Best prose stylists in English literature?

[kuronin]

I don't mind suggestions like Bertrand Russell, but I'm mainly interested in fiction writers.

[DisPater]

Vladimir Nabokov (considering the fact that his primary language was Russian)

[kuronin]

Thanks!

Yes, Joyce and Nabokov are among the more obvious choices. Anyone else?

[Alexander III]

Well, Wilde has beautiful prose.

[Lokasenna]

There are also some really good stylists who don't immediately leap to mind - I've always been rather taken with Mary Wollstonecraft. Here is her rather fantastic description of a waterfall:

"The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares - grasping at immortality - it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me - I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come."

From A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

[ktr]

Vladimir Nabokov (considering the fact that his primary language was Russian)

Nabokov spoke english practically from birth, not to undercut the achievement, but if it were a starting point for comparison one might be inclined to rank Conrad (who taught himself english ((on a boat)) at 20+) higher. Regardless, i actually think i agree with you.

my preferences would be something like (sorry, all obvious choices - except joyce, dislike him with a passion)

nabokov, fitzgerald, conrad, dickens, melville, mccarthy.

[sixsmith]

Though his creative vision frequently engendered cliche and gibberish, Joyce can make most everyone seem second-rate. This, for example, from Portrait:

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

I'm also a big fan of Bellow, who, for mine, can lay claim to one of the most singular and compelling styles of post-WWII novelists. Herzog, in particular, is a prose masterpiece. This from more or less at random*:

I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy - who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity - only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions? No freedom? Only impulses? And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke? A false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth? And so he goes on with his struggles. But this good is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it.

Conrad and Nabokov aren't half bad either.

*More or less because I've underlined it heavily and repeatedly. :biggrin5:

[minstrelbard]

I admire Nabokov's brilliant intellect and his endless imagination, but I find him a difficult writer to love. He takes his gifts and uses them to make games, to tease the reader, almost as though he enjoys proving himself more clever than his audience. I get the impression from his prose that he writes, primarily, to show off.

I prefer Conrad. His prose is wonderful and he uses it to a more noble purpose than Nabokov, I think. Conrad simply tells his stories as well and as truthfully as he can, with no trickery and no vanity - or, if he is guilty of vanity, he covers it well enough that I forgive him.

I think Kipling, at his best, is brilliant. He didn't revise enough, it seems to me, but he's electrifying just the same. My father used to read his Just So Stories to me when I was very young, and that was the first prose that I ever appreciated just for its sound. I still he my father's voice talking about "the great gray-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees ..."

Joyce is astonishing. Too bad he was so difficult. Still, I find myself reading some of his passages over and over. There's a description in Ulysses of a drowned man being brought into a boat: "Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun."

Anthony Burgess is also wonderful, though he may be a bit too influenced by Joyce.

T.C. Boyle is worth checking out, though I find him a bit annoying because he seems to despise his own characters; they're jokes to him, and it's as if he only writes to poke fun at them.

Martin Amis is good, too, but I think he follows Nabokov the way Burgess follows Joyce.

Funny that nobody has mentioned Hemingway yet. I guess the twentieth century's most influential stylist isn't ranked very highly these days.

[ktr]

I admire Nabokov's brilliant intellect and his endless imagination, but I find him a difficult writer to love. He takes his gifts and uses them to make games, to tease the reader, almost as though he enjoys proving himself more clever than his audience. I get the impression from his prose that he writes, primarily, to show off.

I think there is a lot to this, but i think that's also why so many people love him - i know for a fact it is why i admire him.

What i disagree with is that he did any teasing in a way to show off his superiority. I think it was a testament to the respect and admiration he had for readers. His novels double as games, and the right solutions offer incredible insight to the reader, not only into life, but into the mind of the author. As a writer, and a person - i think he is far more difficult and rewarding than nearly anyone (especially Joyce). He's like the robert frost of literature, so seemingly simple at times, so mystifying in totality.

Don't forget that he was a pimp-*** chess player who spent a great deal of time creating complexasfuk problems for people to figure out. The key there being, to figure out - not to stump.


Funny that nobody has mentioned Hemingway yet. I guess the twentieth century's most influential stylist isn't ranked very highly these days.

Yeah, but this is a thread about prose?

[Whifflingpin]

Gibbon

[Desolation]

James Joyce, definitely.

Second, for me (and I doubt anyone will agree) is Henry Miller.

I don't really understand the hype around Hemingway. I've tried reading The Sun Also Rises 3 times and have never made it past page 30. His prose seems incredibly mundane to me. Maybe that's part of the intrigue.

[stlukesguild]

Yes, Gibbon... Johnson, Robert Burton, Izaak Walton, Thomas De Quincey, Emerson, William James...

[Themistocles18]

Most consistently good prose stylist or best, in sustained bursts? I'd probably nominate Evelyn Waugh for the first and Hardy for the second (I'm trying to avoid a few obvious choices). I'm a pretty serious Christian and bits of Tess of D'urbervilles knock me off my feet. "Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love."
Or:

"You will think of us when you be his wife, Tess, and of how we told 'ee that we loved him, and how we tried not to hate you, and did not hate you, and could not hate you, because you were his choice, and we never hoped to be chose by him."
Or:

"But, might some say, where was Tess's guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order."


Of course, Hardy's tragic sense occasionally leads him to write wordy clunkers, but he's capable of almost unmatched sublimity.

[minstrelbard]

I don't really understand the hype around Hemingway. I've tried reading The Sun Also Rises 3 times and have never made it past page 30. His prose seems incredibly mundane to me. Maybe that's part of the intrigue.

I actually appreciate Hemingway more for his narrative technique than his style, and by that I mean how he structures scenes, how he uses flashbacks, and so on. He makes fairly complex technical challenges look deceptively simple. When I have a problem figuring something out in my own writing I sometimes look to Hemingway to see how my problems might be solved.

Personally, I find The Sun Also Rises the most boring of the books of his that I've read, and the only one I've never wanted to re-read. Try his short stories, or A Farewell To Arms, or (my favorite) For Whom The Bell Tolls.

[kelby_lake]

Nabokov, or maybe Fitzgerald.

[JBI]

Francis Bacon.

[Night_Lamp]

Most of his novels bore me to tears, but I greatly admire Henry James' style and craft. He doesn't use every big word he knows in every sentence; and the devices are used sparingly to a greater effect. The texts are smoothly written.

[dfloyd]

If you mean a writer who has a unique style, then I prefer Hemingway above all others. How anyone could find The Sun Also Rises boring is beyond my comprehension. I have read that novel 4 or 5 times, and find it intriguing. I have just gone through his major novels on cd, and they are a joy to listen to. I have just finished listening to around ten of his short stories, read by Stacy Keach who does a remarkable job. I read A Moveable Feast last month, but now I am going to listen to a new updated version with more of Hemingway's original writing thrown in. When first published, this book was edited by Mary Hemingway and others at Scribners. Now a new edition with a very good introduction by H's grandson is available. For the first time, in this Introduction, Hemingway's suicide is discussed and blamed upon his loss of memory and inability to write again caused by electric shock treatments at The Mayo clinic. The Health Care clinicians won another victory, as so aptly told by Ken Kesey. Someone posted here a month or so ago that H had cancer. Not true! He was killed by the Mayo Clininic.

Listening to the major works of Hemingway is my fourth time through hismajor works, and the clarity of his writing always amazes me. And his staging of flashbacks, as another poster said, are incredible.

[Emil Miller]

For the first time, in this Introduction, Hemingway's suicide is discussed and blamed upon his loss of memory and inability to write again caused by electric shock treatments at The Mayo clinic. The Health Care clinicians won another victory, as so aptly told by Ken Kesey. Someone posted here a month or so ago that H had cancer. Not true! He was killed by the Mayo Clininic.

Could you say why he was attending the Mayo Clinic?

[EddytheFlow]

Nabakov is a great recommendation, he's got wonderful prose style. Honestly, I haven't yet made it thru any Joyce, his language is far too, well, dull to me. One obvious choice for me is italo Calvino. I can't believe nobody mentioned him (okay, maybe because he isn't classified as an English author? Either way he deserves mention!), he's got enormous creative power and beautiful literary style, his prose is rich, well thought out, and original!

"Her friends' lips were red, their teeth white, and their tongues and gums were pink. Pink, too, were the tips of their breasts. Their eyes were aquamarine blue, cherry-black, hazel and maroon."
-Cosmicomics; Without Colors; Italo Calvino.
...
"The lawn mower attends with defeaning shudder to the tonsure; a light odor of fresh hay intoxicates the air; the leveled grass finds again a bristling infancy; but the bite of the blades reveals unevenness, mangy clearings, yellow patches."
-Mr. Palomar; The Infinite Lawn; Italo Calvino.

[stlukesguild]

Calvino isn't classified as an English writer because he doesn't write in English. If we are going into non-English writers it would seem you'd need to speak the language and be able to read the work in the original before you begin speaking of this or that writer as a brilliant prose stylist in Italian, German, French, etc...

[OrphanPip]

Gertrude Stein's prose always puts a smile on my face.

edit:

"Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one."

[ktr]

If you mean a writer who has a unique style, then I prefer Hemingway above all others. How anyone could find The Sun Also Rises boring is beyond my comprehension.

Well, that's not what we mean by prose style. All authors are unique - that's part of being human. It seems as if you're saying u prefer him for his uniqueness rather than his actual skill. Which is fine - regardless - his style does not lend itself to prose like awesomeness.

{edit}

[_Shannon_]

Nabokov, yes....maybe Fitzgerald (though coming back to him I find his novels to be a mess--there are some brilliant and beautiful blurbs--but the construction is a disaster.)

Lawrence kind of rocks. And Truman Capote.

I am looking at this as talking about the beauty of language at it's highest.

LOL! And I'll keep my mouth shut about Hemingway--I'm mad at him right now.

[minstrelbard]

Jazz music began as a relatively easy style to listen to, and even to play, but as it progressed, it grew more complex and difficult, until along came bebop and only virtuosos could play that music and it got pretty hard to listen to. So along came rock and roll - simple instrumentation, simple chord progressions and rhythms, and woo hoo! We're back to something we can all play and listen to.

Then rock got pretentious, with the arrival of highly skilled players such as Hendrix and Clapton, and with the development of progressive rock, only virtuosos could play it and relatively few liked listening to it. So along came punk rock, and woo hoo! We're back to what's easy and comprehensible.

Maybe a similar thing happened in literature. In the late nineteenth century, prose was getting pretty flowery, and with the late Henry James and others, it was maybe getting a bit unwieldy. And with Joyce's Ulysses in 1922, it got, for many people, unreadable. So along comes Hemingway in the 1920s and he writes simply, and woo hoo! Literature is easy again!

Hemingway was literature's punk rocker.

I'm just tossing that out there; I'm not prepared to defend it with actual arguments or anything. I'll just mostly use emoticons.

;)

[_Shannon_]

I'm not prepared to defend it with actual arguments or anything. I'll just mostly use emoticons.

;)

minstrelbard--I think you're my new favorite poster:cheers2:

[ktr]

minstrelbard--I think you're my new favorite poster:cheers2:

Agreed.

[Desolation]

Hemingway was literature's punk rocker.
Yeah, I can see James Joyce as Jimi Hendrix. The timing doesn't really add up, but Henry Miller is, of course, Keith Richards.

Hemingway can be Sid Vicious.

:thumbsup:

[The Comedian]

I like the writing style of Cather, Thoreau, Edward Abbey, John McPhee, Barry Lopez, and Rachel Carson.

[JCamilo]

People may not be able to play like Hendrix, but they can listen to Hendrix. Normal people can not write like Hemingway or Joyce, does not matter much.
The complexity of Joyce is exagerated, it is not his invention, Mallarme was as much obscure as him and literature always had some tendency towards obscure meanings. Neo Classics like Voltaire aimed simplicity, Poe or Tchekhov too. But then you have Borges with a language simple enough for a kid and the entire complexity of themes. Even James, stilized, but far from the word-play of Joyce or even Carroll (Coleridge was already complaning about simplification of prose writers while compared to poetry writers), and of course, Stevenson was simple as hell.

[JBI]

People may not be able to play like Hendrix, but they can listen to Hendrix. Normal people can not write like Hemingway or Joyce, does not matter much.
The complexity of Joyce is exagerated, it is not his invention, Mallarme was as much obscure as him and literature always had some tendency towards obscure meanings. Neo Classics like Voltaire aimed simplicity, Poe or Tchekhov too. But then you have Borges with a language simple enough for a kid and the entire complexity of themes. Even James, stilized, but far from the word-play of Joyce or even Carroll (Coleridge was already complaning about simplification of prose writers while compared to poetry writers), and of course, Stevenson was simple as hell.

The thing with Neo-Classicism though, generally in most parts of the world, it has a few great authors, then tends to drag for a long time, unable to evolve; it staggers, before being blown out in favor of often more radical, very new language.

I think that is apparent in French, when Romanticism essentially redefines a genre mastered over a century before its death. It happens again in England, but it also happens in, from what I understand, Chinese literature, as well as other traditions.


Generally neo-classicism, from my understanding, follows a movement that first commences as artistically brilliant - such as the rennaissance, and then somehow gets out of control, where the styllistic modes invented and developed become to decorated and fanciful. Then some people get it in their heads to "tie down" the language into "pure forms" - so you get strong writers for a while, with clean, precise, and sharp lines. This of course, gets boring quick. So Racine can develop, and French can be governed by the court of Louis XIV, or Charles II, but it doesn't develop -so by the time Voltaire comes by, the style becomes satirical - it folds upon itself, with similar shows in Swift.

The movements only managed to really move forward with, instead of a lasting refinement in style, a change in style to conventions of the exact opposite. Popular novels brought out the popular, often "trashy" forms as a counter to the limitations.

Also, Romantic poetry seems to have remade verse forms - the movement in the exact opposite direction of classicism and the 18th century in general.

This in turn becomes fanciful, and the cycle arguably respins itself in a circular point - with Romanticism being the head, then Victorianism the fanciful period, turned into Modernism, the re-defining of prose back into "purer" form, that is, "common spoken language" or Joyce's "Scrupulous meanness" or Hemmingway's "Iceberg." If we take it that way, Postmodernism is the downturn of fancy leading to the next big bang.


But that all of course is just wishful thinking. Only I find it interesting to note how neo-classical style can only stretch itself so far.

I think simplicity always runs the risk of getting boring very quickly; that's why artists coming away from it tend to obscure it. Movements that emphasize clarity and simplicity generally lead to movements of stagnation, and then about-faces.


As such, I don't know how to view someone like Swift, Defoe. or Fielding; somehow they seem dry and boring, as if they were just echoing a rather dry idea, despite the fact that in another context, they would be revered as the great stylists of their time.

Likewise, I find reading Dryden a bore, but in terms of style, he seems to have perfected the couplet form to an unmatched level; stylistically he is one of the greatest poets of English - how do we then understand that in today's context?

The whole of idea of simplicity and difficulty, of form and deviance from the form, gesture to a process of refinement, and redefinition outside of refinement. Joyce already wrote in the refined style that was the emergent force at the time; you see it in Dubliners, and in much of Portrait. But the form couldn't contain anymore, so, arguably, he sought to write the book of forms - Ulysses - in which he uses every single style of English he could think of in as many forms as he could work in. To me it reads like a Neo-Classical text more so than anything else - D. H. Lawrence would be his Romantic counterpart, as outlined by F. R. Leavis I believe.

So where does that leave this whole idea? ultimately, some degree of difficulty will emerge whether the tradition is of simplicity or difficulty. Neo-Classical writers had a knack for taking the simple, and writing the most ridiculous out of it. Marinism in Italy proves such an idea, where a penchant for gimmicks in stylized forms dominates even in a time when "classical refinement" and subject matter were thought essential.


I guess it is no surprise now that poets as well as prose-stylists are starting to push more toward the "comprehensible" - you see that in a lot of emergent authors. I wouldn't be surprised if the "simple" - the rehashing of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads introduction - is rerealized in the nearby future - as of now it looks like it's either that, or a descent into flowery, over-formed language, or else stagnation.

[IceM]

I'd sell my soul to write like Emerson.

I'd give it away to write like Thoreau,

[Evaril]

Jane Austen. Look how she employs abstract nouns and relations between ideas, among others.

But if you were to consider all languages, I would say Proust. A million times Proust.

[blazeofglory]

Literature is admired when it becomes obscure and the obscurer the style of the writer the greater is his status. James Joyce in Ulysses simply tried to challenge the scholars or professors of his days and he had somewhere expressed this bluntly. Derrida too was much in praise of his style of writing. Derrida is a difficult read and so is Joyce' Ulysses. I feel reading him is a waste of time. There are greater writers to choose from and running after a stylist is sheer stupidity when at the end of it all you come across is wordiness and nothing else. I like to read Tolstoy, Dickens, V> S> Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie more. Of course I got impressed by Joyce's style and repertoires of approaches to writing works of prose but more often than not the attempt I find is exasperating all the time. We can say great things in simple words, and running after a horde of critics is rubbish. English is today a global language and there are so many styles of writing in English in different countries. There great writers writing in English in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Shrilanka, Hong Kong and we must consider their styles also. Americanism or Englishness is not quite enough. Globalism must be the norm and I urge commenters here to refer to some other great writers in English originating in some non-English speaking countries. From Indian for instance come great writers in English, like Arundhoti Roy, Arvind Adiga and the like. We can quote examples from other countries too

[billl]

Blaze, in the U.S., Canada, Australia, N.Z., and the U.K., etc. there is a cultural sense of 'Ireland' that probably goes beyond what is usually experienced in other nations, even those where English is commonly spoken and sometimes a first-language. In the U.S., across the Atlantic from Ireland, we celebrate every year a holiday devoted to Ireland, and I know of a pub/bar that has an oral reading of Finnegan's Wake every year to celebrate the holiday in the city I used to live in. So Americans, Brits, Canadians, etc. may have a sort of "head-start" on Joyce, his vocabulary, and his style/vernacular. STILL, just as important, is the time-gap, that keeps growing between now and the time that Joyce wrote his often perplexing novels.

So, I think it is just fair to say that for a book to be a masterwork of English, it need not be beholden to modern usages, or trends. And I think you would probably agree with this, as you have spent an admirable time commenting on Joyce in other threads, and praising his obvious, yet sometimes elusive genius. However, you are most certainly right to point to the obvious (and more obvious with every day) fact that the modern world of English, and its use in many English-using countries deserves recognition for its skill and relevance, despite the relative paucity of built-up regard.

I am ashamed to admit that I have not read Roy or Adiga, but I imagine I will sometime. I have had the pleasure of reading some V.S. Naipaul, and I certainly understand your point.

More than anything, however, I wonder if you (a very interesting Litnetter who has commented on both Joyce and Dostoevsky, and quite often) have read much of Nabokov--a writer not so old as Joyce, and similarly respected among many, yet not a native-English-speaker?

[sixsmith]

Blaze,

With respect, I think your evaluation of Joyce is a little facile. I am the first to admit that his work can present a difficult and , it must be said, sometimes unrewarding experience. However, for the reader willing and able to handle some initial disorientation, (and here I leave Finnegan's Wake aside) there is much joy to be had not only in terms of prose, but with respect to humor and characterisation. That said, and as Bill points out, an appreciation of Joyce is undoubtedly aided by an intellectual climate in which his work is the subject of intense and continued study. In any case, your broader point about moving beyond the US and Europe is well made. Indeed, I can't believe I didn't mention Naipaul in my earlier post (though I suppose he is regarded in many quarters as a British novelist).

[JCamilo]

Joyce difficult is not born from challenge from scholars, that is silly to reduce his aesthetic ambition to a simple matter of showing off. At some point, when prose started to domain the scenario, some writers started to apply the directions and demands from poems to prose. Joyce was possible just the the one who did it best, all his works, albeit in prose, are written with rythim, the words picked because their sound, their combination. The difficult of FW is that we do not have to read it only, but listen to it. Other than that, his classification as elitist is far fetched, his books may be the glory of academic stabilishment, but his themes and even language were in many aspects mundane, there is some irony how he uses the mirror of Odissey to portrait a day and a commun man.

Anyways, route to JBI...
Yes, I think to be honest, that neo-classicism lacks better understanding from us. They have a imense merit to organize the world that Romanticism would explore. It is a great momment for very good translations (1001 Nights, Pope, Champman, etc) which are the ultimate source for much of XIX delight, even more with the end of latim.
As nature, I think Classicism (those who repeat the roman model, not themselves) have a tendecy to pastiche by its very nature. They seek a form, a spirit that is no longer theirs. This bring the irony to the most of them out. And yes, they wont develop much further: they already are in their area. The XVIII century then, also had the lack of faith to enrich their texts and they will always look old if compared with the recent writers.
I however would say that stagnation is the destiny of all dominant styles, eventually they fade away and some of the modern authors are quite neo-classics (Borges or Machado de Assis) and of course, they are also noted by their humor and language economy. I think Joyce Ulysses is one of those genre blendings texts, there is neo-classical references, but that accumulation of styles seems to me quite baroque. Proust seems to me more neo-classical but with modernist this is always hard to say. Perhaps the english counterpart could be Bernard Shaw or Fitzgerald...

[JBI]

Joyce difficult is not born from challenge from scholars, that is silly to reduce his aesthetic ambition to a simple matter of showing off. At some point, when prose started to domain the scenario, some writers started to apply the directions and demands from poems to prose. Joyce was possible just the the one who did it best, all his works, albeit in prose, are written with rythim, the words picked because their sound, their combination. The difficult of FW is that we do not have to read it only, but listen to it. Other than that, his classification as elitist is far fetched, his books may be the glory of academic stabilishment, but his themes and even language were in many aspects mundane, there is some irony how he uses the mirror of Odissey to portrait a day and a commun man.

Anyways, route to JBI...
Yes, I think to be honest, that neo-classicism lacks better understanding from us. They have a imense merit to organize the world that Romanticism would explore. It is a great momment for very good translations (1001 Nights, Pope, Champman, etc) which are the ultimate source for much of XIX delight, even more with the end of latim.
As nature, I think Classicism (those who repeat the roman model, not themselves) have a tendecy to pastiche by its very nature. They seek a form, a spirit that is no longer theirs. This bring the irony to the most of them out. And yes, they wont develop much further: they already are in their area. The XVIII century then, also had the lack of faith to enrich their texts and they will always look old if compared with the recent writers.
I however would say that stagnation is the destiny of all dominant styles, eventually they fade away and some of the modern authors are quite neo-classics (Borges or Machado de Assis) and of course, they are also noted by their humor and language economy. I think Joyce Ulysses is one of those genre blendings texts, there is neo-classical references, but that accumulation of styles seems to me quite baroque. Proust seems to me more neo-classical but with modernist this is always hard to say. Perhaps the english counterpart could be Bernard Shaw or Fitzgerald...

Oh, I just meant that the movements seem to be moving in a cyclical structure. Certainly Joyce is not a prime example of neo-classicism. I just wanted to point out that he has those elements firmly engraved in him, as do Eliot, Pound, and then Auden to an extent.

Real Neo-classical though really needs to turn from Restoration until the emergence of the novel - when couplets and letter writing were at their prime.

In truth, the art of writing letters seems the most outwardly neo-classical, given that it as good as sees the reemergence of Erasmian form - the so called abundant style. In that sense, the epistolary novels seem to be neo-classical to the core, in both style and diction.

What that implies (to me) is a rather unexperimental form of language, in a stylized form. The art is in how the form is manipulated - perfected - rather than in the form itself.


What Ulysses then seems to me, is the playing of all forms - it is neo-classical, in that it swallows all the models, and builds on all the models that come before it - but ultimately, the last passage proves the most innovative and famous - as does perhaps Nausicaa.

[Thom Holliday]

Hemingway. Give me the iceberg method over any flimsy, convoluted, passive description any day! Of course I'm only generalising here. There are many, many great writers who are massively descriptive, however Hemingway is the king of style for me.

He's definitely a writer's writer, and one I base most of my own writing on!

Other stylists I feel that are worth notable mention are Raymond Carver (matter of fact, simple, yet beauty steeped in ordinariness), Anton Chekhov (well, not technically an 'English' writer, but still a brilliant short story writer), Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Italo Calvino, John Cheever and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

[JCamilo]

I think the ciclical structure is in crisis now. Anyways, I agree that letters do sound like neo-classic (unless you consider Werther) mostly because they are philosophical in their nature. So it is the essays and works with prefaces. Neo-classic prose seems to be more close to short forms. Historical narratives like Gibbons seems to be a need for epical poetry, which no neo-classic was really able to produce with competence.
I think the thing about Joyce is that the Neo-classic part of the book, the obvious influence, was a mirror. There is obvious distortions, which was a bit part of intention, it was not exactly the imitations that the poets used to do with Horace, Pindar, etc.

[minstrelbard]

I would include Hemingway on the list of great stylists, but I wouldn't put him at the top. There two problems I have with his style: First, I like prose to sound good when read aloud, and his usually doesn't - he doesn't seem to have much sense of rhythm. Second, he sometimes deteriorates into self-parody. It's no wonder there are "bad Hemingway" contests. I remember a passage from the beginning of "Green Hills of Africa" that I can't quote exactly, but in my memory it went something like this: "We went up the hill and across and down into the valley and along the river and up again and then down and across and up and along and then down and through and across and along and up again and down and up and down ..."

Sheesh.

:)

[Ristshot]

Joyce has got to be up there. Easily one of the best descriptive writers. But he's already been discussed.

I'm surprised no one mentioned Orwell. Line after line, the man delivers. Knows how to get right to the point and making the most of your attention.

As far as wit goes, I like Vonnegut. His simple, crisp writing never gets dull and always knows how to put everything in perspective. Wilde, too, is easily one of the most quotable.

Hemingway's iceberg method is also something to consider. His minimalist take that "takes you to the bridge and lets you walk over it" is a bit demanding, but well worth it. Not one more word needs to be in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" or "Hills Like White Elephants" to portray the story. Also has some of the most memorable passages from what I've read.

I'm also a fan of Pynchon's, Salinger's, and Kerouac's styles too, though the others write better.

[PeterL]

I skimmed the whole thread and didn't find a definition of "prose stylist", so I don't think that the responses were anything beyond preferences in writers of prose, which isn't an especially enlightening piece of information.

I can understand why there were several responses of Nabokov, and he was a damned good writer. The same is true of Joyce; although clarity was not one of his stronfpoints, and clarity is of high valuse in prose. My preference would be for someone who used the style to convey information. Most writers don't do much of that, and many would question whether it was possible, but H. P. Lovecraft created atmosphere and assisted in characterizations through his style. There are a few others who have done the same, such as Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift, but most writers are lucky to get clarity.

[Alexander III]

I think Kerouac deserves mention, his prose is clear and there are pieces infused with the early jazz of his time, which he brings to the page in bright bursts of color.

[stlukesguild]

Borges postulated something of a cyclical nature to literature (or art in general) suggesting that dynamic new movements in art eventually erode into a sort of Mannerism (although Borges used the term "Baroque") and that all Mannered or "Baroque" art was by it very nature ironic... satirical... comic. Borges himself is surely not far removed from a writer like Swift or Sterne.

[ktr]

I think Kerouac deserves mention, his prose is clear and there are pieces infused with the early jazz of his time, which he brings to the page in bright bursts of color.

you're a genius.


Borges himself is surely not far removed from a writer like Swift or Sterne.

kind of funny you say that, as sterne did his best to distance himself from swift.

"I ... deny I have gone as far as Swift: he keeps a due distance from Rabelais; I keep a due distance from him."

he believed himself to be a successor in the style of rabelais, not really a swift-like contemprirarythingamjig

[mal4mac]

Most consistently good prose stylist or best, in sustained bursts? I'd probably nominate Evelyn Waugh for the first and Hardy for the second (I'm trying to avoid a few obvious choices). I'm a pretty serious Christian and bits of Tess of D'urbervilles knock me off my feet.

Sounds like you're now a pretty serious doubter.

"But, might some say, where was Tess's guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked."

Ouch! Did you manage to get up from the floor after that?

"...the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order."

Ouch! That does for Bertrand Russell as well.

Hardy is great.


Of course, Hardy's tragic sense occasionally leads him to write wordy clunkers, but he's capable of almost unmatched sublimity.

A good description.

I've read about five of his novels and not a bad one amongst them. Many more to go!

[Drkshadow03]

Stephen King, of course!

[Smooth Operator]

How about a Faulkner mention?

Hemingway is about structure, a sort of objective correlative. His prose is empty without context. Check out Faulkner's Absalom Absalom! for prose style. I think it has the longest sentence in all of literature. He approaches late-Joyce as far as style.

Literary non-fiction: Samuel Johnson.

[WICKES]

Evelyn Waugh wrote beautiful prose.

P G Wodehouse was a master of the English language as well. In fact Wodehouse almost created a language of his own (some have compared him to Shakespeare for his way with language- and they are not joking).

[minstrelbard]

Hemingway is about structure, a sort of objective correlative. His prose is empty without context.

I don't understand what this means. Can you clarify your point about Hemingway's style?


Check out Faulkner's Absalom Absalom! for prose style. I think it has the longest sentence in all of literature. He approaches late-Joyce as far as style.

I tried to read Absalom, Absalom about thirty years ago, but my way was blocked by an immense mountain range of words through which there appeared to be no pass. I've read scraps of Faulkner since, so, with a bit more training, I might try Absalom, Absalom again. I hope it's worth the effort - Faulkner doesn't make it easy.

[Astromaxis]

To me one of the best prose stylist is Margaret Atwood. As one of my friends stated and I agreed that her novels touch on the poetics of language as she is a poet as well but Woolf and Joyce she can extract meaning in language and present it to us. Be her works psychological or post-apocalyptic she does bleed great logic and feeling into them. A visceral and cerebral concoction of great zygotic transmissions.

[Smooth Operator]

minstrelbard, regarding the objective correlative read T S Eliot's Hamlet and His problems. Basically he says that meaning and emotion should be tacit or implicit in the text, not explicit.
And Absalom Absalom was a difficult book, but completely rewarding if you can get through it.

[WildWildEast]

James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner.

[Gregory Samsa]

I would say Nabokov. He could write wonderful and with humor. The style is characterized by word play, double entendres, anagrams and so on. Like Lionel Trilling said about Lolita: "we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents [...] we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting."

[breathtest]

kerouac any day of the week

[stlukesguild]

kerouac any day of the week

Accck!!:shocked::eek2:

[Emil Miller]

kerouac any day of the week

Accck!!:shocked::eek2:

Now, now StLukes don't be unkind about beatniks.

[miyako73]

amy tan

[Sebas. Melmoth]

Pater's essays of aesthetic criticism in The Renaissance are recognized as being the purplest of English prose.
http://www.amazon.com/Renaissance-Studies-Poetry-Oxford-Classics/dp/019283553X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279821667&sr=1-3

Wilde's prose very wonderful, although Pater thought it too close to actual speech; on the other hand, who in goddes' name ever spoke like Wilde?
Yeats testifies that Wilde spoke so perfectly that his extemporaneous speech could have been transcribed onto paper exactly as it stood without changes of any kind.

Somerset Maugham wrote a very nice English with an excellent vocabulary, nice syntax, and good punctuation.

Ditto Orwell who also turned out an essay on English composition which is much admired by university English professors.

Dreiser's prose has been much criticized (he grew up in a German-speaking household) but I admire his novels greatly: Sister Carrie, Jeannie Gerhardt, The Financier, and An American Tragedy.

Melville's tortured syntax is a marvel.

Conrad's syntax is also often difficult, but his masterpiece Heart of Darkness is a magnificent example of Flaubert's technique of le mot juste.

D. H. Lawrence was a nice English stylist.

Poe too wrote a very nice English with much aural appeal.

See:
http://www.amazon.com/N-O-V-E-L-101-The-Short-Course/lm/R2APMA9M3UCWVN/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_title_full

[miyako73]

Isn't prose supposed to be 'prosa,' meaning straight-forward?

[Sebas. Melmoth]

It's a point, Miyako-sama.

Yet since the later-19th Century many writers have experimented with stylized prose frequently termed 'prose-poetry'.

[miyako73]

this is my idea of a good prose -- not too poetic and not too bland.

from God of Small Things by Arundathi Roy

"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun."

[PeterL]

Isn't prose supposed to be 'prosa,' meaning straight-forward?

Yes, prose is supposed to be straigh forward prose. There are some bad writers who toss in purple and poetry, but that is bad prose. Good prose is straight-forward, clear, and concise.

[stlukesguild]

Yes, prose is supposed to be straigh forward prose. There are some bad writers who toss in purple and poetry, but that is bad prose. Good prose is straight-forward, clear, and concise.

Clear... to the point... written at an 8th grade... oh, hell, let's make it a 4th grade level so that anyone can understand it... doesn't challenge the reader in any way... not all that interesting... rather akin to a dictionary definition... that is what "good prose" SHOULD be? According to who? Or are you now the arbiter of what all prose is "supposed" to be like?

[JCamilo]

Funny enough... Clear, straight foward, concise... Like Flaubert, the guy who did it because Prose needed to be like poetry?

[Seasider]

In 65 replies from soi-disant lovers of literature on English prose stylists and only a fleeting and scarcely complimentary mention of George Orwell. "Politics and The English Language", "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier" are masterclasses of English prose and should be required reading for any aspiring writer. So many of the people held up for our admiration here are mannered...Kerouac for example or one trick ponies, Hemingway's a good example.

[profgood]

Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter, Conrad, Cormac McCarthy:

"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."
--Cormac McCarthy, *Blood Meridian*

And here is Conrad, from "Youth":
"I pulled back, made fast again to the jetty, and then went to sleep at last. I had faced the silence of the East. I had heard some of its languages. But when I opened my eyes again the silence was as complete as though it had never been broken. I was lying in a flood of light, and the sky had never looked so far, so high, before. I opened my eyes and lay without moving.
"And then I saw the men of the East—they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the shore, and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped through the green foliage, through the big leaves that hung shining and still like leaves forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise. And these were the men. I sat up suddenly. A wave of movement passed through the crowd from end to end, passed along the heads, swayed the bodies, ran along the jetty like a ripple on the water, like a breath of wind on a field—and all was still again. I see it now—the wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the wealth of green infinite and varied, the sea blue like the sea of a dream, the crowd of attentive faces, the blaze of vivid colour—the water reflecting it all, the curve of the shore, the jetty, the high-sterned outlandish craft floating still, and the three boats with tired men from the West sleeping unconscious of the land and the people and of the violence of sunshine. They slept thrown across the thwarts, curled on bottom-boards, in the careless attitudes of death. The head of the old skipper, leaning back in the stern of the long-boat, had fallen on his breast, and he looked as though he would never wake. Farther out old Mahon's face was upturned to the sky, with the long white beard spread out on his breast, as though he had been shot where he sat at the tiller; and a man, all in a heap in the bows of the boat, slept with both arms embracing the stem-head and with his cheek laid on the gunwale. The East looked at them without a sound.
"I have known its fascination since: I have seen the mysterious shores, the still water, the lands of brown nations, where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, pursues, overtakes so many of the conquering race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their knowledge, of their strength. But for me all the East is contained in that vision of my youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea—and I was young—and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that is left of it! Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour—of youth!... A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and—good-bye!—Night—Good-bye...!"

[stlukesguild]

*****

[Teetos]

Oscar Wilde

[islandclimber]

“Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business centre hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently - not fall, not jump - but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off - farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.”

- Vladimir Nabokov ~ Pale Fire

[islandclimber]

"I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with a wine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I'd often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide: loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined, the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables."

William Gass ~ The Tunnel

[astrum]

I like John Milton's prose writings.

[Darcy88]

They've already been mentioned but I have to say Oscar Wilde and Joseph Conrad are up there. I do believe though that Ralph Waldo Emerson's prose is the finest ever written in the english language. I get high off his essays.

[WICKES]

Evelyn Waugh's prose is breathtakingly beautiful.
P G Wodehouse is also wonderful and has even been compared to Shakespeare. Wodehouse more or less created his own form of English and there is nothing quite like it- as Stephen Fry put it, reading Wodehouse is like "bathing in sunlit perfection".

[WICKES]

In 65 replies from soi-disant lovers of literature on English prose stylists and only a fleeting and scarcely complimentary mention of George Orwell. "Politics and The English Language", "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier" are masterclasses of English prose and should be required reading for any aspiring writer. So many of the people held up for our admiration here are mannered...Kerouac for example or one trick ponies, Hemingway's a good example.

Agreed. Orwell is an absolute pleasure to read.

[ennison]

Looking at the quotes Profgood provided from McCarthy (a writer I enjoy) and Conrad (a writer I admire) I am struck again by what I sometimes feel about McCarthy - that he is flashy because he can be but Conrad integrates his style to the whole task and my admiration grows as I consider how difficult a task it is for most of us to learn another language as we get older and Conrad mastered a form of literary English that is really attractive. Mr Gass has a considerable dark humour.

[hannah_arendt]

I agree when it comes to McCarthy and Waught. I would mention also the name of Tolkien, R. Howard, U. LeGuin.

[maxphisher]

You're not really being very honest about Joyce. Yes, he did write to Jacques Benoist-Mechin that: "I have put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it keeps the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." However, to condense the entirety of Joyce's accomplishments, goals, and successes down to this one statement is very shortsighted. The sheer amount of research and connection-making that he performed in Ulysses is absolutely stunning, not to mention the ability with which he employed his various prose styles. Yes, a book like Ulysses demands a good bit of commitment from the reader, but the payoff that one receives after that work is well worth the effort.

Honestly, if clarity and concision were the only things that we need to look for in successful prose, then dictionaries and encyclopedias would be the most celebrated pieces of prose ever written. Whether we agree to like him or not, Joyce's ability to create incredibly vibrant and clear prose with such fluidity and variation is stunning. There's just no getting around it. The man was absolutely fearless when it came to writing.

[Hal]

Nabokov is pure style. He is like a tennis player that hits the ball between his legs just because he can.

[ennison]

Nabokov does THAT because he can? OUCH!

[PeterL]

There is no doubt in the matter. Jonathan Swift had the best prose style in the history of the English language, and he had a great sense of humor. Not only did he have style, but he had content; although some of the content is quite obscure now.

[mande2013]

May I suggest there's more to being a great novelist than merely being a great prose stylist. Prose is not poetry. This isn't to suggest the stylized aesthetics of someone like Nabokov or Woolf shouldn't be commended. If a writer can successfully do what those two do with the form, then great. But stylized prose should not necessarily be treated as a cornerstone of aesthetics where the novel is concerned. See Dostoevsky and Balzac for proof. Judging a novelist almost exclusively on how good a prose stylist he is strikes me as rather posh and bourgeois, sort of like if we were to judge a painter exclusively on his skills as a draughtsman. For poetry, sure, judge all you want based solely on their linguistic skills, but the novel is more of a "content"-oriented form in my humble opinion at least. If one were to call out Dostoevsky or Cervantes for not being a "great prose stylist", perhaps it's because they didn't try to be and merely had other concerns more related to "content", and there's nothing wrong that. That doesn't make them inferior artists, especially when they're working within what is essentially a story-telling medium. The novel, like 'classical' music is a mode of expression that more easily rewards "substance" whereas poetry and jazz more easily reward "style". Painting and filmmaking accommodate both in equal measure I think, as does play writing. My polemic is in no way intended as some anti-experimentalist backlash. I feel Faulkner is among the very best, but if you feel the 'flowery' linguistic style of Nabokov, Woolf, or I don't know, Flaubert is the necessary pinnacle of literary achievement and should therefore be propagated as prosaic gospel, then you probably don't understand the true essence of novel writing, just like someone who can't comprehend why Jean Renoir is superior to Kubrick or Kieslowski doesn't grasp the true essence of filmmaking. Linguistic perfectionism is more compatible with poetry writing than with prose writing in my opinion.

[Whosis]

John Steinbeck for the novel, Anton Chekhov for the short story.

[JanVanHogspeuw]

Judging a novelist almost exclusively on how good a prose stylist he is strikes me as rather posh and bourgeois, sort of like if we were to judge a painter exclusively on his skills as a draughtsman. For poetry, sure, judge all you want based solely on their linguistic skills, but the novel is more of a "content"-oriented form in my humble opinion at least. If one were to call out Dostoevsky or Cervantes for not being a "great prose stylist", perhaps it's because they didn't try to be and merely had other concerns more related to "content", and there's nothing wrong that. That doesn't make them inferior artists, especially when they're working within what is essentially a story-telling medium. The novel, like 'classical' music is a mode of expression that more easily rewards "substance" whereas poetry and jazz more easily reward "style". Painting and filmmaking accommodate both in equal measure I think, as does play writing. My polemic is in no way intended as some anti-experimentalist backlash. I feel Faulkner is among the very best, but if you feel the 'flowery' linguistic style of Nabokov, Woolf, or I don't know, Flaubert is the necessary pinnacle of literary achievement and should therefore be propagated as prosaic gospel, then you probably don't understand the true essence of novel writing, just like someone who can't comprehend why Jean Renoir is superior to Kubrick or Kieslowski doesn't grasp the true essence of filmmaking. Linguistic perfectionism is more compatible with poetry writing than with prose writing in my opinion.

I don't think anyone is saying that prose style is the exclusive way to judge the worth of a novel, but there's more to prose style than in your opposition of it to "content" or "substance". Take Nabokov for instance, whose style to me is a lot more than just 'flowery', but is often itself a meditation on perception and memory, and the relationship between language and life. I'll quote Pnin (considered one of his slighter works):

“What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself...never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because...the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind...but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.”

Sure it reads pretty, and some will probably read the content of this as being the banal point about having to subsist in a world in which this death happened, but to me the content is in the style; of the way in which Pnin having this painfully overwrought memory is described to us. 'Flowery' suggests it's all about how trippingly on the page something reads, but to me great prose style is more about how words are used to make the imagery more vivid and the thoughts and emotions resonate more deeply, and in this passage these seven words, "those gardens and snows in the background", just floor me.

[R.F. Schiller]

Nabokov is pure style. He is like a tennis player that hits the ball between his legs just because he can.

Lol, did you get this off Nick Mount's lecture on Youtube? He was my first-year English Professor at UofT, and he said the exact same quote.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I have been re-visiting the delicious Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee this and last week, some yummy prose style there.

[kev67]

I have been re-visiting the delicious Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee this and last week, some yummy prose style there.

I wondered about suggesting Laurie Lee myself, but I was not sure what the definition of prose was. Cider with Rosie seems too lyrical to be called prose, but then I have read it described as a prose poem. I am currently reading the follow up As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Laurie Lee is like a more lyrical George Orwell.

[WICKES]

If you are talking about style and nothing but style then Evelyn Waugh does it for me. His prose is pretty much perfect. When he was at Oxford he became involved with the Aesthetes and he retained a commitment to beauty above content throughout his writing career. When you read him you get the sense that he is refining and reworking his prose to make it ever more fine.

Aldous Huxley's first novel Crome Yellow is another masterpiece of style.

Oh, and PG Wodehouse. Wodehouse has a reputation as a light, comic novelist but, my god, the man was a genius with the English language. Someone once said that reading him is like swimming in Champagne- perfect description!

[prendrelemick]

......deleted

[Ichida Bros.]

Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote.

[nishant2397]

Jonathan Swift? Jonathan Swift!

[ajvenigalla]

Cormac McCarthy, Evelyn Waugh, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, Flannery O'Connor, Jonathan Swift, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, G. K. Chesterton, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Salman Rushdie, Edgar Allan Poe, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Lydia Davis, Alice Munro, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Tim O'Brien, Kazuo Ishiguro, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Harold Bloom, Ian McEwan, J. M. Coetzee

[prendrelemick]

I prefer a clear and simple style of prose, I find it more beautiful and satisfying than fanciful stuff - and rarer. So Hemingway and Isherwood good. Henry James bad.

[ennison]

Some folk like their grapes off the vine; some prefer them peeled stuffed and simmered in wine

[Emil Miller]

Ultimately this comes down to personal preference and is necessarily subjective. One would have to be very widely read to arrive at a satisfactory answer to the question, but, in any case, it wouldn't be definitive. However, we all have our preferences based on our reading experience and my preference is for le mot juste rather than the superfluous. Much of my reading has been in French and German at the expense of English so that my knowledge of English prose writing is somewhat limited and, to my mind, Emile Zola and Thomas Mann are equal to anything I have read in English but I would agree that Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene are masterly in their prose style, as are Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald whose compatriot Frank Norris is also a master prose stylist.

[CynicalPeace]

I concur with many of the previous suggestions, especially those regarding highly of Joyce (and even Hemingway- images from The Old Man and the Sea have been etched into my mind since Junior High.) Say what you will about Joyce, the controversy surrounding him on this forum is telling. I am astonished to read of no David Foster Wallace recommendations. DFW was the defining prose stylist of recent generations. He is THE GUY contemporary writers look to. An example from Forever Overhead:

"Around the deck of this old public pool on the western edge of Tucson is a Cyclone fence the color of pewter, decorated with a bright tangle of locked bicycles. Beyond this a hot black parking lot full of white lines and glittering cars. A dull field of dry grass and hard weeds, old dandelions’ downy heads exploding and snowing up in a rising wind. And past all this, reddened by a round slow September sun, are mountains, jagged, their tops’ sharp angles darkening into definition against a deep red tired light. Against the red their sharp connected tops form a spiked line, an EKG of the dying day.

The clouds are taking of color by the rim of the sky. The water is spangles of soft blue, five-o’clock warm, and the pool’s smell, like the other smell, connects with a chemical haze inside you, an interior dimness that bends light to its own ends, softens the difference between what leaves off and what begins"

[ajvenigalla]

^ thanks bro for the DFW recommendation,

I especially love his "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky," which is IMO one of the greatest literary criticisms ever

[Eupalinos]

To anyone interested in this subject I would strongly recommend seeking out 'A History of English Prose Rhythm' by George Saintsbury.

[ajvenigalla]

http://www.jstor.org/stable/441228

Something I just wanted to put out here