Samples of Prose Style
from
Angela Carter,
The Infernal Desire Machines of
Doctor Hoffman
It turned out that the
extremely powerful bourgeoisie and by far the greater part of the peasantry
around the capital, from the rich farmers to the white trash, was of variegated
European extraction, united by the frail bond of a language which, although
often imperfectly understood, was still held in common while the slum dwellers
presented an extraordinary racial diversity but were all distinguishable by the
colour black, for that pigmintation,
to some degree, was common to them all.
[…]
She had a
slippery, ingratiating quality which was meant to disarm but somehow offended
me and she loquaciously set sail on a rattling stream of nothings while the
girl in the drawing room continued to play the piano exquisitely and the music
echoed down a corridor into the room…She had a waxen delicacy of a plant
bred in a cupboard. She did not look as if blood flowed through her veins
but instead some other, less emphatic fluid infinitely less red. Her
mouth was barely touched with palest pink though it had exactly the proportions
of the three cherries the artmaster piles in an
inverted traingle to illustrate the classic mouth and
there was no tinge of any pink at all on her cheeks.
—from Raymond Carter, “Cathedral”
His wife had
died. So he was visiting the dead wife's relatives in
—from F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
About half way between West Egg
and
[…] We walked through a
high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house
by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white
against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the
house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the
other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the
ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as
wind does on the sea.
The
only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which
two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were
both in white, and their dresses were rippling and
fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around
the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and
snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall, Then there was a
boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about
the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned
slowly to the floor.
[…]When they met again,
two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was, somehow, betrayed.
Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the
settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious
and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more
charming than ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that
wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy,
gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.
[…]Already it was deep
summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red
gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I
ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in
the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating
in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew
the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the
moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not
alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my
neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the
silver pepper of the stars.
—from Annie Proulx, CloseRange:
In the first
go-round he'd drawn a bull he knew and got a good scald on him. He'd been in a
slump for weeks, wire stretched right, but things were turning back his way.
He'd come off that animal in a flying dismount, sparked a little clapping that
quickly died; the watchers knew as well as he that if he burst into flames and
sang an operatic aria after the whistle it would make no damn difference.
He drew o.k.
bulls and rode them in the next rounds, scores in the high seventies, fixed his
eyes on the outside shoulder of the welly bull that
tried to drop him, then at the short-go draw he pulled Kisses, rank and salty,
big as a boxcar of coal. On that one all you could do was your best and hope
for a little sweet luck; if you got the luck he was money.
[…]
What he
wanted to know now, tires spanking the tar-filled road cracks and potholes,
funeral homburg sliding on the back-seat, was if Rollo
had got the girlfriend away from the old man, thrown a saddle on her and ridden
off into the sunset?...His thoughts clogged as if a comb working through his
mind had stuck against a snarl.
[…]
They climbed
through the stony landscape, limestone beds eroded by wind into fantastic
furniture, stale gnawed breadcrusts, tumbled bones,
stacks of dirty folded blankets, bleached crab claws and dog teeth. […]
The roots of his mind felt withered and punky.
[…]
[…]
Looking at her, not just her face, but up and down, eyes moving over her like
an iron over a shirt and the old man in his mailman’s sweater and
lopsided hat tasting his Everclear and not noticing
or not caring, getting up every now and then to lurch onto the porch and water
the weeds.
[…]
He traveled
against curdled sky. In the last sixty miles the snow began again. He climbed
out of
The light
was falling out of the day when he reached the pass, the blunt mountains lost
in snow, the greasy hairpin turns ahead. He drove slowly and steadily in a low
gear; he had not forgotten how to drive a winter mountain. But the wind was up
again, rocking and slapping the car, blotting out all but whipping snow and he
was sweating with the anxiety of keeping to the road, dizzy with altitude. Twelve more miles, sliding and buffeted, before he reached Ten
Sleep where streetlights glowed in revolving circles like Van Gogh's sun.
—from Mark Leyner, Et Tu, Babe
The giant
awoke, got high on drugs, masturbated, and then went into town to forage for a
human-flesh breakfast. He stopped at an intersection where his eye was
caught by the puffy orange Day-Glo parka of a postmenopausal crossing guard. He
knelt down and plucked up the screaming crossing guard in his fingers and
dropped her into a gunnysack slung across his back.
[…]
Those were
my first visceral tattoos. I’ve had many since. A tip to the
guys out there—visceral tattoos really turn on female medical technicians
and nurses. I’ve had numerous hot relationships start because a
med-tech or a nurse saw one of my X-rays and went nuts over all the
tattoos. They know that any wimp can go out and get “Winona
Forever” stenciled on his arm—but it takes real balls to have
yourself put under general anesthesia, sliced open, have a vital organ etched
with radioactive isotope ink, and then get sewn up again every time you want to
commemorate that special lady.
Next, I want to have the words Desert Storm—Thunder and Lightning tattooed on my left frontal cortex. But
I don’t know where I’m going to go for that one. Brain
tattooing is illegal even in
[…]
Rocco’s father had been
a medical cheese sculptor—he sculpted cheese centerpieces for medical
conventions. It was a profession that required not only fine craftsmanship
and an encyclopedic knowledge of cheeses, but a comprehensive understanding of
human anatomy. One needed to know which cheeses by dint of their hues and
textures would allow the sculptor to render an organ with maximum
fidelity. Mavarti with dill, for instance, is
particularly suitable for sculpting uterine lining. Mozzarella has just
the right slickness and convoluted folds for the brain.”
[…]
When I
arrive at the Jack LaLanne Health Spa, there is no
sign that a clandestine meeting of ultra-right-wing intellectuals and psychics
is taking place in its sauna. Yelping aerobics classes, the echo of
racquetballs, sweaty florid-faced hausfraus in garish leotards slumped at juice
machines, men with hairy jiggling breasts and gelatinous rolls of stretch-marked
belly fat grimly tramping on treadmills and Stairmasters—nothing out of
the ordinary. I undress in the locker room, walk down a short hallway, come to
a door marked SAUNA and open it. Through the thick steam, the first face
I recognize is that of Dr. Claude Lorphelin, a
gynecologist, surrealist poet, and neo-fascist pamphleteer who lives in the
post 16th Arrondissement of the
—from Lorrie Moore, "How to Talk to Your Mother"
Once in a
while take evening trips past the old unsold house you grew up in, that haunted
rural crossroads two hours from where you now live. It is like Halloween: the
raked, moon-lit lawn, the mammoth, tumid trees, arms and fingers raised into
the starless wipe of sky like burns, cracks, map rivers.
. .Look up through the windshield. In the November sky a wedge of wrens moves south, the lines of their formation, the very
sides and vertices mysteriously choreographed, shifting, flowing, crossing like
a skater's legs... Walk through wooded areas; there is a life there you have
forgotten. The smells and sounds seem sudden, unchanged, exact, the paper
crunch of the leaves, the mouldering sachet of the
mud. The trees are crooked as backs, the fence posts splintered, trusting and
precarious in their solid grasp of arms, the asters splindly,
dry, white, havishammed (Havishammed!)
by frost.
—from Lorrie Moore, a selection of sentences with
interesting figurative language
1. "Her eyebrows will lift like
theater curtains."
2. "Your roommate looks at you, her face
blank as a large Kleenex."
3. "Work up a vibrato you could drive
a truck though."
4. "Try to figure out what has made
your life go wrong. It is like trying to figure out what is stinking up the
refrigerator. "
5. "You are a zoo of
insecurities."
6. "The clink of the silverware inside
the drawer, piled like bones in a mass grave."
7. "You see a ghost, something like a
spinning statue by a shrub."
8. "She ages, rocks in your rocker,
noiseless as wind."
9. "On public transportation mothers with soft, soapy, corduroyed seraphs
glance at you, their faces dominoes of compassion."