The names had the sound of the History Channel: Pearl Harbor, Eniwetok Atoll, Guam. His father had been to each during the Second World War and he, the son, had never known about it. Fifty-one years he’d been alive and to find out who his father had been he had to get like this: drunk, lost, estranged from a minimum of two wives, and a murderer in the eyes of his sister, and maybe the state of Indiana.
This is the paragraph of a story called Presently In Ruins by Gregory Blake Smith. I present it to you because one of my little practice things is to pick apart openings and see how they work and how they don’t. And since I’m doing this, why not let you share in the fun? And also because when I post stuff that’s a bit too cat-bloggish all the other LSH contributors tend to run for the hills. So let’s put away our angsty revelations and get out our protractors and scientific calculators, and try to figure out why this is such a stellar opening.
The most obvious culprit is style: the paragraph reads beautifully. Smith varies the rhythm of his sentences, the word length, and the syntax. For instance, we have two sets of lists – the first of places, the second of what I guess you’d call states. Not only are these lovely changeups from a more traditional writing style (not too many lists in serious literature. Or even un-serious literature), but they work in parallel to contrast the far-ranging locales visited by the narrator’s father (Pearl Harbor, Eniwetok Atoll), with the rather pedestrian and cliched miseries of the son (drunk, estranged from two wives).
This last example is also telling of another of this writer’s gifts, one difficult to catalog precisely but eminently noticeable, which is a keen awareness of how word placement, word ordering, and word choice affect the overall ‘bouquet’ of a sentence. For instance:
Example 1: The narrator describes himself as estranged from ‘a minimum of two wives.’ If you’re like me, you find this sentence amusing without even thinking about it. But why is it funny? For one reason, estrangement from one’s wife is not something about which one is uncertain. You are estranged, or you aren’t. But Smith’s ‘a minimum of’ phrasing not only casts this normally digital state into doubt, which is funny by itself, but it implies that perhaps the narrator is even estranged from 3 wives, or 4, or god knows how many. Multiple marriages are a hallmark of a certain kind of shitbag, and shitbaggery is something we look upon with a sort of contemptful amusement, provided the emotional distance is great enough, and tricks of phrasing like this one ensure that it is.
Example 2: The narrator admits to being ‘a murderer in the eyes of his sister, and maybe the state of Indiana.’ This sentence utilizes a more standard technique of mentioning the most salient and important aspect of a sentence in an incidental manner, often last. Here’s another made-up example: ‘DDB was in a black mood. He’d missed lunch, which, since it was Tuesday, had been pizza, his favorite. Also, someone was trying to kill him.’
The effect created with this trick isn’t precisely humor, but rather a mental frisson, a surprise and a wonderment. Probably part of this is simple novelty – how many times did your teacher tell you to say the most important things early in a sentence? – but there’s something more, too. When you read one of these backwards sentences you know you’re in the presence of a different kind of mind, one that sees the world differently. Whether this perspective is given voice by one of the characters, or is delivered by the author himself, via narrative voice, you feel that you’re about to sit down to a meal that’s not the usual meat and potatoes.
Huge power is stuffed into just five and a half lines in this opening. We learn a lot about a father and a son, and we’re left with questions: what’s the deal with the two or more wives? And a murder? And how does your sister factor in? Are you on the run? Are you really such a shitbag as you appear, and if so, why? And finally, what changed, if you lived your whole fifty-one years without knowing these details about your father, and now you do?
It’s not so great a thing to ask or imply questions. The real achievement is presenting them in such a way that the reader wants to keep reading to find out the answers. I haven’t read any more than what I’ve quoted here, but I’m looking forward to seeing how Smith pulls it off, and whether the piece holds up to the promise of that first paragraph.