First, please put away any pitchforks. I’m not here to make value judgements and tell you your favorite author sucks. For context, I grew up reading mostly genre fiction (mostly YA, horror, and sci fi), then had a big nonfiction phase, and now read more literary fiction with the occasional genre book.
I see a common misunderstanding on this subreddit and other fiction subs that prose (which is basically the word choices and writing style in a novel — the “voice” of the author) is either basic and functional or it is flowery and stuffy. You *allegedly* can either have language that only conveys its direct meaning or you have 3 pages describing a vase which is a symbol for lost love or something. This is not true at all, and I suspect this belief a byproduct of American high school education. I used to believe it myself to an extent. Because even though I came around to “the classics” eventually, I absolutely hated high school literary analysis as a teenager.
But it isn’t true, prose can be both beautiful and straightforward. Or simple and still somehow excessive. Or none of those. It can be obtuse or haunting or terse. It can be rhythmic or sublime or coarse. Lots of options, because there are pretty much an infinite number of ways to say the same thing. More creative prose takes a little more conscious attention to read, but it can also add *a lot* to the main elements of the book (plot, characters, world, etc). There’s a big payoff sometimes.
To try to prove it, I’ll leave some examples in the comments that show a range. I’ll avoid authors that are very divisive on this subreddit, and stick in some genre fic with good prose as well as some literary fiction that generally wouldn’t be taught in high school for various reasons. I’ll also avoid older writing since that’s a worse jumping off point for most. Leave more examples in the comments if you like.
by TheCoziestGuava
2 Comments
**Tess Gunty – The Rabbit Hutch (2022) – Personal, dynamic, rhythmic, colorful**
>Now, in the Valley, certain sentiments boil and spit in her chest. What I love most about you, she wants to say, is your piano. Weren’t we safe until you got your shiny, pricey Bosendorfer involved? Yes, I wanted to touch your stubble, drink your coffee, wear your glasses. Yes, I wanted your mind and your words and your face and your sadness and your sensitivity and your power and your talent and your age and your imagination and your hair and your music, but ultimately —ultimately — I wanted to fuck your piano.
**Thomas Pynchon -The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) – Dense, frenetic, propelling**
>One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.
**Joy Williams – Harrow (2021) – Casual, winding, Americana, unsettling**
>Their deaths *would* matter. They *would* effect, what did he call it, a paradigm shift, the earth *would* heal as a result of their actions, balance and beauty *would* return.
>She decided she’d stay in the courtyard tonight, her legs were too tired to carry her to her room. She liked the courtyard, where fragments from the resort’s carefree past could still work their way up through the dirt to the surface —cribbage pegs, lanyards, confetti. You really couldn’t call it dirt anymore, least of all soil, because some worm had come through and changed its composition but the stuff was generally referred to as dirt, it being accepted that it was too much trouble to define it as something else.
**Octavia Butler – Wild Seed (1980) – Matter-of-fact, formal and removed, a tad archaic**
>She deliberately turned her attention to the new things he had given her to think about. Her age, for instance. He was right. She was about three hundred years old—something none of her people would have believed. And he had said something else—something that brought alive one of her oldest memories. There had been whispers when she was a girl that her father could not beget children, that she was the daughter not only of another man, but of a visiting stranger. She had asked her mother about this, and for the first and only time in her life, her mother had struck her. From then on, she had accepted the story as true. But she had never been able to learn anything about the stranger. She would not have cared—her mother’s husband claimed her as his daughter and he was a good man—but she had always wondered whether the stranger’s people were more like her.
**Italo Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979, translated from Italian) – Weird, unfurling, off-kilter in a way that purposefully draws attention to the narration itself**
>“I thought I was alone in the elevator,” Marina writes, again from New York. “Instead a form rises at my side: a youth with hair of arboreal extent had been crouched in a corner, wrapped in clothes of rough canvas. This is not a proper elevator so much as a freight elevator, a cage closed by a folding gate. At every floor a perspective of deserted rooms appears, faded walls with the mark of vanished furniture and uprooted pipes, a desert of moldy floors and ceilings. Using his red hands with their long wrists, the young man stops the elevator between two floors.”
**Larry McMurtry – Lonesome Dove (1985) – Old Western pastiche, meandering, dryly funny**
>When the weather was fair [Augustus] would go sit in the shade the sign cast and think of ways to improve it; in the two or three years since they had put it up he had thought of so many additions to the original simple declaration that practically the whole door was covered.
>At first he had started out spare and just put the name of the firm, “Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium,” but that caused controversy in itself. Call claimed nobody knew what an emporium was, including himself, and he still didn’t despite Augustus’s many long-winded attempts to explain it to him. All Call knew was they they didn’t run one, and he didn’t want one, whatever it was, and there was no way something like that could fit with a cattle company.
>However, Augustus had his way and “emporium” went on the sign. He mainly put it in because he wanted visitors to know there was at least one person in Lonesome Dove who knew how to spell important words.
>Next he put his name and Call’s, his first because he was two years older and felt seniority should be honored. Call didn’t care — his pride ran in other directions. Anyway, he soon came to dislike the sign so much that he would just as soon not have had his name on it at all.
>[This bit goes on for like 3 pages and I think it’s hilarious]
prose is prose. respect what you like.