Diagram
A young Nick Shay is called into the office of Father Paulus at a remedial Catholic school in northern Minnesota. Inside, the priest asks the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s Underworld to name all the parts of a boot. “There’s not much to name, is there?” Shay answers. “A front and a top.”
“A front and a top. You make me want to weep,” Paulus says, before prompting him:
“What’s the flap under the lace?”
“The tongue.”
“Well?”
“I knew the name, I just didn’t see the thing.”
“You didn’t see the thing because you don’t know how to look,” Paulus reprimands his student. “And you don’t know how to look because you don’t know the names.” What follows is a torrent of nomenclature: the “strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace” is called a cuff, the “stiff section over the heel” is the counter, the “strip above the heel” the welt, the “frontal area that covers the instep” the vamp.
Again and again, Shay tells the priest he doesn’t know what a quarter is, a grommet, an aglet. “My head is breaking apart,” he protests. Paulus answers, “Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren’t important, we wouldn’t use such a gorgeous Latinate word.”
Success as a novelist can come down to simply knowing all the names; being someone who, merely by naming things, discloses the depth of the quotidian. That knowledge of names, however arcane, allows the best writers to, in the words of another character in Underworld, act as a guide to “the little histories hidden in a gesture or word.”
We lost two of the great namers over the past few months: Martin Amis and Cormac McCarthy. While their novels had little in common aside from a preoccupation with the brutality of men — for Amis, that brutality manifested as boorishness; for McCarthy, literal bloodshed — they both had a knack for composing sentences of breathtaking precision. Each writer’s vocabulary was almost too voluminous, such that I often found myself reading them with the dictionary app open on my phone, constantly plugging in words to fully appreciate images like this, from McCarthy’s Child of God:
Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom.
Or this one, from Amis’ The Information:
The floorboards hummed and tickled shod feet with the work of the hidden hypocaust. This senile apparatus was augmented, in the unheatably high-ceilinged hall, by an open log fire, before which, on the sofa, a gravid Labrador anxiously awaited the arrival of her puppies.
The only way to use this sort of language is unapologetically. Recently, I was joking with a friend about how some words are commonplace enough to use all the time, some are so esoteric you can only use them once in an article or essay, and some are so annoyingly abstruse that you only get one over the course of a novel. For a writer like McCarthy, that third order of word appeared on practically every page. He didn’t think twice about describing the night sky as being “sprent with stars” or wagons as featuring “osnaburg covers” — these were simply the most accurate words, so he used them.
At the same time, McCarthy didn’t seem overly eager to feature a particularly juicy adjective or verb simply for its novelty (an excess I confess to being guilty of on any number of occasions). “In the evening they came out upon a mesa that overlooked all the country to the north,” he wrote in Blood Meridian:
The sun to the west lay in a holocaust where there rose a steady column of small desert bats and to the north along the trembling perimeter of the world dust was blowing down the void like the smoke of distant armies. The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the land by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor.
Certain words leap out at the reader — Shadowfold! Imbrium! Holocaust! — while others are repeated or iterated to establish rhythm: north, desert, along/long, distant/distance. The juxtaposition of bright and basic language mirrors the scene, a sun setting over a constant, moon-like plain. McCarthy isn’t forcing it, he’s experiencing what Amis called “one of those uncovenanted expansions that every artist knows, when, almost audibly to the inner ear, things swivel and realign (the cube comes good), and all is clear. You don’t do this: your talent does it.”
If McCarthy’s language felt immovable, like words chiseled into stone, Amis’ buzzed with nervy contingency. In Money, he wrote from the perspective of an unbearably misanthropic commercial director who had just landed in New York:
You step off the plane, look around, take a deep breath — and come to in your underpants, somewhere south of SoHo, or on a midtown traction table with a silver tray and a tasselled tab on your chest and a guy in white saying Good morning, sir. How are you today. That’ll be fifteen thousand dollars.
Words torrent in Amis’ novels, building momentum and breaking in time with each narrative beat. In The Information, Richard Tull, an unbearably misanthropic novelist (are you catching a theme?), rides the Tube in London, stewing over a remark from a rival writer who suggested Richard’s signature trait is being “unenvious:”
Richard considered his signature: what marked him out. Because we all needed them now, signatures, signatures, even the guy sitting opposite: his was the pair of pink diaper pins he wore through his nose … Richard couldn’t come up with anything good. Except — this. He had never been to America. And he would tell you that quite frankly, raising his pentimento eyebrows and tensing his upper lip with a certain laconic pride.
I quite agree. What an asshole.
Over the course of that paragraph, Amis’ voice gradually backs away, moving from the protagonist’s interior monologue to the punk in the train car to a third-person view of Richard and his shabbily recolored eyebrows. Then Amis makes the final leap, offering a pitch-perfect authorial intrusion that zings the reader with fellow-feeling, even as you can’t help but also experience a twinge of defensiveness on behalf of the character you’ve come to quite enjoy getting to know, never mind his (copious) faults.
The engine that makes any of this work, this grandiloquent fantasy of fiction, is language. Amis gets away with his little postmodern pirouette because there is no better word than “pentimento” to describe these particular eyebrows. McCarthy gets to call a sunset a “holocaust” because that’s what Blood Meridian is about, systematic killing in the borderlands. Naming things properly is the whole game: if you can’t get the names right, your book will never rise to become more than just a story. Don DeLillo — and let us rejoice that he is still with us — understands this better than anyone. Hell, one of his novels is even called The Names.
One night in Blood Meridian, the character McCarthy calls “the judge” is sitting at a campfire, writing in his notebook. One of the men he’s sharing the night with, a Tennessean named Webster, “regarded him with one eye asquint and he said: Well you’ve been a draftsman somewheres and them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no man can put all the world in a book.”
“What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ,” the judge says. “How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.”
Many thanks to Tess for stepping in to write the most recent newsletter, and to everyone who responded with words of encouragement. I’m happy to report that I turned in the first draft of the book on time and am now waiting on an initial round of notes from my editor. I’ve taken on some freelance work in the interim, so you should see my byline starting to pop up again over the next couple months. In the meantime, please do take a gander at the most recent report from Components, which we released at the beginning of the summer. It’s (likely) the last of the studies of the music industry we’ll be doing and really digs into the fundamental split between the streaming economy and analog formats like vinyl, looking to the work of Marshall McLuhan and John Dewey to grasp the importance of tactility in the enjoyment of music.
A big shout out to my old pal Annie Fish for getting her graphic novel, And the Birds Flew From the Trees, out into the world. Annie has been working on this project off and on since 2009 and I have to say I’m blown away by the final result. Her illustration style is subtle but moving, and her story masterfully captures the anxious years of identity formation between high school and college. In addition to being a great comics artist, Annie has been pumping out killer albums since we were teenagers, most of which are available on her Bandcamp. You can buy And the Birds Flew From the Trees here, and support all things Annie Fish at her Patreon.
That’s all for now. You can find me on my website, or shoeing twilight mosquitos away from my ankles as I try to enjoy a raspberry shrub on the patio.
Your pal,
Kyle