Up and Down

Here are some sentences, from public information outlet wikipedia, about the Disney Channel Original Movie Read It and Weep:

After the prom, which was ocean-themed, Jamie invites everyone to eat at her parents' pizza parlor. When Lenny rushes into the kitchens to help cook the pizza, his jacket, which was covered in seaweed from the prom, accidentally lands on some of the pizzas, covering them in seaweed. They do not know this, but when the pizza is delivered to the customers, they discover it is delicious, and Jamie's father finally figures out the secret of how to save their business, ending the film on a happy note.

And here are some sentences from our friend Flannery O'Connor, who wrote the book that we're reading this (month-ish):

It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

I, for my part, really really like all seven of these sentences. But it's good to see how they do what they are doing differently so that we can start to think about what Flannery O'Connor is up to (we will spend less time thinking about what whoever wrote the wikipedia entry for Read It and Weep is up to, I am sorry to say).

The first two of the wikipedia entry's three long sentences have "which" clauses in them, which serve to fill us in on information withheld in the preceding account of the movie and which get us crucial information to understand the third sentence, where we get our happy ending. They barrel along. The only adjectives in them are "ocean-themed" and "delicious", which I think is delightful. They are like subway cars, these sentences, on their one level and on their track and getting the job done. Getting the job done, though, is not what we want out of short stories. We want something else, and we get it from the title story of Everything that Rises Must Converge.

There is something about the sentences from people like Flannery O'Connor that makes them different from the kind of popcorn sentences that we read through at prodigious clips per minute. What I think one of the pleasures of those sentences is -- what I think makes the sentences I quoted upstairs from Ms. O'Connor different from the sentences I quoted above from wikipedia -- is their sense of moving not just forward, but up and down. A little bit earlier, describing the character Julian's reaction to his mothers less comical than jaunty and pathetic hat, and the prospect of taking his mother out in public generally, Julian is described as "waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to start piercing him". A long simile, but a delightful one. O'Connor does her work so delightfully by moving not just forward but up and down, in so many delightful registers. Is that an obvious thing to note? I think that the way in which O'Connor manages to flit between registers while maintaining the momentum we see in the wikipedia passage is one of the things, but only one of the things, that makes her so worth our reading. Read up and down and read slower.

That is what I took, anyway, out of the magnificence of the sentences in this our first Flannery O'Connor story. There will be more!