the whole time. I think this is what people mean when they say they "don't care about plot": it doesn't have to be an action-packed story, they want to see ideas or feel emotions, which doesn't require action in the most literal sense. A good book like this is not relying *only* on pretty sentences: thin action works because of its overall aesthetic logic. But thin action puts the prose under a microscope: the aesthetic logic really has to work.
I think maybe I've long-windedly talked myself into agreeing with you in a sense. I don't think it makes much sense to talk about "beautiful sentences" out of the context of the whole, nor to talk about "plot" in terms of literal actions apart from a general aesthetic logic. (Side note: I agree that plot actions can really go wrong and derail a logic!) The best writing does involve a seamless marriage of form and content. I love a lot of sentences in Middlemarch, which are on their own formal masterpieces of English prose. But I don't remember them because primarily because they are "pretty," but because they are expressing a memorable philosophical thought or expressing something that has been staged by the whole.
I think that's the point. You can slice up a book into style and story, but a lot of the times when we say "style" we are thinking of something another person might consider to be "story". I personally don't talk much about style or about prose, because to dwell on those things carries a connotation to me of pretentiousness.
But in writing about the Elaine Kauf book I realized...this is not a very strongly-plotted story. I approve of the fact that it has a story, but that's probably not the thing that stands out about it to most people. To me, the fact that it has a story is just a natural result of the overall integrity of the work--the working-out of a certain logic. But most people would probably be more drawn to the characters (who are really zany and strange) or the writing or just the feel of exuberance than suffuses the book.
I liked this discussion and I think you are fundamentally correct. I'd like to make one comment, that doesn't so much apply to you as it applies to most people talking about style. They talk about beautiful "sentences". Certainly there are such, but, to me, in prose, the key unit is the paragraph, and many of the most memorable (to me) passages of prose are great because of the paragraph, not any individual sentence. Nitpicking, maybe, mind you!
To David Copperfield and Great Expectations -- these are bildungsromans, right? That's a whole subgenre consisting of purposely episodic books, seems to me. Even so, David Copperfield, at least, though not conventionally plotted from beginning to end, does have important strands that tie things together. So, for instant, the whole story of the Pegotty family is connective tissue, and without having followed them throughout an episode like the storm would have no power. Or certainly Betsey Trotwood's appearances and reappearances. The funny thing is that the two "romance" plots are the weakest part -- Dora is a terribly uninteresting character, and Agnes is too much of a paragon. I suppose in a way, though, it is the characters, not the plot, that make the novel -- just looking through the list of them brings forth delightful memories.
Oh my God, the first romance in David Copperfield is unbearably tedious. That's the point where I realized that every Dickens book has a section of fifty tedious pages that you just need to get through before the goodness starts again.
Yes, the bildungsroman is usually episodic, but in the modern bildungsroman, we usually understand that the character has some core conflict that they need to work out (for instance, that they're gay, or that they really want to be an artist). In older books, that psychological reading of the novel is usually much weaker. Like, in Great Expectations, the book is somewhat about Pip learning to deal with his good fortune, and you can read it through that lens (I.e. Miss Havisham is a person who never learned to deal with catastrophe). But it's a somewhat-weak organizing principle. It definitely took me a while to learn to appreciate these old books for what they were, and not to demand some kind of narrative coherence that the author wasn't totally aiming for.
I love a beautiful sentence but I do agree it can interrupt the dream of reading if I stop too often to admire the artistry. I think there’s a tipping point and, if the story is too dull or clumsily executed, even the loveliest phrasing can’t rescue it.
I assume you know this, but since you didn't mention it in the Year-End Praise, I wanted to point that Just Happy to Be Here was also named a Best Book for Teens 2024 by the New York Public Library (along with We Mostly Come Out at Night). Congratulations! https://www.nypl.org/books-more/recommendations/best-books/teens
This was great. I agree somewhat with Lacey that it’s pointless to criticise a book because you feel the novel should have been told from another character’s perspective. But that’s a narrow reading of Lacey. If she’s saying you can point out plot holes or poor pacing, etc., then I vociferously disagree.
I think there’s a lot of merit to the idea that novels are a good way to bypass people’s natural defenses and incept ideas directly into their consciousness. Insofar as a book has nice writing it generates a connection to the reader, but without a plot it’s sort of letting that feeling go to waste. I think a lot of highbrow readers are into this because they see it as the highest form of pure aesthetic appreciation, but it makes me feel like the author doesn’t actually have core beliefs, or is just too scared to express them.
"The choice to avoid telling a story is not in itself praiseworthy." Loved this line, and this post more generally. It's so weird when writers act like plot is something they don't and shouldn't consciously create to achieve particular effects.
Form is content and content is form. Princess of 72nd Street sounds really good. I wonder if you've read I Who Have Never Known Men, it's another one of those forgotten out of print novels by women authors that's become popular again, in this case due to BookTok. It sort of fits in with the style vs story question as well as I could see some people accusing it of not having enough of a story, although I would disagree. I received it as a Christmas present, which was lucky because I doubt I would have bought it myself, and I ended up reading it in a day, it was that good.
Agree! I don't think critical judgement is possible without a vision of what a good book is, or an ability to see in a specific case how a bad book could have been good.
For myself I think I would replace story with something a little harder to define like emotional and atmospheric experience. Even this would still be opposed to the people who claim to enjoy only style and be entirely careless of what that style is being used to communicate. I don't think those people do enjoy only style either. I think they're very confused. I can understand enjoying only things you think have a good style, and looking at other things that contain elements you would otherwise like and saying, if only they were well-written! I can understand feeling that a talented writer can elevate any content and make it worthwhile. But that's not the same as believing that when you read something well-written you are tossing the content over your shoulder as a valueless by-product, treasuring only the shell.
LOL. I loved this line! "But that's not the same as believing that when you read something well-written you are tossing the content over your shoulder as a valueless by-product, treasuring only the shell." What a bon mot!
I enjoyed this. It made me think of being in a writing workshop with this woman who wrote long, plotty, very romantic stories. The other writers in the class gave her a lot shit about the way she wrote, but her stories were the ones I looked forward to the most, because there was always the drive to find out what happened next. That’s a pretty strong drive!
That being said, I’m staring at four of my favorite books of all time on the shelf right now—books I’ve read multiple times each—and I can’t remember the plot very well of any of them. I can remember characters as well as I remember my real-life friends, I can tell you how it feels to read the books, and I can quote lines from all of them off the top of my head. But if I was asked to give a detailed plot summary of any of them I simply couldn’t do it.
Congratulations!! And thanks for a fun read. Your take on the plot problems of Huck Finn brought to mind an essay on that very subject by George Saunders; I can look for it if you’re interested.
I'd love that! I have an essay on Huck Finn coming out and have been too lazy to do the thing you're supposed to do, where you dig up everything everyone has ever said on the topic.
What I discovered about Proust after having read the whole thing once is that I can get my Proust fix by re-reading parts of the first volume. I have my favorite bits like snob LeGrandin rebuffing Marcel's father. Or Swann's imprecations to himself against the Verdurins that prove to be all bark and no bite. Or the comparison of the great-Aunt with Louis 14th. Or the wonderful cut by the Princess de Guermantes of her anti-semitic cousin. In a way I'm reading it by writing this comment!
And I generally hate books devoid of plots!
I liked Fleishman, and I liked Long Island Compromise even more.
Wow you liked LIC?! Okay, maybe I'll give it a try. I heard it wasn't quite up to snuff.
I really like the parties and the gay stuff in Proust--for me it doesn't really get good until the third or fourth volume. Then that middle volume (The Prisoner and the Fugitive) is so dull! That's the point where, to me, on my last re-read, the repetition got to be a bit much.
The parties are wonderful set pieces. The Verdurin's, though, are so awful, I just love the dinners there.
Yes, the middle volume is excruciating. One would not put up with their best friend going on and on like that. about their version of Albertine.
It (“They”) is pretty thin, in that it’s not much plot…it’s more feeling and atmosphere. I tend to enjoy that type of novel more than other people (note to self to make that clear of I’m reviewing that type of book in the future.
It's okay, you didn't do anything wrong! I already owned the book and was glad of the impulse to read it--I wouldn't have finished at all if I'd hated it.
It feels as if when people talk about plot there is a confusion of 1. actual events that drive the story forward 2. the movement of a protagonist from one psychological state to another 3. the initial premise of a book.
Herzog, which I read last year and loved, is an incredibly beautiful novel on the sentence level. But the sentences are beautiful bc of both their internal qualities of pure sound and rhythm and descriptive accuracy and also because they are so accomplished at revealing the mind of the protagonist, who by the end of the book has been transformed internally even though the actual events that happen are relatively few. And the premise, a nebbishy academic deals with his divorce, is the sort of thing I would have sworn a few years ago I would never touch, it used to seem to me a betrayal of the imaginative possibilities of prose to use it for such quotidian, bourgeois concerns. But ofc I was an idiot, there are whole worlds within Herzog, the whole book feels so much more alive and inventive than a lot of books that are fantastical on the surface. Then there are a lot of books with great premises that make you want to read them immediately, but that fail in the execution.
I never really remember the sequence of events that happens in a novel so much as I remember moments, characters, and situations. So I think the books I like that have a lot of actual stuff happening tend to be either picaresque or tragic, bc the picaresque has so many opportunities for memorable setpieces and the tragic has the pervading mood of melancholy and inevitability that builds and builds. Mason & Dixon would be a good example of the former and (to pick a popular fiction/genre example) The Friends of Eddie Coyle the latter.
Separately, it's funny that the "underappreciated classic" label has been so thoroughly devalued that the quote on the cover of Princess of 72nd St. has to be like "no, really!"
I thought that cover quote was funny too! The forgotten classics business might've gotten a little too big, honestly...but when you compare it to the rest of publishing, you're like, well, at least the forgotten classics are usually at least somewhat-good. Even with a mediocre one, you don't despair at the fact that this got published.
Yes, there's a certain imprecision when we talk about all the elements of a story. There's certainly a way of describing a book that makes it sound just like every other book. In my post I'm aware that I made some false equivalences (sentences = style and plot = story). I just think it's all kind of one big ball--different things about a book strike different people differently, but usually when we come together and discuss it, we're able to agree that actually, we read the same book, with the same features. I haven't read Herzog, but I've read a few other Saul Bellow novels (my favorite is Ravelstein) and I agree I cannot remember the first thing about the plots! Does Ravelstein actually have a plot at all? I have no idea. All I remember is the inimitable portrait of Ravelstein himself, in all his languor and self-importance. With some writers, it doesn't necessarily make sense to discuss the story when discussing their work.
Agreed, I’ve learned to take the hype with a grain of salt but they’re usually worth reading at the least and sometimes they are truly great. And I’m glad more of them are popping up — I really like McNally editions and I’m excited about the one Brandon Taylor is involved in.
I love Ravelstein, it doesn’t have much of a plot per se but it definitely has an arc where through Ravelstein and then through his own near death experience the protagonist comes to some sort of terms with the fact of his own mortality. Which is kind of the plot (or character arc or whatever you want to call it) of every Bellow book I’ve read.
Thanks for a provocation to work out some better thoughts about this.
Perhaps it matters what we mean by "style." If style *only* means formally pretty sentences, then I don't think I agree that story and style are the same thing, or that the sentences are automatically good because the story is good. I've read books that, as a whole, transcended their bland/rough/average prose, perhaps with a thrilling plot, lots of brilliant ideas, or a creative, thought-provoking world. It's difficult for a truly good book to transcend bad prose, but I think a good book can have unremarkable or average prose, where I can think "that was good, but I wish the writing had been a little more polished or felicitous."
But maybe if we define style more broadly, then the boundaries between style and plot begin to blur. Style might also be a mood or emotional state, a general aesthetic logic, that governs the way events are sequenced and paced, how things are given to the reader to perceive (perhaps with a lot of sensory detail, imagery and metaphor, perhaps with little). In that case, what might appear a bland, functional sentence out of context is part of a stylistic whole that works or is "good." Style gets harder to separate from plot; its a tonal or aesthetic logic that determines both what the information is and how it is dispensed.
Maybe we also think about plot in a too-narrow way as merely the literal actions a character takes, merely "what happens" in the most limited active sense. But I don't think there is any such thing as a plotless book! There can be an entire "plot" in a story even if a character sits in a chair and thinks the whole time. I think this is what people mean when they say they "don't care about plot": it doesn't have to be an action-packed story, they want to see ideas or feel emotions, which doesn't require action in the most literal sense. A good book like this is not relying *only* on pretty sentences: thin action works because of its overall aesthetic logic. But thin action puts the prose under a microscope: the aesthetic logic really has to work.
I think maybe I've long-windedly talked myself into agreeing with you in a sense. I don't think it makes much sense to talk about "beautiful sentences" out of the context of the whole, nor to talk about "plot" in terms of literal actions apart from a general aesthetic logic. (Side note: I agree that plot actions can really go wrong and derail a logic!) The best writing does involve a seamless marriage of form and content. I love a lot of sentences in Middlemarch, which are on their own formal masterpieces of English prose. But I don't remember them because primarily because they are "pretty," but because they are expressing a memorable philosophical thought or expressing something that has been staged by the whole.
I think that's the point. You can slice up a book into style and story, but a lot of the times when we say "style" we are thinking of something another person might consider to be "story". I personally don't talk much about style or about prose, because to dwell on those things carries a connotation to me of pretentiousness.
But in writing about the Elaine Kauf book I realized...this is not a very strongly-plotted story. I approve of the fact that it has a story, but that's probably not the thing that stands out about it to most people. To me, the fact that it has a story is just a natural result of the overall integrity of the work--the working-out of a certain logic. But most people would probably be more drawn to the characters (who are really zany and strange) or the writing or just the feel of exuberance than suffuses the book.
I liked this discussion and I think you are fundamentally correct. I'd like to make one comment, that doesn't so much apply to you as it applies to most people talking about style. They talk about beautiful "sentences". Certainly there are such, but, to me, in prose, the key unit is the paragraph, and many of the most memorable (to me) passages of prose are great because of the paragraph, not any individual sentence. Nitpicking, maybe, mind you!
To David Copperfield and Great Expectations -- these are bildungsromans, right? That's a whole subgenre consisting of purposely episodic books, seems to me. Even so, David Copperfield, at least, though not conventionally plotted from beginning to end, does have important strands that tie things together. So, for instant, the whole story of the Pegotty family is connective tissue, and without having followed them throughout an episode like the storm would have no power. Or certainly Betsey Trotwood's appearances and reappearances. The funny thing is that the two "romance" plots are the weakest part -- Dora is a terribly uninteresting character, and Agnes is too much of a paragon. I suppose in a way, though, it is the characters, not the plot, that make the novel -- just looking through the list of them brings forth delightful memories.
Oh my God, the first romance in David Copperfield is unbearably tedious. That's the point where I realized that every Dickens book has a section of fifty tedious pages that you just need to get through before the goodness starts again.
Yes, the bildungsroman is usually episodic, but in the modern bildungsroman, we usually understand that the character has some core conflict that they need to work out (for instance, that they're gay, or that they really want to be an artist). In older books, that psychological reading of the novel is usually much weaker. Like, in Great Expectations, the book is somewhat about Pip learning to deal with his good fortune, and you can read it through that lens (I.e. Miss Havisham is a person who never learned to deal with catastrophe). But it's a somewhat-weak organizing principle. It definitely took me a while to learn to appreciate these old books for what they were, and not to demand some kind of narrative coherence that the author wasn't totally aiming for.
I love a beautiful sentence but I do agree it can interrupt the dream of reading if I stop too often to admire the artistry. I think there’s a tipping point and, if the story is too dull or clumsily executed, even the loveliest phrasing can’t rescue it.
I assume you know this, but since you didn't mention it in the Year-End Praise, I wanted to point that Just Happy to Be Here was also named a Best Book for Teens 2024 by the New York Public Library (along with We Mostly Come Out at Night). Congratulations! https://www.nypl.org/books-more/recommendations/best-books/teens
I did know, but I'd also forgotten! I saw that your anthology was on there too! Thanks, will have to remember that for my next post
Hi! I am a new subscriber and I'd like to commend you in this post. I am excited to read more from you :)
This was great. I agree somewhat with Lacey that it’s pointless to criticise a book because you feel the novel should have been told from another character’s perspective. But that’s a narrow reading of Lacey. If she’s saying you can point out plot holes or poor pacing, etc., then I vociferously disagree.
I think there’s a lot of merit to the idea that novels are a good way to bypass people’s natural defenses and incept ideas directly into their consciousness. Insofar as a book has nice writing it generates a connection to the reader, but without a plot it’s sort of letting that feeling go to waste. I think a lot of highbrow readers are into this because they see it as the highest form of pure aesthetic appreciation, but it makes me feel like the author doesn’t actually have core beliefs, or is just too scared to express them.
"The choice to avoid telling a story is not in itself praiseworthy." Loved this line, and this post more generally. It's so weird when writers act like plot is something they don't and shouldn't consciously create to achieve particular effects.
Form is content and content is form. Princess of 72nd Street sounds really good. I wonder if you've read I Who Have Never Known Men, it's another one of those forgotten out of print novels by women authors that's become popular again, in this case due to BookTok. It sort of fits in with the style vs story question as well as I could see some people accusing it of not having enough of a story, although I would disagree. I received it as a Christmas present, which was lucky because I doubt I would have bought it myself, and I ended up reading it in a day, it was that good.
What is a negative review but "a request for the book to be a different book [a good book] instead of responding to the book as it is [shitty]" ??
Agree! I don't think critical judgement is possible without a vision of what a good book is, or an ability to see in a specific case how a bad book could have been good.