Sunday Prose

If all the clocks and calendars vanished, children would still know when Sunday came. They would still feel that suck of dead air, that hollow vacuum created when time slips behind a curtain, when the minutes quit their ordering tick and ooze away, one by one. Colors are muted, a jellylike haze hovers and blurs the landscape. The phone doesn't ring, and the rest of the world hides and conspires to pretend that everyone's baking cookies or watching the game on TV. Then Monday arrives, and the comforting racket starts up all over again.

I have begun, as you can see, to read the Francine Prose novel Goldengrove. The wind is howling outside, and I spent the day's first waking hour hovering over The New York Times Book Review, admiring the work of David Barber, say, who, in his review of William Logan's new poetry collection, Strange Flesh, writes: "A hard-boiled formalist with a redoubtable aptitude for tersely fastidious diction and sinewy prosody whipped into fighting trim, he's a poet who wouldn't be caught dead trying to dazzle or beguile, recoiling from anything that might smack of lyrical extravagance or bardic pomp."

I mean: Look at that sentence.

Imagine the thought and the knowing that lives behind that sentence.

I digress.

I have begun to read Goldengrove, and though Michael Pakenham, for whom I wrote countless reviews for the Baltimore Sun, once cautioned me never to express an opinion about a book until I was actually finished reading it, I already know and can express two things: This Francine Prose paragraph about Sunday, quoted above, encapsulates a thought I've had since I had the capacity to formulate thoughts (such as they are). I was that child looking out a Sunday window—waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. Where is everyone?, I wanted to know. What are they doing? Why have I been left alone, to Sunday?

But then there is this second thought: Not counting the lines that I've italicized above (which are tight and telling and so quintessentially Prose-esque), there is unexpected space between the words in Goldengrove, and I'm not referring to the typesetting. Sentences that feel not yet fully slashed or tightened. I've been spoiled by reading Liz Rosenberg's Home Repair, I know, which is at once taut and affecting, chiseled and heart big. Spoiled by Aleksandar Hemon and David Barber. But still, reading Goldengrove, I want to scrunch up many of its passages—clump them together, break them apart, pound out some of the air.

True: I feel that way every single time I read something that I've written.

Also true: It may be that such airiness is precisely what Prose needs to tell her story. I am intrigued. I am reading on.....