Where the Great Sentences Are

This is the way I read the really good books. Really good books are the ones with really great sentences.

We read a lot of books, and we own a lot of books. I’m honestly not sure how many. Hundreds? Thousands?  Still, you can take one glance at our home library and know instantly which ones are the really good books with really great sentences based on the density of the sticky-flag mohawks.

The sticky-flags are not enough. I also need to underline the great sentences. Like so many other habits, I just can’t help myself.

Fortunately, I’m surrounded by people who seem to accept this quirk of mine. I remember overhearing a conversation between two of my students, one of whom was a recent addition to our class. The newcomer asked the classmate if she could borrow an eraser. “Look at this!” she said, horrified, “Someone wrote all over this book!”

The classmate glanced at the book and said ever-so-nonchalantly, “Oh, that’s just Mrs. Robinson. She does that to the really good ones. She just can’t help it.”

Lately I’ve been getting reacquainted with Elizabeth Berg. Oh, the things she does with sentences! They are humble and enchanting all at once. Elizabeth has written many novels, but what I like best are her collections of short stories. The one I’m reading now is called The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted. While I think she usually writes to an intended audience of females, this is the most obvious of the books of hers that I’ve ever read. 

Does that stop me from reading passages and pages and whole stories out loud to Russ? Of course not.

Some of the great sentences are well-crafted:

To acknowledge all that was in that remark would be to put a fist through the dam. (from "Rain")

and

Late Sunday morning, Rita awakens in her pitch-black Egyptian hotel room and opens the drapes. It is a child’s drawing of a day, the sky nearly navy, the clouds so puffy and well-defined, it seems they are there for the plucking. (from "Sin City")

and

Once, Laura put salt on a slug. This is what her stomach is doing now. But she manages, “Oh! What fun!” (from "Truth or Dare")

Other sentences pack an unexpected intensity. There you are, just cheerfully reading along, and POW!

We visited often at first, Dennis and I. All Michael’s friends did. But our visits fell off: the distance, the necessity of living our own lives, the way one becomes used to anything, even a good friend dying. (from "Rain")

Doesn’t that just make your soul ache? 

But it was this sentence that made me realize something I should have known this whole time:

She tried to push him down to the water’s edge, but the wheelchair wouldn’t go through the mud, so she went down to the pond and filled her hands with water and carried it back up to him and spilled it all over his legs, which by then had gotten so heartbreakingly thin. (from "Truth or Dare")

It’s long, and rambly, and a bit out of character for the tight poignant sentences Elizabeth uses to romance her readers. But it is so easy to visualize, despite the ordinary words arranged in a plain way, and it is so very real.

I read it and just knew.

I re-read it, just to be sure.

Yup, the feeling was still there:

That was not a fictional sentence from a fictional short story. She lived that moment, I’m almost certain of it.

Oh, I know there are a lot of great minds out there. Thick, juicy minds brimming with creativity. I'm just not convinced that imaginations could conjure that moment, could ever possibly dream it into existence, even if the existence was confined to pen and page. To write that moment, one has to give voice to familiar pain. And this pain--when you want so desperately to please someone you love so hugely, only to be thwarted by something so elemental-- this pain, shrouded in plainclothes, it had to come from experience. It had to.

They say that this is what authors do, weave moments from their own lives and experiences into the fabric of fictional existence, and I’ve never doubted it. Just sort of—distanced myself from it, I suppose—and allowed myself to believe that only the genesis of happy moments began in the memories of the author.

Which is childish, I know, but I’ve had an intense relationship with denial far longer than my rekindled romance with Elizabeth Berg. And because we are so intimately familiar, denial and I, I can tell you this secret:

Our mighty brains don’t let us believe more than we are ready to handle. Things that are too overwhelming get pushed out past the electrified fence of denial.

Up until this point, I don’t think I was ready to know Elizabeth Berg like this. And now, it seems, I am. I’m looking forward to going through and re-reading this collection, and her others, as well. This might be the edge of reincarnation-- I'll get to know her and fall in love with her all over again.

It won’t be as daunting a task as it could have been; I’ve already got all the best parts marked.