Castle Walls Editing

Tag: exclamation points

  • The Second Time Through

    In preparation for this week’s release of Justin Cronin’s The Twelve, I spent a good part of last weekend rereading its predecessor, The Passage. Here is a sentence from Cronin’s epic work:

    “By nightfall they were fifty miles past Oklahoma City, hurtling west across the open prairie toward a wall of spring thunderheads ascending from the horizon like a bank of blooming flowers in a time-lapse video.”

    A number of things struck me about this sentence. There’s tremendous movement, for one thing, and there’s the use of the word thunderheads, which seems to me suggestive of someone who’s spent a great deal of time looking at the sky over an open landscape. The imagery of flowers is beautiful and also cinematic (time-lapse photography has been employed with weather quite effectively in numerous films). Writers are correct to exhibit concern over using too many prepositional phrases, which can suck the life from a sentence, but I think they work here.

    Though obviously outside the realm of authorial intent, the sentence did put me in mind of these lyrics from the Alice in Chains song “Brother”:

    Roses in a vase of white

    Bloodied by the thorns beside the leaves

    That fall because my hand is

    Pulling them hard as I can

    Something I picked up during my second time through the book is the theme of falling that follows the character Wolgast. At one point, Wolgast is carrying the girl Amy, who is unconscious, up a ladder in an air shaft. He has to lean out with her and maneuver her into a duct above him, and there’s this line:

    “He began to fall. He’d been falling all along.”

    Caught in the moment, I only read this the first time as coinciding with the physical action of the scene. But on my second reading, it brought tears to my eyes, because it said so much more.

    And then there is this line, which I found devastating the first time through and just as affecting the second. Notice again the reference to falling.

    “Amy, he thought as the stars began to fall, everywhere and all around; and he tried to fill his mind with just her name, his daughter’s name, to help him from his life.”

    This sentence is dear to me, and I have trouble speaking it aloud without being overcome. Cormac McCarthy, whose stunning work The Road was frequently referenced in reviews for The Passage, is famously quoted as saying that semicolons and exclamation points have no place in literature. McCarthy is a brilliant writer, but I think the semicolon works well here, and I also enjoy the way exclamation points are used in the works of Sarah Langan (a writer whose fiction blows me away) and Swamplandia! author Karen Russell.

  • Grammar Questions

    Early in his career, English footballer Michael Owen celebrated goals by rubbing his hands together in a joyous “Goody! Goody! Goody!” show of enthusiasm. Book lovers feel something similar when learning of a book that captures their imagination and produces a swell of anticipation that is almost inevitably more expansive than whatever pleasures the book has in store.

    I felt such a surge after reading reviews for a collection of stories by Lydia Davis, an author whose works I was unfamiliar with. I particularly enjoy short stories, and she is a short story writer of much acclaim, as evidenced by the following praise for The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis:

    “A body of work probably unique in American writing . . . I suspect that The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions” (James Wood, The New Yorker).

    “Magnificent . . . Davis has made one of the great books in recent literature, equal parts horse sense and heartache” (Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books).

    One of the reviews for the collection mentioned the story “Grammar Questions,” in which the narrator, whose father is dying, employs a kind of grammatical logic to explore her emotional landscape. A father of two wonderful children, I have a disastrous relationship with my own father, so I am drawn to stories of fathers for two very different reasons. (Not surprisingly, I was greatly affected by both the father-and-son relationship in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the fatherly role Wolgast establishes with Amy in Justin Cronin’s The Passage.)

    And the story involves grammar. Goody! Goody! Goody!

    “Grammar Questions” is a damn good story, and I would recommend exploring Lydia Davis’s work. In addition to being a finely wrought contemplation of death, the story provides numerous examples of the proper use of punctuation with quotation marks. At the end of a sentence, a question mark or exclamation point goes inside the quotation marks if it applies to the quoted material. The mark goes outside the quotation marks if it applies to the sentence as a whole.

    Look at the following examples from the story:

    Now, during the time he is dying, can I say, “This is where he lives”?

    and

    If someone asks me, “Where does he live?” should I answer, “Well, right now he is not living, he is dying”?

    Style Note: Titles of novels, albums, and collections, such as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, are generally set in italics. Short stories, poems, and songs are generally enclosed by quotation marks.