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In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on February 01, 2011, 05:08:22 pm ---Yes, I did.
--- End quote ---
My dear, your critical sense is sound, but your opinion alone does not make someone or something "famously regarded."
Front-Ranger:
Well, quite a lot of people have moaned and complained about her style and Dwight Garner writes:
"What is that signature style? Reading Ms. Proulx’s prose is like bouncing along rutted country roads in a pickup truck with no shock absorbers. Her books are packed with arcane flora and fauna and eccentrically named towns and characters. Many writers employ unusual verbs and adjectives; Ms. Proulx likes weird nouns. Her cluttered style is, in a kind of reverse way, as jewel-encrusted as Gustav Klimt’s."
This is from our thread entitled Annie Proulx's Memoir:
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,46240.msg599654.html#msg599654
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on February 01, 2011, 07:46:47 pm ---My dear, your critical sense is sound, but your opinion alone does not make someone or something "famously regarded."
--- End quote ---
That was badly and baldly said. I apologize. I should have said something like, "My dear, I respect your critical sense, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that one opinion alone does not make something 'famously regarded.'"
Front-Ranger:
We're getting off topic, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to quote from a reviewer of The Shipping News by lisaMariaClark that is illustrative of how legions of readers feel about Annie Proulx's style:
--- Quote ---Proulx is the author of the short story "Brokeback Mountain" which was made into the film of the same name. I read that short story soon after seeing the movie and remember finding it moving. But Proulx might be one of those authors whose extreme styles are more effective (at least for me) at the shorter lengths. I love several short stories by James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, for instance, but hate the novels by them I've tried.
In the case of Proulx, her style quickly wore on me. I'm truly not a Grammar Nazi; fiction is not meant to be an essay. But she uses sentence fragments so frequently she doesn't flow, and boy she piles on the metaphors in her drawn-out descriptions. But the worse part is the protagonist: Quoyle. This is a paragraph of how he's described early on which should give you an idea of Proulx's characterization and style:
A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face.
Note the choppy syntax. That could be effective done sparingly but the entire book is written like that. (And er...plastic has a color? Kissed fingertips are bunched? Really?) Quoyle's a lump of a character in every way who has never been able to hold a job long. His wife, Petal Bear, who thankfully is killed off early in the novel, sold their two young girls to a pornographer. (The girls are found before they can be harmed.)
The pace is slooooow and about a third of the way I knew I'd had enough. I struggled to get that far. Painful. If you don't love Proulx's style--and I hated it--there's no reason to stay.
--- End quote ---
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on February 02, 2011, 06:08:58 pm ---We're getting off topic, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to quote from a reviewer of The Shipping News by lisaMariaClark that is illustrative of how legions of readers feel about Annie Proulx's style:
--- End quote ---
I still think your own use of nouns is a bit overblown ("Legions"? C'mon. ...), but at least you are offering evidence besides your own opinion. This is a good thing. :)
I don't think you get to be an award-winning author if "legions" of readers find you, well, unreadable.
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