The skyscraper, for years suspended in a famous state of incompletion, was a beautiful disaster, famous because it was a disaster (glass kept falling from it) and disastrous because it was beautiful: the architect had had a vision.
“Gesturing,” by John Updike
Updike’s sentence is overspilling with style. It comes pouring out: the syntax that creates suspense, the repetition of “disaster,” in its different forms, the surprising conjoining of words, and the image itself, which I’m going to put into the category of style techniques.
To give you context: the short story is about a long marriage that has come to an end. Both the husband and wife have taken lovers, and they’ve agreed to separate. The husband moves to an apartment, and from his window, he can see the skyscraper.
The first effect of an image on a reader is to call for a particular kind of attentiveness, writes Catherine Brady, in Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction. The poet Robert Hass says the image isolates an aspect of reality and, at the same time, invokes an immense subterranean displacement. What he means by that is the image generates qualities and emotions not explicitly stated.
How does that happen? Because an image invites associations, and when connected to the story’s action and patterns of imagery, the writer creates the invisible subterranean. In “Gesturing,” the beautiful disaster of a building and the demise of a long marriage are in conversation. The couple once had a vision of a future together, echoing the architect’s vision of the skyscraper. And yet, now the couple’s vision is in ruins like the building outside the divorcee’s apartment window. The real beauty of this is that none of this is explicitly stated; the reader feels it.
The Making
This is a mid-branching sentence with the subject—skyscraper—separated from the linking verb—was.
What separates those two is an appositive. The appositive is very versatile, found in almost every kind of writing; it renames the antecedent or adds information, details, or texture.
If we remove the appositive, we have: The skyscraper was a beautiful disaster. When I first read this sentence, I fell in love with it right here. Right with the words “beautiful disaster.” It’s an oxymoron, a figure of speech in which seemingly contradictory words appear side by side. Also called a paradox, I am thrilled when I create one or encounter one because it scrambles our usual and often cliched binary way of thinking.
Now Updike does something interesting. He returns to the appositive and the word “famous” and elaborates: “famous because it was a disaster.”
Then he adds a little parenthetical “(glass kept falling from it)” (nice alliteration)
Then he jumps to the subject complement—a beautiful disaster—and elaborates. But he doesn’t use “disaster”; he uses “disastrous,” a technique called polyptoton, in which words derived from the same root are repeated. That little change, what I think of as déjà vu almost, keeps the repetition from being, well, repetitive. Just enough of a change to wake up and shake up the reader’s mind.
And the last two lines, “famous because it was a disaster and disastrous because it was beautiful” exemplify parallelism.
After that longish sentence, Updike uses a colon to keep the final sentence closely connected to the former one. And, smartly, he varies the rhythm and keeps the final sentence short: “the architect had had a vision.”
The word “vision” sends me right back to the beginning of the sentence,” and I see the skyscraper, with all its history now, in all its beautiful disastrous state.
Try it!
Let me know how it goes.
John Updike was my role model from early in my writing efforts. There were no writing classes available to me back then, no Internet, no computers even. But I was transfixed by the word magic he created. I learned by reading and osmosis. Updike's short stories, I thought then, were the epitome of sophistication. I'm more critical of his chauvinistic content nowadays but damn, still dazzled by how he says it.
Gosh, I love your blog. Nowhere else can I find someone who will ignite my summer imagination with a discussion of "mid-branching" sentences. It makes me think that I might enjoy teaching again. And then I remember that teaching's enjoyments are infrequently intellectual.