Association Three: Back to Perfection

This week, it’s back to description.  It might be obvious by now that I just love description.  My favorite writing exercise (along with writing Wikipedia-style summaries of characters I invent) is to describe objects, places, or people, usually to no point or purpose.  To that end, I’ve been thinking of the best kind of description: the short kind.

You might instead call it the efficient kind.  I might love description, but I won’t tolerate entire paragraphs devoted to one person, one miserable car.  What gives the greatest shudder of pleasure when I read is that perfect one-liner.  

"Last time I saw a mouth like that, it had a hook in it."

David Foster Wallace might have figured this out better than any other writer I’ve encountered, with the possible exception of Hunter Thompson (Thompson being vicious where Wallace was pithy), may both of their souls rest in peace.  In particular, I refer to his landmark essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”  

Readers have raved about this essay in the two decades since it was published, but whatever.  It bears repeating.  I’m aware of the allegations that parts of this essay are embellished or fabricated, which really is more than a little troubling for purported non-fiction (particularly in the post-Million Little Pieces-debacle world).  But I’m talking about style here, not content.

I love this article.  If you haven't read it yet, go do it now.  Wallace's tale of a week on a luxury cruise liner is so funny—so dry and self-deprecating—but so tightly written, employing one of the broadest and most eclectic batteries of vocabulary.  He reviews every inanity and arc of emotion with the wonderment of an alien visitor and a precision that is just downright titillating for description junkies like myself.  

Artist's interpretation of reading the phrase "sepulchral crewmen" (via SB Nation)

But enough of that; there was a point I was trying to make.  For something not quite as perfect as what I mean, consider once more Monica Ferris’ fashionable gentleman: 

“His gray wool overcoat with the tie belt was a perfect match in color for the fedora.  Around his neck he wore a gold-colored, loosely-knit scarf so enormous it was practically a shawl.  With all this, plus his narrow trousers and thin black shoes, he looked like an illustration in an upscale magazine article entitled, ‘What the Fashionable Man Is Wearing.’”
(Blackwork, Chapter 1)

Here is 3 sentences, 61 words, describing the clothing of a man who will never reappear in the story.  I feel a little bad dragging this out again, but the vagueness stands in such opposition to Wallace’s sniper-like targeting.  As I mentioned in my previous post on this passage, Ferris could have cut the description down to:

“He wore narrow, tapered pants and a gold, loose-knit scarf around his neck, so enormous it was nearly a shawl.  With his gray woolen overcoat matching his fedora, he seemed to have sprung from the pages of Esquire.”

In his essay, Wallace does not waste anyone’s time.  The extent of his physical description of a fellow cruise-goer is this:

“Trudy is fifty-six and looks--and I mean this in the nicest possible way--rather like Jackie Gleason in drag”.

What Wallace does, in effect, is pinpoint a defining characteristic of an object.  This one detail receives enough attention, in the form of very apt description, that it allows the reader to extrapolate from that point.  Knowing exactly what Trudy looks like has little to no bearing on the narrative of Wallace’s cruise, so he mercifully refrains from forcing us through the minute details of Gleason in a wig and brassiere.  

Just picture it for a second.

If I was to use Wallace’s methods on Ferris’ gentleman, I could shorten the description even further:

“He was a man who had stepped out of a Brooks Brothers ad.”

Wallace does not limit his precision to descriptions of people.  His footnote to explain a single sumptuous dinner is thus:

“Not until Tuesday's Lobster Night at the 5* C.R. did I really empathetically understand the Roman phenomenon of the vomitorium.”*

*Never mind that an actual Roman vomitorium has nothing to do with excessive gluttony

What Wallace is doing once again is honing in on one facet of the object.  Like a synecdoche--using the part to refer to the whole--one apt starting point gives the reader just enough to understand the totality, for themselves.  And thus, the great power of narration: not telling the reader, but letting them feel.