“This dour presence and I gazed at each other through the bubbly old windows until I pointed at the porch door, where I met him, holding Desi and Wally by their collars as they clamored sniffing and snorting, Desi with his back up, theatrical growling.” The construction has an offhand quality, emphasized here in another of Bill’s Temple Stream sentences:

The reviewer called Just’s move “presumably a side effect of his laudable economy of style but one that creates grammatical ambiguities.” Just’s sentence: ‘She began to describe her studies, utterly fascinating.’”

It was strange as I wrote this post to stumble across, in the New York Times Book Review of March 27, a criticism of this same “syntactical short cut” in Ward Just’s new novel Rodin’s Debutante. That elaboration is perfectly clear, but twice the words and half the poetry of Bill’s sentence. This literally says leaves (the subject) were forlorn, but placed next to “road” the word implies the road was forlorn, too-achieving the effect of typing the entire scene: the effect of the leaves blowing down the empty road was forlorn. On the one hand, this is just hanging a strong adjective off the end: “He fell back, wounded” is an example. I may steal it, if I can, to enliven my own prose. On my first readings of Temple Stream, I don’t remember consciously noticing what really jumped out at me on my recent third reading, probably because not long ago I’d noticed he does it on his blog: an unusual sentence construction, sometimes technically ungrammatical, that’s wonderfully visual, poetic, and colloquial. Bill is a novelist, an award-winning short story writer, an essayist, the author of a popular how-to book, Writing Life Stories, the editor of a creative nonfiction anthology, and most recently a blogger. I’d been impressed with his review of my memoir for a prospective publisher, and hired him to line-edit a draft of it.

I read Bill Roorbach’s memoir Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey a couple times last summer.

Temple Stream by Bill Roorbach