Artful Words

Anne Patchett is quite the styler of words. In The Magician's Assistant, there is this moment:

"We were very close," Sabine said. Her voice was quiet. The bar seemed to press forward; the bartender pushed his upper body across the polished wood, pretending to reach for a bowl of salted nuts.

Sabine is on the edge of divulging, and everyone in the room, including the smooth polished bar itself, leans in to hear. It's a brief half-paragraph of held breath and then it's gone, a pregnant pause if ever there was one. And then Sabine continues talking, her secrets about to spill. I picture Edward Hopper's Nighthawks for a moment, though that's not actually the scene Patchett is rendering.

C.S. Lewis talks about mythopoiec moments in literature - cruxes in the narrative where time stands still and some imminent numinous comes crashing in. I don't think I'd tax Patchett's writing with the burden of myth-bearing, but she sure approaches that stand-still moment from time to time. In this particular scene, her words morph into what I first perceived as cinematic. Can't you envision the bartender on screen, leaning in on beefy arms as the lens bends out? But on second read, and third, and fourth, I saw what Patchett had actually done in a mere two sentences.

These are words made art. She throws down language and it comes out as paint before the imagination's eye, a brief moment, loud with sudden silence. The plot stands still, and the bartender - and the bar itself - moves in off the page. As time bending as Dali, as real as Ralph Goings. The reader is caught out of the flow of narrative into something grander, something with a movement of its own. The bartender leans forward across the smooth, shiny, bending counter in all the bold strokes of rich oil on canvas. Patchett doesn't say so, but it's clear to me that he turns his ear in, rag hand forgotten. He wants to hear, as we all do. His motion echoes the reader's desire. It's a brilliant moment before the tide of (also artfully-crafted) plot carries on and we're soon privy to the conversation that we've paused so eagerly to listen in on.

The Magician's Assistant is the third Patchett novel I've read. It's my least favorite so far - though I shouldn't pass judgement till I've finished it - and I still find it lovely. Which means I highly recommend my first two forays: foremost, the stunning Bel Canto. Second, State of Wonder, from which I'm still mildly reeling. If mythopoeic moment isn't Patchett's consistent strength (and I'm by no means suggesting it should be), deft characterization and turn of beautifully-styled phrase is. Is it too much to say Patchett succeeds at what Mary Doria Russell attempts? Please don't hate me. And don't get me wrong: Russell wrote one of my all-time favorites, Children of God - not to be read before reading The Sparrow first, of course.

All to say, get ye to a bookstore (or better - a library!) and check out Bel Canto. And if you like that, try State of Wonder. Heck, throw The Sparrow in your bag, too. And while you're at it, pull Children of God down off the shelf, because you're not going to want to stop at the end of Russell's first sci-fi tale of (truly) space traveling Jesuit priests. There aren't space ships - or Jesuits, for that matter - in Patchett yet. But her language and characters are transporting enough. For the love of all things artful in the ever-morphing literary world, I'm grateful.