Title: “How Viet Thanh Nguyen Turns Fiction into Criticism”
Author: Jonathan Dee
Publisher: The New Yorker
Date: February 22, 2021
Form: Literary Criticism
Keywords: Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed, novel, realism
One of the key lessons about sentence-level clarity in Joseph M. Williams’s book Style is that you can usually make a sentence clearer by identifying the thing the sentence is about, and making that thing the sentence’s grammatical subject. The sentence before this one, for example, was primarily about the lesson (rather than the book it’s from, or the person applying it), so it makes sense for the subject to be “One of the key lessons” rather than “Joseph M. Williams’s book Style” (e.g., “Joseph M. Williams’s book Style includes a key lesson…”or “you” (e.g., “You can follow a key lesson from…”).
One type of sentence that falls foul of this principle is the type that begins with a phrase like “There are” or “There is.” Those kinds of sentences effectively don’t have a grammatical subject—it’s the word “there” that’s the subject of the verb, but “there” doesn’t actually signify anything concrete. Most of the time, then, when I come across a sentence like this in a piece I’m copyediting:
There are three key characteristics of this novel.
I’ll suggest changing it, in accordance with Williams, to something like
The novel has three key characteristics.
“There is” and its variants (“There are/was/were/will be/has been…”) are phrases that I often encourage authors to do a search for in their manuscripts. If it’s possible to revise these sentences so that they make the sentence’s subject (i.e., what it’s about) its subject (i.e., its grammatical subject), such a revision will usually improve clarity.
I stand by that principle, but in this post I want to highlight a passage that does exactly the opposite, and for good reason. It’s a paragraph from a review of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new novel The Committed in The New Yorker, written by Jonathan Dee. Dee’s claim in this passage is that The Committed contains elements one wouldn’t expect in a realist novel: Nguyen smuggles into a realist shell a host of ideas and techniques that would be more at home in other genres and forms, from critical theory to Hollywood movies. Here’s the paragraph:
This spirit of improvisation, of adopting the form or tone appropriate to the moment’s purpose rather than overvaluing systematicity, hovers over the entire novel, as it did over “The Sympathizer.” There’s a photograph in it—just one. There are typographical flourishes that might have come from Laurence Sterne. There is a concrete passage in which the words “thank you” and “fuck you” alternate until the page is full. One scene appears in the form of a play. The aforementioned ghosts come and go. A scene in which a gangster tortures his victim while listening to pop music is lifted straight from Quentin Tarantino (and hardly seems worth the effort).
Structurally, this paragraph consists of a claim, followed by a list of six pieces of evidence, which get a sentence each. That’s a lot of evidence in a short space—more evidence than can be carefully explained. But that’s OK, that’s the point: it’s the number of ideas, rather than any one of them in particular, that Dee is recording.
Three of those six ideas are introduced with “There is”–type phrases (“There’s,” “There are,” and “There is”). These sentences could all have been rewritten with a concrete grammatical subject, and if Dee’s aim was to analyze each one and show how it supports the novel’s larger project, perhaps they would have been. If the sentence “There’s a photograph in it—just one” was truly about the photograph, it might have started “A photograph on page X…”
But it’s not. The claim he’s making is that it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things why there’s a photograph in the novel, or why there are Tristram Shandy–esque typographical quirks. They make sense in the moment, but aren’t part of any overarching principle, other than the principle of pushing the boundaries of the realist novel. The vagueness of the “There is” construction reflects the fact that Dee’s subject here isn’t the photos or the typographical flourishes but rather the aggregate of the photos and the typographical flourishes and the novel’s other non-realist moments.
All of which aligns with my general approach to writing “rules,” like avoiding “There is” sentences. And this is really everyone’s approach, right? It’s worth understanding why the guidance exists. But the process of analyzing your writing to assess whether or not the rule is actually worth following in this particular case is, in the end, the more valuable thing.