What makes a good sentence good?

On Colin Barrett's Homesickness

There’s often a misconception that writers - novelists, short story writers, poets - are free-wheeling “creative types”. They’re characterised in the collective imagination as “artists” and represented in popular culture as such - kaftan-wearing, whimsical, floaty types. But more often than not writers are stern, obsessive control freaks with a pathological need to master and organise the world around them. When writing, they are, to use Zadie Smith’s analogy, building a house. It is one built to their precise specifications - the fit, design, taste and order is exactly, perfectly as they want it to be, literally down to the letter. To extend Smith’s analogy, if a finished novel or short story is a house, then one of the key building tools they use is the sentence. 

Writing good sentences is a writerly obsession. ‘“You can either write good sentences or you can't,” Zadie Smith said, unsurprisingly sternly, in her rules for writers; "Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences." wrote Sylvia Plath in her journal. ‘...I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence…’ Truman Capote is quoted as saying in The Writer’s Chapbook, the same place you can find this from Elizabeth Hardwick: “Here is a beautiful sentence, just right, inspired, a bit of prose I’ve memorized. It is by Pasternak. It goes: ‘The beginning of April surprised Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On the seventh, it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had yet accustomed to the novelty of spring.’ 

I dove down this sentence-shaped rabbit hole after I read Anhedonia, Here I Come, a short story midway through Colin Barrett’s wonderful new collection, Homesickness. The story follows Bobby, a frustrated and largely unsuccessful writer. At one point he goes to pick up weed whereupon he meets a man (only ever referred to as “the guy”) who gives Bobby “strenuous and sudsy fellatio” in the back of a Range Rover. It becomes clear afterwards, though, that what “the guy” would much rather give Bobby is his prose for critique. “What I need to know about,” the guy says to Bobby as he hands him a stack of paper and persuades him to provide feedback, “is the sentences. I just want to know if they are doing something interesting or not.”

Baarrett’s sentences in this collection are frequently so good, and so interesting, that I started to obsess over them. They made me turn over and over the question of what exactly they were doing, and how - what is it about them, exactly, that makes them so powerful? (I’m not alone, the legendary Anne Enright when reviewing Homesickness wrote: ‘In The Ways, the second story in Colin Barrett’s superb second collection, every sentence is as full and alive as a sentence can be, while managing to stay ordinary.’) My obsessing over these sentences brought to ming a section in James Wood’s book, How Fiction Works, where he writes about being “consumed” by a sentence of Virginia Woolf’s (‘The day waved yellow.’) and goes on to try and unpick what exactly it is about this sentence that makes it so compelling.

This post is my attempt to do the same about Barrett’s sentences, but hopefully to also tease out something wider about what writers actually mean when they bang on about writing ‘good sentences’. 

“The guy” in Anhedonia may be giving blowjobs in the back of a car in return for critique on his sentences, but we start to think of him as the more “real writer” than Bobby precisely because of his concern with this most fundamental bit of craft. Maybe this is why he’s giving the blowjobs; he’s that dedicated.

Either way, this story acts as a road sign for the reader: pay attention to the sentences, Barrett seems to be saying; demand of me that I write sentences which do something interesting, because they’re the proof. 

Take this one, from a story called The Silver Coast:

‘He was a bit older than Luke, fifteen or sixteen and emphatically pubescent, with scraggly porkchop sideburns and the bright red bulb of a cyst throbbing like a stalled car’s warning light on the side of his nose.’

The first bit of genius is ‘emphatically pubescent’. A person, rather than puberty, is normally emphatic. When we hear it we think of a person gesticulating wildly and pressing their agenda or argument on another person. By using it in front of ‘pubescent’, the period and biological impact of puberty is given the agency it rightfully demands; it’s anthropomorphised, turned into an almost-character in the story. 

As anyone who’s been through puberty knows, it can feel like an almost-monster has invaded your body and started doing all sorts of strange things. Spots and lumps sprout and emerge all over your body; what was once bare gets covered with hair; feelings and urges emerge that are at once yours and yours alone, and those that seem to belong to someone entirely unrecognisable. 

We then get a wonderful bit of specificity about what exactly this forceful monster has  done to poor Luke’s unsuspecting body. The ‘scraggly porkchop sideburns’: fleshy and evoke greasy meat, a slight sliminess which scream teenage acne and shine and new-found-fluids. I say ‘scream’ but of course Barrett has both invoked and avoided the classic teenage references of acne, oily, grease, spots, shine, and so on, that would take the sentence into the realms of humdrum. 

It’s the ‘bright red bulb of a cyst throbbing like a stalled car’s warning light’ and while ‘scraggly porkchop sideburns’ is fantastic, this is the next stroke of real genius. First, it’s a rare instance when five words is better than one: ‘bulbous’ would be the obvious thing to choose, but noses are just as constantly described as bulbous as pavements are pounded and handbags are rifled through. Plus, you say ‘bulbous nose’ and we think of an older, gut-heavy man who has drunk far too much for too long. With this particular choice of words we get the spectre of bulbous, and a flash of an older man that this person may be on his way to, but without the cliche and mismatched imagery that actually using it would result in. ‘Throbbing’ is sex. Teenage, porn-y, erotic fiction sex. And because we’re talking about his nose, and not anything to do with sex at all, it is rendered incredibly funny. 

And finally, breathlessly, we get ‘a stalled car’s warning light’. Just as a straightforward image, a car’s warning light brings long-suffering Luke’s enormous cyst vividly and excruciatingly to life. But ‘a stalled car’ is pubescent in itself; someone learning to drive, both literally and in the way of life. What is being a teenager if not constantly stalling the car? (What is adulthood, what is any stage of life, if not, etc, I hear you cry). 

The degree to which a sentence can ‘consume’ you - surely isn’t the marker of a ‘good’ sentence. For that there are probably some fairly obvious and universally-agreed attributes that we could list: Not bad - no pounding pavements, no rifling through bags, no ‘spotty, oily-skinned teenager’; renders a real, believable human being; renders a truth - emotional, human, or otherwise. But any sentence that is elevated beyond good must be like a meaty bone; something that can be chewed, and chewed over, almost endlessly. And not just as a standalone thing, but within the context of the particular bit of prose in which it sits. 

Any sentence within a story must act as a propulsion device: it has to push the reader from onto the next sentence and so through to the end of the story. And not just in the way of a springy stepping stone but as a connecting device. And in this way it must be not just a ‘good sentence’ as a standalone thing - it isn’t a bullet point - but it must be ‘a good sentence within the context of this story’. It has to tell us something about the way we should read the rest of the story; the way we should read this author and the particular set of characters they’re presenting us with; the tale they’re trying to tell. 

I think this is one thing that makes Barrett’s sentences so rich and consuming: they are at once a roadmap and a vehicle for navigating the terrain in which we find ourselves. Look at this one from The Alps:

‘A Hitachi Hiace with piebald panelling, singing suspension and a reg from the last millennium rolled into the car park of the Swinford Gaels football club late on a Friday evening.’

A Hitachi Hiace with piebald panelling’ - such an ironically high falutin’ description for a desperately, almost comically ordinary car. And there are many of those such cars that Barrett could have chosen, but what makes this is the two capital Hs - standing proudly tall and upright - and the sound of a double ‘H’ that you imagine being said in the sort of loud, breathy, bellow announcing its own arrival as if it were the Queen arriving to open Parliament. 

We are surrounded by the voice of a pub raconteur inviting us to rest our haunches on the nearest chair and listen-in. It sounds like a person gearing up to spin a great yarn at the pub, which is exactly what the rest of the story ends up being: a group of brothers entertaining each other in a pub; trying to be funnier than each other, making the small crowd around them lean in, listen, and laugh. 

And compare that sentence with the opening line of Whoever is there, come on through:

‘Eileen watched the bus pull into the depot and the passengers debark, stiff and groggy, into the crisp November air, their breaths flashing like handkerchiefs in front of their faces.’ 

Here, our protagonist is upfront in a way that we recognise from the opening to thousands of novels or short stories. A person doing a thing, plainly described. We’re with Eileen, but just next to her, at the exact distance of the close third person. Of course, we want, also, to know what Eileen is watching, and why. 

And what about that simile? ‘...[B]reaths flashing like handkerchiefs in front of their faces’. There’s an immediate surprise with ‘breaths’ - when was the last time you used that in the plural to mean the visible breath of lots of different people? I’m not sure I ever have. It sounds a little Joycean. It also, of course, tells us about the weather without actually telling us about the weather.

There’s a slightly hesitant, perhaps cautious tone to the sentence brought about by ‘watched’ and ‘stiff and groggy’. We know that we aren’t in the realms of a rambunctious raconteur anymore; we’ve tuned in to the tone, we know who we’re paying attention to and what to look out for as we move on. 

These sentences are good because they’re a feat of literary engineering. They don’t just bump the reader onward, but bridge the gap between the author, the reader and the world we’re inhabiting together.