A Country Girl
You can hear her narrative voice—a bit breathless, direct, consumed by the story.
Ireland 2017
Here’s a sentence from Edna O’Brien that caught my eye:
I still recall the rapture as a child, gazing, gazing at a great amphora of artificial tea roses in yellow and red, far more beautiful than the dog roses on the briars or the devils pokers in the garden outside, which, because of the way they smoldered, somehow looked spiteful.
It comes from Country Girl, O’Brien’s artful memoir, and the subject of the passage above is her childhood dining room. Perhaps the sentence is a tad difficult to judge outside of its context, yet, even without the larger story, the words are striking. It’s a peculiar construction, one that triggered me to reread what I had just skimmed past.
And that peculiarity is what’s most prominent in these lines: the voice on the page is distinct, closer to transcribed speech than original writing. You almost have the sense—and, despite appearances, this is intended as a compliment—that the writer isn’t accustomed to writing. After you pass the alliterative opening of “recall the rapture,” you lurch forward the rest of the way, encircling the subject, tangent by tangent, unsure about the endpoint.
Notice the slight lilt to the sentence. There are two spots where O’Brien gives you a little nudge, with the first coming when she repeats the word “gazing” just eight words into the sentence. The repetition is a slight hiccup, a restart, a chance for you to take a breath and prepare for the long descriptive clause which comes next. The second little nudge comes when she squeezes “which” between two commas: take the opportunity for a pause here, she lets you know, as I’m about to slam this sentence shut with a word you don’t expect, and I want “spiteful” to have its full thrust.
She molds this rhythm with a precise shape, a counterbalance in how one nudge holds up the front while the other supports the back. We have eight words from the opening until we reach the first nudge, thirty descriptive words sandwiched in the middle, and a final nudge nine words from the end.
Separately, I appreciate the unshakable confidence it takes to add that repetition, to tell your publisher: yes, print the same word twice in a row, that’s the rhythm I want. How many writers can manage that? O’Brien must consider that double construction keyed to her narrative voice, as she also inserts it in other spots. A chapter later, while describing her childhood classroom, she writes:
She reeled off the names of heroes whose heads were impaled on the gates of Dublin Castle, and yet, and yet, Malachi retained his collar of gold.
If you look for the rhythm of these words, you do hear her voice—a bit breathless, direct, consumed by the story. She’s in the room with you rather than on the page. She’s at the table and looks you in the eye while she tells her tale. These sentences—which appear deceptively close to clumsy writing—have power because good writers trick you into listening rather than reading.
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