I was still a teenager when Thomas Jefferson broke my heart. It happened in a single sentence; a permanent break. The moment came while I was reading Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson’s famous 1781 treatise. In it, the titian-haired founding father holds forth on everything from the varieties of apples cultivated in Virginia orchards to the annual expenses needed to run the general assembly.

Jefferson’s ravenous prose opens all of Virginia to our view, stretching back to prehistoric time.  Virginia’s mammoths—of which only skeletal evidence remains—are just as present for Jefferson as the juniper and black oak taking root outside his window. “Such is the economy of nature,” he observes in Query VI, “that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”

The sentence I’ve taken from Query XIV displays a melodic glitteriness that’s as damning as it is beautiful. Consider the four anapests which govern the central argument of the sentence, i.e., the part concerning “kidnies,” “skin,” and their respective “secretions.” Here, the sentence begins to gallop as Jefferson rolls out the (pseudo) scientific logic that underpins his view that Africans are inferior to whites. Watch how Jefferson grounds his philosophical contention in the body, framing it in terms of the seemingly irrefutable evidence offered “by the kidnies and…by the glands of the skin.”

Here is the poet-naturalist at work. The irresistible rhythm of Jefferson’s language—so like the rolling hills of Virginia—seduces the reader’s body into going along, into agreeing by a kind of accession, even before the mind registers the sinister implications of the words themselves. Black people are different, says Jefferson. The evidence is as plain as your sense of smell.

I’m an American woman of mixed African and European descent. My body confounds and infuriates me on a daily basis. If my feelings were a sentence, it would begin at the moment in early childhood when I stood before the full-length hall mirror and realized that the wide gap between my front teeth made me look like Goofy, the dimwitted cartoon dog. That sentence would continue to unfold through my life, gaining new nouns and predicates, darkening with syntactical complexity. In thirty-three years, I’ve dedicated whole clauses to my wobbly upper arms; the fact that my thighs meet, no matter how much weight I lose, has given rise to multiple interjections (Alas!)

I want to say that, like Jefferson’s Notes, my body-sentence would be a luminous compendium, swollen with rivers and mathematics, with taverns and milk-cows and huge slugs of amethyst hidden in the dirt. But in truth, I’ve lived a rather ugly grammar when it comes to body-image. It didn’t happen the way the media tells it. I didn’t read Tiger Beat magazine, then gaze in the mirror and cry because my body didn’t match up with Tiffany Amber Thiessen’s. I cared more about the teachers who lined us up on school picture day and, if someone’s hair was out of place, would gently swoop it to one side with a plastic comb that was, then, the student’s very own to keep. When that teacher came to me—my hair crescendoing from its pigtails, so that my head resembled a crazed halo of fuzz—she would just sigh and say, “I’m afraid to even touch this.”

In Jefferson’s writings, Virginia emerges as a site of astonishing beauty and promise. From its natural landscape and from its human machinery of magistrates, sheriffs, assemblies, and law-courts, Jefferson extrapolates the character of a new American republic. There are whole sections of his Notes that contain nothing but lists, spare catalogues of birds. The names of hamlets. If it were poetry, Jefferson’s Notes would be a sublime lyric. You can’t  read this document and not want to set up a farmstead near some “efficacious” spring. Maybe take walks at night through the timothy-grass. But what kind of body would be OK to walk in?

In the third grade, our school Christmas play was a retelling of the Nativity. Though I desperately wanted to play the Virgin Mary, I ended up as the Narrator. It was, arguably, a larger role, but it distanced me from the main action, and so I was disappointed. Still, I memorized my lines and those of everyone else in the play. When the little girl who’d been cast as Mary came down with the  flu, my teacher asked me to fill in. She gave me the box that contained Mary’s beautiful costume; a long white gown to wear over my uniform, and a textured blue cloth for a veil.

My happiness lasted exactly as long as it took for one of my classmates—a swan-limbed, needle-eyed brunette who modeled clothes in our local pennysaver—to pronounce it “ridiculous” that I’d been given the part. “Who ever heard of a black Mary?” she teased, and of course we were all too young to have known about the hundreds of Black Madonnas being venerated that very hour in Europe. Later—could it have been the same day?—another girl cornered me in the cloakroom. “K_____’s parents spent a lot of money on that costume,” she warned. “It’s very expensive. So you’d better not get it dirty. You’d better not ruin it.”

Each time I wore the costume, I made sure to place it back in its box, carefully folding the fabric according to the original creases. I imagined K_____’s parents  astonished at the pristine placement, wondering aloud if another child really had worn the costume. It was my body, you see, that was dangerous. It had the potential to make clean things dirty. The very idea of a “black Mary” was laughable because nothing good could reside in such a vessel. Not even my hair—“kinky” and “coarse,” as my mother’s own black hairdresser had called it—could be touched, at least not by white people. Didn’t I know that?

I come from a long line of Virginians. According to family lore, at least one ancestor was enslaved in the central part of the commonwealth. His name was Butler, but whether that was his owner’s surname, a nickname bestowed on him by his community, or something he chose for himself remains his forever secret. Looking through old photographs, it’s clear there were other secrets, too. I may have looked strange to my white classmates in elementary school, but nearly everyone in the Virginian branch of my family—the black branch—was fair-skinned.

As soon as European colonists brought African slaves to North America, the groups began to mix. Babies were born into a complicated new world of exploitation and exchange. Whether by marriage or by force, white people did touch us. Nobody knew this better than Jefferson himself, of course. Despite his own writings, his long relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, really did happen. He and Sally were alive together in Virginia. And so were my ancestors—perhaps not far from Albemarle County.

In college, I cut off all my hair and became a poet. After a lifetime of chemical relaxers, hot combs, and plastic curlers, I now could pass my hand over my scalp and feel nothing but sharp little pinpricks of growth. Too new, I thought, to describe as “straight” or “curly.” I craved the hard silence that rested between adjectives, like a palm on skin. It shocked me how hot the top of my head was; a kind of furnace.

It was then that I became a Virginian by education, choosing Mr. Jefferson’s University—UVA—for my own alma mater. I spent four whole and happy years there, studying literature in the classrooms he designed for the sons of wealthy planters. He didn’t build it for me. But mostly, this awareness was like knowing the earth’s orbiting the galaxy at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. I couldn’t metabolize the contradiction, the full miracle of what it meant (still means) for me to love that place.

Let me honor it now: the first African American student, Gregory Swanson, was admitted to UVA’s Law School in 1950; the first class of undergraduate women was admitted in 1970. Born in 1979, I was the first female member of my immediate family to have had a reasonable chance of going there. Because of those civil rights pioneers, and pretty much in spite of Jefferson, I have my own memories of the Blue Ridge. Of poplar, cloudberry, and dogwood.

One evening near the end of my time at UVA, a fellow poet invited me to visit his room on The Lawn, the grassy park where an elite few undergraduates spend their final year. I crossed under the arched columns separating the ten pavilions that line the court. The late sun was spinning a golden wheel of light behind Jefferson’s Rotunda when my friend suddenly stepped from his room to meet me. “I could tell it was you just by the sound of your shoes on the bricks,” he laughed. “Nobody else walks like you.”

I can’t hate a body that insists so vigorously on being present in the world. Without consulting me, my heels had struck their own sharp sentence on Jefferson’s ground: I am here. My joy in this doesn’t make up for the collective absence of all those whom he would have barred from his Lawn; their shadows still press into the plasterwork of the colonnade.  They stay with me, like Jefferson’s Notes.

But I still love the man who wrote that book, and my love is a sad and delighted thing. I put my hands on the bare fact of this, grasping it on either side and drawing it toward me like a beloved face. I am grateful, now, for difficulty. As a woman of color, descended from white and afro-Virginians, and as a proud alumna of his University, I take Jefferson’s sentence as balm and warning. I still want him to bless me, to include my family and me in his Book of Good Things. Over the years, I’ve grown into my body, claiming it like land.

Poet Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009). Her second book of poems, Hymn for the Black Terrific, will be released from Sarabande Books in August 2013. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisville and Co-editor of Transom, an independent on-line poetry journal.

“He magicked flowers onto paper, so that upon it they quivered, rejoiced, and smiled, swaying in their plantlike ways; his concern was the flesh of flowers, the spirit of the secret which dwells in the resistance a thing with special properties offers to understanding. “ — “Thoughts on Cezanne” by Robert Walser (translated into English by Christopher Middleton)

Would it not be more appropriate for me to say the sentence is more Christopher Middleton’s and less Robert Walser’s? I mean, Robert Walser did NOT write the English words that comprise the sentence, and yet he most certainly wrote the sentence. Or: in 1929 Robert Walser, living voluntarily in the Waldau Sanitorium in Switzerland, wrote not the sentence above but a different sentence in an antiquated form of German shorthand on a scrap of paper, and 20 years later (or so), German scholar Jochen Greven transcribed this shorthand version into a legible German one that the poet Christopher Middleton translated into English, which later appeared in an English-language edition of Robert Walser’s Selected Stories, published by FSG in 1982, of which a single copy (a first-edition hardcover) sold to some sucker who eventually sold it back to Powell’s made its strange way into my hands in the year of 2006—77 some years after Walser wrote the original sentence. Towel snap!

“At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets, some well known and some obscure, from one end of the city to the other—on the upper part of Webster Avenue, up in the upper Bronx, for example, which has a history as a dumping-out place for underworld figures who have been taken for a ride, and which I go to every now and then because I sometimes find a weed or a wildflower or a moss or a fern or a vine that is new to me growing along its edges or in the cracks in its pavements, and also because there are pleasant views of the Bronx River and of the Central and the New Haven railroad tracks on one side of it and pleasant views of Woodlawn Cemetery on the other side of it or on North Moore Street, down on the lower West Side of Manhattan, which used to be lined with spice warehouses and spice-grinding mills and still has enough of them left on it to make it the most aromatic street in the city (on ordinary days, it is so aromatic it is mildly and tantalizingly and elusively exciting; on windy days, particularly on warm, damp, windy days, it is so aromatic it is exhilarating) or on Birmingham Street, which is a tunnel-like alley that runs for one block alongside the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge and is used by bums of the kind that Bellevue psychiatrists call loner winos as a place to sit in comparative seclusion and drink and doze and by drug addicts and drug pushers as a place in which to come in contact with each other and by old-timers in the neighborhood as a shortcut between Henry Street and the streets to the south, or on Emmons Avenue, which is the principal street of Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, and along one side of which the party boats and charter boats and bait boats of the Sheepshead Bay fishing fleet tie up, or on Beach 116^th Street, which, although only two blocks long, is the principal street of Rockaway Park, in Queens, and from one end of which there is a stirring view of the ocean and from the other end of which there is a stirring view of Jamaica Bay, or on Bloomingdale Road, which is the principal street of a quiet old settlement of Negroes called Sandy Ground down in the rural part of Staten Island, the southernmost part of the city.” -Joseph Mitchell

This is the fourth sentence of “Street Life,” from the fragment of Joseph Mitchell’s unfinished memoir that appeared as an unannounced Valentine in the February 11/18 issue of The New Yorker.  It’s a perfectly typical Joe Mitchell utterance—unhurried, modestly insistent upon pace and detail, clear as glass despite the length, quietly lyric in its pedestrian cadence, hugely ambitious under its placid, ambling surface.

It starts as map, naming six locales in New York City’s five boroughs, starting “up” in the Bronx (Webster Avenue) and ending “down” on Staten Island (Bloomingdale Road).  Certain streets and buildings “haunt me,” Mitchell writes; to “wander aimlessly” in his chosen, cherished city is a special pleasure.  Later, the prose lifting to superlatives, Mitchell mentions his particular affection for “the ornamentation of the older buildings of the city.”  Some of these, he says, are “sacred objects.”  “I revere them,” he adds.  The sight of them “will lift my spirits for hours.”  Aimless wandering here acquires definition—taking shape as pilgrimage, a form of worship, circumambulation devout as any Buddhist’s.  If it often opens in malaise, in a “headache” or “some horrifying or unnerving or humiliating thought that came into my mind while I was lying awake in the middle of the night,” it characteristically closes in reverence, a sense of “living connection” (“step by step, out of my depression”).  He’s playing hooky, he says (“I lose my sense of responsibility”), but the play is for mortal stakes—Mitchell walks as Ishmael goes to sea.  It’s at last a secular commedia, and no accident that in the course of his wanderings Mitchell visits so many churches and attends so many services.

As readers we accompany this walker, accept his implicit invitation.  Let us go then—match your gait to mine and plan for all day.  I will go with you and be your guide.  The initial movements, as in Dante’s journey, are downward.  The Webster Avenue scene is Weegee turf, infernal, a “dumping-out place for underworld figures.”  Ahead are the addicts and pushers of Birmingham Street, where “loner winos” doze like Belacqua.  But on this earth upper worlds mix with lower, and along Webster Avenue our Virgil in Brooks Brothers suit and fedora, scribbling notes on New Yorker letterhead, sometimes encounters “a vine that is new to me,” as if even rubbed-out mobsters are deserving of decent burial.  Give lilies with full hands.  The North Moore Street spice warehouses on good days seem redolent of frankincense and myrrh, are “so aromatic it is exhilarating,” and Beach 116^th Street in Queens features at each end “a stirring view” of ocean or Jamaica Bay.  Emerge to see again the stars.  The “rural part of Staten Island,” given these uninsistent parallels, acquires echoes of Earthly Paradise.  Matilda strolling Bloomingdale Road, singing and gathering flowers, would hold little surprise.

At heart, “Street Life,” with its signature Joe Mitchell sentence as welcoming portal, the places linked by “or on” (“Webster Avenue . . . or on North Moore Street . . .or on Birmingham Street . . . or on Emmons Avenue . . . or on Beach 116^th Street . . . or on Bloomingdale Road”) as the people are linked by “and by” (“by bums . . . and by drug addicts and drug pushers . . . and by old-timers”), is the closest thing in print to a Mitchell Apologia Pro Vita Sua, an oblique account of what led The New Yorker’s star writer, author between 1933 and 1964 of forty-nine bylined pieces, to abruptly cease submitting new work after 1964, even as he continued for thirty-one years to report to his office, where editors were too respectful of the man or too awed by his work to inquire closely into what he was working on or when it might be ready; the best answer’s right here, in the revered “ornamentation” at the center of so many walks, since as it turns out Mitchell over the long years of his writerly silence was mostly visiting abandoned buildings and demolition sites, often with his spouse, the photographer Therese Jacobsen Mitchell, salvaging thousands of “sacred objects,” shards and fragments of the “carpentry or brickmasonry or stonemasonry or blacksmithery or tinsmithery or tile setting” so able to “lift my spirits” that they were worth year after year of shared gathering (what adventures husband and wife must have enjoyed together!), careful labeling (there’s what that typewriter was doing, along with writing “Street Life”), and packaging in jars, Brooks Brothers boxes, and Tiffany boxes best understood as reliquaries preserving a precious material archive complementary to the verbal record of the earlier articles and books, Joe and Therese actually putting into practice the goal set almost half a century earlier by James Agee—“If I could do it, I’d do no writing here.  It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement”—for the not dissimilar project he shared with Walker Evans, and in the process establishing Mitchell as at once arguably the greatest and without doubt the most unostentatious American modernist writer (look one last time at this large and lucid sentence, as plumb and solid as good brickwork), builder via word and artifact of his own New Jerusalem in Gotham’s “smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city.”

Robert Cochran is a teacher and writer living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He is the director of American Studies at the University of Arkansas.  

“And who could blame me, after that trip across the mountain floor on which there was no footprint, the stars flaming like oranges, those multimillion tons of exploding gas looking so mild and fresh in the dark of the sky; and altogether, that freshness, you know, that is like autumn freshness when you go out of the house in the morning and find the flowers have waked in the frost with piercing life?” —Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

You could really choose just about any sentence. Bellow’s warty, thronging, thrilling style is in place throughout Henderson the Rain King, and short of opening the book at random, I’ve chosen one that seems to describe and embody the joy of reading Bellow with its own zany, energetic figuration. Right out of the gate there’s a hokiness, a reflexive corniness—leave it to Bellow to leap from self-rebuke to the cosmos in the span of a single clause—but also a raw exhilaration. This sentence falls early in the book, as Eugene Henderson plods out into the African bush, in search of relief more than salvation. But relief from what?

Bellow’s characters always seem afflicted, pecked by their mistresses and wives and parents and children. Henderson is a brute, a buffoon, an egotist, and a lunatic: he can get away from anything except from himself. And that’s where this book, this sentence, and Bellow in general all seem to excel, in these drastic, cosmic, Whitmanesque expansions. (It’s weird that David Foster Wallace didn’t mention Bellow in his litany of “Great Male Narcissists,” since neither Mailer, Roth nor Updike were quite so narcissistic as SB; I’d argue that none were really as great either.)

The key to the sentence is in its metaphor: the stars that flame “like oranges.” Those oranges are so Bellow, fragrant and sensual, and again, faintly ridiculous. (Oranges? Really? The stars?) It’s that shuttlecock that passes so relentlessly between the metaphysical, the mystic and the mundane, that defines him, that makes him, for my money, so much more than a boring novelist of the self. This sentence is filled, of course, with tension: with “exploding” gas and “mild” sky; the exotica of the African prairie and the homeliness of domestic life (“you know”—how beautifully Bellow leans over and familiarizes the insanity, aligns our experience with that of a demented, at the very least manic-depressive, millionaire—“when you go out of the house in the morning”).

The word ‘fresh” appears three times, but only, I think, to set up the plunging blade of “piercing.” (Flowers! These are “flowers” that are so piercing.) To the extent that it turns on itself, setting up a lathe that can accept neither beauty nor isolation (special mention, too, to that mountain floor without a footprint: Bellow had never been to Africa when he wrote Henderson The Rain King, and its easy to see in these thrilling descriptions the egotistic congratulation of a writer inventing—my God—a very cradle of civilization from scratch), the writing punches through.

Beyond the consolations of beauty, and beyond the limits of the speaker’s own boundless self-regard, Bellow gives us something else, legitimately ecstatic. In his excellent, if at times weirdly reactionary, essay on Bellow in The Irresponsible Self, James Wood refers to reading him as “a special way of being alive.” This is true. Not even Walt Whitman, or James Joyce—none of Bellow’s forebearers, really—were quite so able to resolve this tension between the isolation and the amplitude of being; neither was quite so tickled by the very things that horrified him and vice versa. (Elsewhere, Henderson considers the notion of “reality” just so: “I love the old bitch just the way she is and I like to think I am always prepared for the very worst she has to show me. I am a true adorer of life, and if I can’t reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down.”) If Bellow’s approximate novelistic peers (I suppose he was fifteen years older than Updike and Roth; he had only eight years on Mailer) were cranially stranded, myopically obsessed with their own psychosexual stature, Bellow himself was chasing much bigger fish, working away at that intolerable, and infinite, tension between self and surround. I simply can’t get enough of him.

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Black Clock, and other publications. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“He ogled old women and pregnant women and women whose photographs were passing on the sides of buses and, this morning, a woman with close-cropped black hair and tear-stained cheeks, who wouldn’t be half bad if she’d just make an effort, clean up a little and invest in some decent clothes, some white tights and a short skirt maybe, knee boots and a cowboy hat and a cigarillo, say, and he pictured her kneeling on a crude Mexican sofa, in a little mud hut, daring him to take her, and soon they’d screwed their way into some sort of beanfield while some gaucho guys played soft guitars, although actually he’d better put the gaucho guys behind some trees or a rock wall so they wouldn’t get all hot and bothered from watching the screwing and swoop down and stab him and have their way with Miss Hacienda as he bled to death, and come to think of it, forget the gauchos altogether, he’d just put some soft guitars on the stereo in the hut and leave the door open, although actually what was a stereo doing in a Mexican hut?” —George Saunders, “The Barber’s Unhappiness”

This is how we meet the barber of George Saunders’s “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” in the second sentence of what may very well be my favorite story of all time.

Our knowledge of Mickey the barber is sparse when this wheeling little sucker punch of a sentence hits. Here’s what Saunders has told us already: From the title, we know the identity of our hero, his occupation and maybe his class. We know, too, that something’s foul in the state of his personal Denmark. In the one sentence that precedes this one, we’ve been told that “Mornings the barber left his stylists inside and sat out front of his shop, drinking coffee and ogling every woman in sight.” It’s an opening line that’s got its intimacies—the chumminess of “mornings,” the fact that we’re witnessing the barber stepping into a private moment apart from his plebs, the cop to his “ogling.” Still, we seem to be planted at a safe third-person distance from the barber, outside of his emotional splash zone.

And then we get the tsunami of this second sentence, and, with it, the collapse of the distance between the barber’s interior and exterior lives—a distance that turns out to be the story itself. As Saunders unspools the barber’s mental workings, each phrase a step deeper into the inferno, he gives us in one fantastic line the heart of the whole matter: the hurt that lies in the disconnect between his reality and his fantastic expectation, most especially his expectations for himself.

When Saunders starts this mightiest sentence, he places the barber into almost literal conversation with the terms of his world. In a tricky slide of perspectives, observation of a street scene and of the barber himself slips quietly into that same barber’s happy recasting of reality’s players. The membrane here between fact and perception is thin, and ripe for renegotiation. Even in the sentence’s opening phrase, where we’re still tethered to the external world, we’re seeing a world selectively edited for relevance.

And what is relevant to the barber is women. “Ogling,” it turns out, doesn’t even begin to cover it. Saunders tells us this stylistically as the barber merrily gathers women en masse with “ands,” stacking them up like cordwood. When Saunders zooms in on Miss Hacienda, we seem poised for a minute to go back to the broader scene beyond the storefront, to Mickey’s connection to the world around him. Saunders notes Miss Hacienda’s “tear-stained cheeks” and dangles the possibility of the barber making a foray into empathy. But as quickly as the barber brushes unaware against the feelings of someone else, he reshapes the situation in the image of his own lonely ego. Mickey’s problem here is not Miss Hacienda’s emotional distress but its compromising effect on an already compromised appearance, an issue he generously allows would be avoidable if she’d “just make an effort.”

And here’s the first heartbreaking and lovable thing about the barber’s particular brand of delusional dickery: at the same time he starts dreaming Miss Hacienda into the beanfield, he starts wishfully to re-dream himself. Even in these private interior thoughts, we see him propping himself up, painting himself in the best possible terms—the suggested wardrobe upgrade would be an investment! He can see beyond Miss Hacienda’s surface to her potential! It’s all so hopeful and so oblivious that we actually like him in his racism and judginess and predilection for western wear, even as the scene turns to the stuff of gas station pinup calendar. By the time the barber is handing Miss Hacienda a cigarillo from the great bordello prop table in the sky, we’re as enchanted by the barber’s reverie as he is.

In my favorite moment of the whole sentence, with perfect dream logic and as the sentence’s humor hits terminal velocity, “screwing” becomes a means of locomotion; the barber and Miss Hacienda discover that in their amorous embraces, they’ve “screwed their way into a beanfield.” Saunders paints them both as dreamtime flotsam, subjected to the teleporting powers of the barber’s desires. The scene is simultaneously in and out of focus, under the barber’s control and elusive at the same time. He’s only in “some sort of a beanfield;” the “crude Mexican sofa” has been hastily scribbled in as he focuses on conjuring up the main event.

And this is the second heartbreaking and lovable thing about the barber’s unraveling, the source of his pain and hilarity both: his deeply flawed internal logic sees no problems with the big picture but a million with the small. While Miss Hacienda is “daring him to take her,” he can’t resist tinkering with what’s happening in the background. What can be done about the inevitable arousal of the gaucho guys? Where is he going to plug in the damn stereo? Even when said gauchos and their potentially murderous impulses can be avoided through the barber’s cut and paste, he can’t seem to make things come out right. The possibility of the barber’s happiness expands accordion-like, only to contract again, deflated by his needling of his own rankled soul.

The barber’s problems lie not so much in that he lives in his delusions, but that even they can’t live up to his expectations. Saunders uses this sentence to write in miniature this issue that is the whole of the barber’s unhappiness—that space between the way he wishes things could be and the way they are, and the fragile ego lying just behind his monologue that keeps him from shoring up that gap. The more clauses Saunders piles on here, the more he inflates the barber’s delusions, the more exposed the barber becomes. He looks so small alongside his own rhetoric, waiting for a sympathetic read, that Saunders makes it impossible not to give it to him. Here’s the barber pushing back against his greatest vulnerability and showing it to us at once, hoping that we might see ourselves in it, too.

I first read this story in a class with Steve Almond, who talks about the idea of writing towards one’s shame. I’d be hard pressed to think of a better example. I thought of this story again when Karen Russell spoke about reading George Saunders to be reminded to write for pure joy. And I think of this story, this sentence, whenever I need to remember what the best writing is about: our lonely, longing, wasted, human hearts.

Will the barber find love? Will the stereo find its proverbial outlet? This is maybe the one element of the tale to come which Saunders’s sentence refuses to predict—well, that and driving class, and the wedding reception from hell, and the other absurd stages in which the barber’s interior life finds its real-world counterparts. When the sentence ends, we know only that the barber faces the steepest of uphill battles, and that we’ll be cheering for him all the way. While the threat of stabbing by gaucho may not hang in the balance, the not-so-small matter of his heart’s happiness does—and what could be of more fantastic importance?

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky’s writing has appeared in The Story Collider, Hunger Mountain, Hot Metal Bridge, and BookForum. She holds an MFA from The New School and is an assistant editor at Tin House.

Here we find ourselves all at sea just eight pages into Stanley Crawford’s 1972 novella, this long sentence playing out across the water to give an early inkling of the lulling bewilderment we’ll grow accustomed to in the voyage ahead. It’s narrated by Mrs Unguentine (always Mrs, just like the eponymous ship), who relates a few pages prior that her husband, man overboard Unguentine (never Mr) “had been steering all those years with no idea of what he was steering towards” and whose legacy of aimlessness she’s doing her part to maintain.

The plot of Unguentine is as deceptively simple as a myth: it is an account of the seafaring adventures—which double as the domestic adventures—of Mrs Unguentine and her husband, a man who “grew nauseous upon land” and so took his wife to sea, fitting out a barge with increasingly elaborate gardens and mechanical contrivances. In time, the pair become famous (and infamous) in port cities across the world, their home in turn a curiosity, a resort of ill-repute plowing international waters, a smuggler’s ship. The notoriety eventually dissipates, leaving their self-contained ecosystem a floating world unto itself; all the better as far as Mrs Unguentine is concerned—even if her good riddance has something wistful about it.

The deeper and lonelier waters the Unguentines then sail into are chronologically behind us when we arrive at this sentence, though they are ahead of us in our reading. Already seeping into her wistfulness is a weariness, an impatience to be done with it all, captured in Mrs Unguentine’s final, wrist-flicking clause: “so on, so forth.”

The beauty of this sentence rests in its rhythmic swaying along a wave destined for that final clause; its undulations, so like the billowing sea, rolling toward a dismissive wave of the hand. Read—or better, hum—it aloud to feel yourself sliding along its crests and troughs. Notice the sentence’s velocity: we are on the back of long swells, the great rhythm of the sea mirrored in the great rhythm Mrs Unguentine imagines her husband’s become a part of. Later, when trouble comes, the sentences grow shorter, sharper, and more precise. But now, we’re drifting along waters subsiding from a great tempest.

It’s pleasurable to drift on these languid swells knowing the storm has passed, but how long can we, just embarked on this voyage, tolerate this aimlessness? We need to get somewhere and so are justified in asking: where is this sentence taking us?

Into the unfathomable mind of Mrs Unguentine, who from the start reveals herself to be capable of growing tired of the “flat, three-dimensional manner once so much boasted of”—of course, that manner, dismal reality—and who seems possibly at sea in both literal and figurative senses. But not entirely: that “sometimes” at the start opens the hatch to a narrative lucidity that will ebb and flow through the course of the book.

There’s another layer, too, of Mrs Unguentine’s remark: the ancient mariner Unguentine, who flaunted his seamanship with bottle in hand, whose charts are later revealed to have been blank, and whose renowned garden grew to such prodigious heights as to make navigation impossible anyway, has by dint of long exposure assumed the character of the sea, going and coming, slipping into the depths only to reemerge at some unexpected point in the sea beyond. By a “gentle law of nature,” the Mrs says, and what choice do we have but to believe her, finding ourselves in a region landlubbers like us know so little about? By some gentle law he’s disappeared. (The irony of this gentleness is revealed later.) And we wait. Adrift in a sea unbounded by coastlines, we can do little else but wait. By some gentle law, he’ll reappear. Gradually, like a point on the horizon, the way things appear at sea, first spotted a long way off and approached slowly.

Crawford, on the contrary, doesn’t give his readers the benefit of that slow approach. Instead, already by this languorous sentence we’re sailing over murky depths that contain the canon of Western nautical literature: Adam and Eve are aboard The Mrs Unguentine; as are Noah, Ulysses, Ahab and Ishmael (the first line of the book is “The name is Mrs Unguentine.”), and as the book was written in the 70s, Gaia is a passenger as well.

Which must mean that our entire planet is contained in these eighty-eight words.

Stephen Sparks (@rs_sparks) is a buyer at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. He blogs at Invisible Stories and is an editor at Writers No One Reads. 

“The sun shone feebly through the overcast, like a lamp covered by a woman’s scarf in a shabby hotel room.” Charles McCarry, The Secret Lovers

Two pages into Charles McCarry’s 1977 novel The Secret Lovers, the reader comes across this sentence buried in the middle of a paragraph. A throwaway line, a felicitous toss-off. The simile made me sit up and ease into the book all at once. Sit up, because at first it seemed to be overreaching. What a fussy comparison, so picky, so conditional, with so many parts, so many qualifiers. A glow screened not just by any old thing, but a scarf, a woman’s scarf at that. Not just any lamp, but a hotel lamp. Not just any hotel, but a shabby one.

Ease in, because that simile had the control and casual flair of true style. It turned the outdoors of cloudy Berlin into the seedy indoors of illicit transaction. It conjured a baleful world of uncertainty and futile activity. It gave off a whiff of adultery, that pastime inextricably entwined with espionage and with the novel itself, from Tolstoy to Flaubert. After that line, I entrusted myself to McCarry, knowing I was in good hands.

Not that I mistrusted him to begin with. To hear of McCarry is to hear high praise. He comes highly recommended from every quarter. To read him is to be initiated into the work of the secret American master of the spy novel. Almost fitting, that the best of the clandestine genre should itself be known only to a few, and indeed it was as samizdat that McCarry’s work survived, commended with a handclasp and a kind word from friend to friend, until in 2004 Overlook Press began reprinting his entire oeuvre.

Of course there is that other McCarry, a chiaroscuro of rare facts that can nevertheless obscure the work. McCarry who quit Harvard for the Army. Who did ten years in the CIA, in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Biographer of Ralph Nader, ghostwriter to Alexander Haig, speechwriter for Henry Cabot Lodge. Savaged by Christopher Hampton in his only NYRB review. Anointed a prophet for The Better Angels, his 1979 novel about Arab terrorists hijacking jet planes as weapons during a millennial presidential election rigged by a candidate with ties to the energy business.

If anything, his previous book, probably his most famous, had sold me. 1974’s The Tears of Autumn, featuring his perennial CIA hero Paul Christopher, offered an alternate explanation of JFK’s assassination. Autumn begins much more authoritatively, wearing the starch of that crisp McCarry style on its sleeve: “Paul Christopher had been loved by two women who could not understand why he had stopped writing poetry.” Genre work in any medium too often earns praise for merely flouting convention, as if the measure of audacity were departure from formula and not the depth of one’s unflinching gaze into the human heart. Yet admittedly rare is the spy novel that mentions poetry as an opener, and rarer still the series that makes a lapsed literary calling its main character’s defining trait. Impeccably informed, astutely political, convincing in the smallest detail, McCarry’s novels deal not only in the news it is famously “difficult” to get from poems, but also that lack of what is found in them, which leads men to miserable deaths.

The Secret Lovers, too, flouts formula. Ultimately devastating, it is not particularly suspenseful. For much of the middle, the same six characters circle each other around Paris, meeting for meals, making progress reports during weekly rendezvous. The MacGuffin is a manuscript smuggled to the West, a novel by a brilliant Russian writer part Pasternak, part Solzhenitsyn. A great deal of hemming and hawing goes on about how, when, and with whom to publish it. In French? In English? In the original? Is publishing it a death sentence for the author, still in Russia?

That’s right, it’s a thriller about… publishing.

In McCarry’s novels, history is fate. The choices we make to survive leave us open to manipulation. His novels are also exemplary illustrations of geopolitics: eventually, their plots draw what seem at first disparate settings plausibly, unpredictably together, linked by a single thread of conspiracy.

Lovers, despite coming later than its predecessor Autumn, steps back in time to examine Christopher’s marriage to the first of the two women Autumn’s first sentence mentions. The Secret Lovers opens with a man fussing over a briefcase. The tone is factual, mechanical, competent but slightly dry. Until that line about the lamp. Which, if it sticks with you, manages to seem prescient. You could credit it with forecasting the novel’s themes: the slow erosion of trust, love’s defeat at the hands of shame, and what do you know? Adultery.

The winner of the 2010 John Dryden Translation prize, Clarion alum Edward Gauvin has received fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright program, the Centre National du Livre, and the American Literary Translators’ Association. His volume of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s selected stories, A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010) won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award and was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Subtropics, Conjunctions, World Literature Today, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and PEN America, among others. The contributing editor for Francophone comics at Words Without Borders, he translates comics for Top Shelf, Archaia, Lerner, and Self Made Hero. He writes a bimonthly column on the Francophone fantastic at Weird Fiction Review.

“Alcohol and cards Rabbit both associates with a depressing kind of sin, sin with bad breath, and he was further depressed by the political air of the place.” —John Updike, Rabbit, Run

We’re only a few pages from the beginning of John Updike’s justly celebrated Rabbit, Run. Rabbit has left his apartment after a spat with his tipsy, pregnant wife (they have another child, a boy, two years old) and doesn’t yet realize he isn’t going to return. He walks toward the Sunshine Athletic Association, a social club his former basketball coach frequents. Although soon he will seek refuge with this mentor, just now he passes up the opportunity to go inside: “Alcohol and cards Rabbit both associates with a depressing kind of sin, sin with bad breath, and he was further depressed by the political air of the place.”

This sentence is one of the miracles Updike routinely works in his fiction: he takes an abstraction or an inchoate state of mind, adds something vividly concrete to it, and makes you feel, taste, and see the intangible. I immediately know a lot about what sin means, and doesn’t, to this twenty-six-year-old ex-basketball star. I know his attitude toward right and wrong is probably more hygienic than genuinely moral. We’ve already been given hints that Rabbit is personally fastidious. Updike devotes a detailed sentence to Rabbit carefully hanging up his coat when he arrives home from work, and Rabbit sees his wife as “lumpy” and a lousy housekeeper. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that he would categorize sins in terms of body odor. Violating a sacrament, shaming a wife, and damaging the trust of a young son—these are mere misdeeds. Old age and becoming superfluous (no longer a basketball hero?) are the true, stinking offenses.

I always remember that, as a young man, Updike trained as a visual artist, and I sometimes study his novels and stories to try to glean how he makes description so intimately revealing, when in other books it often amounts to journalism or window-dressing. When I read Updike’s best work, I feel that I’ve been transported to some vividly lit place where everything stands out in sharp relief. This clarity of atmosphere is extremely pleasant, even when Updike’s subject matter is less so. There may be murk and obscurity in Rabbit’s mind, but there are none in the narrator’s translation of it. When Rabbit plays a pickup game with some kids at the start of the novel, his body stretching for the ball, “it feels like he’s reaching down through years to touch this tautness.” Could there be a more precise and tactile way to express the distance Rabbit feels from his youth or the joy he once possessed in it?

Don’t get me wrong—murk and obscurity are sometimes essential in fiction, the only way of expressing certain truths. But it’s nice to spend time in a universe where everything psychological or spiritual seems to have its material analogue, where, if it’s not too much to say, the code of life makes sense and can be broken. It’s appropriate that Updike was a believing Christian all his life. As his fictional worlds’ God, he makes even what is hidden perfectly legible.

Pamela Erens‘s novel The Understory was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her new novel, The Virgins, will be published by Tin House Books in August 2013.

It begins with desire.  “I want,” says William Howly, thinking of himself.  But he is not alone for long.  Desire needs its object, and here Will’s gaze falls upon Lilian Field, his friend Arden Quadberry’s possibly pregnant girlfriend.  He’s not covetous, though, so much as curious, and a little bit fatherly in the way he watches over Lilian now that Quadberry has headed off to the Naval Academy at Annapolis.

Will’s attitude, this wish to see Lilian pregnant, isn’t a bit what we’d expect from a first-semester freshman, and that surprise is part of the pleasure of the sentence.  When Will searches for a way to describe pregnancy, we’re reminded of his demographic.  Watermelon-like is language belonging to a young man of the rural south.  It’s a little bit crude, and certainly not flattering (though accurate in its suggestion of size and encumbrance).  But there’s also something of the flavor of summer in Hannah’s choice, something sweet and innocent, which seems poignant as our protagonists face the uncertainty of adulthood in the Vietnam War era.

Hannah doesn’t stop here. As Will continues to consider Lilian’s possible pregnancy he finds that there is no likeness like enough.  The thing must be admired for itself: “an amazing mother shape.”  This phrase manages to encompass all the shifting parameters of pregnancy, the varieties of shape and experience available to women.  And something else quite wonderful is at work in the words: Hannah acknowledges Lilian’s agency.  She isn’t looking like anything now, she is making herself into something new.  When she transforms, she will be the author of her own metamorphosis.

Had Hannah stopped at the comma, our sentence would have remained nothing more than a young man’s momentary figuring of pregnancy in the dude language of melon sizes.  If we only had the second half, its transcendent bent would have seemed baseless. Instead we watch Will’s mind travel from the prosaic to the epiphanic, a believable leap because isn’t this so often how our own minds work?  We try to say the thing we mean and we say it crudely, but if we keep our eye on Lilian a moment longer, what we see inspires a deeper sentiment.  By the end of Hannah’s sentence, Will’s focus has shifted away from himself.  He stands in awe, not even so much of Lilian herself, but of the way new life can enter into our warring world.

When the backdrop is Vietnam, we can’t be expecting a blithe conclusion.  But for all that, reading “Testimony,” I’m never disheartened.  Because the vigor of Hannah’s sentences suggests to me the same thing that this particular sentence does: there is hope for us, in the generative power of the human mind, as there is in that of the human body.  At last, and overwhelmingly, I find myself gazing in awe at this amazing sentence shape, pregnant with implication.

Kate Brittain holds an MFA from NYU and lives in Brooklyn with her dog, her bicycle, and never enough books.

“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.” —Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep 

Or so begins The Big Sleep, and with it, the third career of one Raymond Thornton Chandler, former accountant and oil exec. It was, instead, about seven years after he had been fired from Dabney Oil for being a drunk and a creep, 1939, with his wife not much of a wife to him anymore and thunderheads in all directions. He’d spent most of those seven years tramping up and down the Southern California coast with this woman eighteen years his senior and a typewriter not too much younger, teaching himself to write by stealing what he liked from the pages of Black Mask and the other pulps. The Big Sleep, his story of a knight in gaudy armor (a “powder-blue suit” with “socks with dark blue clocks on them”) told out of the side of a smartmouth’s mouth, was an S.O.S. Sort of. Anyway, it got him into luxury goods for a while.

Marlowe, the sentence’s speaker, is, as far as we can figure from the rest of the novel, in much the same straits as his creator, in need of several breaks, a wealthy benefactor, and maybe a nap. The charm of this first sentence is that, even so, he doesn’t seem desperate. He speaks only of coolness, of shadow—not yet noon, not yet bright, a “look” of rain far off that, in Los Angeles as nowhere else, means flooding is imminent. It’s been carefully calibrated to come off as cool—notice that “about”; notice the odd combination of exactitude and approximation in the sentence—it’s “mid-October” but not necessarily October 15; nearing or just having past eleven o’clock, we can’t say; the sun not shining but the day not necessarily dark; a rain that isn’t yet rain off in the distance somewhere. Or are we in the foothills? Our speaker does not say.

In fact, all that is asserted here is the voice, Philip Marlowe’s voice. We don’t know what time it is, what date, or even what the weather’s like and this guy’s supposed to be a detective? Whatever happened to “It was a dark and stormy night”? Later on in the novel Chandler will lose track of one of his own characters, so maybe we can chalk it up to too much tippling the stormy night before. But maybe this is rather the man’s character. Marlowe isn’t brighter (a “sun not shining”?) than anyone else in the book, but he’s “hard,” not possessed of a glass jaw, a bluffer, born and bred. An expert in the rope-a-dope, he’s suckered us into winding ourselves whiffing at a puff of smoke, a “look of . . . rain.” The “mystery” of The Big Sleep isn’t much of a mystery—Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple would’ve had the Sternwoods on the carpet in less than a chapter—but it keeps us going because what it isn’t is kind of the point.

See, Chandler wanted his readers to be able to solve the mystery right along with his detective—anything else was cheating. If you’re in the head of the detective or looking over his shoulder but you don’t get to see what he’s thinking until the last page, you’re violating some very obvious principles. His solution? Give us a detective as fuzzy on the facts as we are (as he was), and have him get wise right along with us. What do we know about the setting of this first scene in The Big Sleep? About as much as Marlowe. That’s okay, though, because what we know, we know about Marlowe, and he’s why we bother to read the rest of the book. The mystery he’s trying to solve, like the facts missing from his first sentence, most readers won’t even remember.

Gabriel Blackwell is the author of Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer and Critique of Pure Reason, a collection of fictions and essays. He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife, Jessica.