I just finished reading T.C.’s “Women,” a whopper of a novel about the four lovers of Frank Lloyd Wright, American genius architect. The piece, overall, is wonderful–by the time you’ve reached page 451, you really feel that you’ve come to know the enigmatic Wright fellow himself: his preference for a plain diet, his love of strenuous exercise, his vigor for lovemaking, his mother-complex, his almost insatiable and dependent need to have a woman in his life, how he always seemed to get what he wanted, his almost boy-like optimism about snow and roast chicken and swimming in a lake, and, most of all, his desire for love.
A riveting tale has never been T.C.’s issue–his stories are spun with the utmost care and the mastery of a truly gifted world-builder. But what really grabbed my attention in reading this novel–other than the creative backwards structure in which Wright and his four love affairs unfold in reverse chronology until we reach the heart of the man himself–is T.C.’s amazing language. And I’m not talking about just run-of-the-mill language that turns a pretty phrase. I’m talking the kind of language that desensitizes the world, makes us truly “see” the way any good photograph stops us in our tracks, helps us gaze upon an object as if for the very first time. The language invents, whirls, draws metaphors and similes I’ve never seen before–and the ultimate result? It makes me want to write, write, write, until my own language grows more precise, vivid, haunting.
Here are just a few of T.C’s language knock-outs that I’ve been savoring the last week:
“She was dressed all in white, in a clinging gown of silk, and her hair was loose on her shoulders. The lorgnette dangled from one hand, swaying gently back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch. In her other hand, balanced delicately, a teacup held in abeyance.”
“He was whistling, fiddling with the gearshift, the choke, feeling as light as the puffs of cloud running high overhead across the pale blue roof of the world.”
“Leora hesitated. Blinked her eyes. Blinked till Miriam thought she must have developed some sort of tic like the dropsical old man who used to sit all day at La Rotonde, contorting hs face and spitting in a hankerchief, and who was very likely dead by now, dead of blinking and quivering and spitting.”
“A series of images ran through her head–Thomas in diapers, the girls nattering over their dolls, their hair in ringlets and their dresses spread out round them like parachutes fallen to the earth, the glittering black eyes of a random infant in a perambulator, tiny immaculate fingers and toes, pink skin in a bubble bath–but none of them seemed to have anything to do with Frank.”
“It was early November now, the fields frost-burned, the windows aching with cold…”
“It was the cold, she told herself, the dreary unrelenting winter that gave everyone chilblains and ague, the same as in Paris, but at least there she could find refuge in a gallery, or a concert hall or one of the cafes or salons artisques.”
“….and a number of beaming young students who looked as if they were able to faint dead away with the anxiety of staring into a white face for what might have been the first time in their lives.”
“…as he bent to the last of the greeters, a white-haired ancient in samurai costume, he caught a single scintillating whiff of Japan on the breeze riding up off Yokohama Bay–an ineffable amalgam of broiled eel, incense and human effluent, and knew he was home at last.”
“The next thing she knew the place was deserted, the lanterns burned low, and the maid was there with her robe, murmuring something in her own language that sounded as lovely as the whisper of cherry blossoms in the breeze, and then she was in her room, on the futon, beneath the blankets, and the rain ran a thousand fingers across the roof.”
“We Japanese have a saying, Ame futte ji katamaru: the ground that is ruined upon hardens.”
“They made their way down the drive, crabwise, ice underfoot, the pale disk of the sun settling into the trees at their backs and the river opening out before them, and then they crossed the road and went down the narrow path on the other side, everything pristine and perfect under the sculpted banks of snow. She breathed in the scent of the pines, saw the way they stood ranged along the river like sentinels, rugged and alive and riving up their color to a monochromatic world…”
