Regarding the Em Dash

Essays
January 4, 2018 | 29 6 min read

Punctuation, largely invisible and insignificant for normal people, as it should be, is a highly personal matter for writers.  Periods, commas, colons, semi-colons:  in their use or non-use and in their order and placement, can represent elaboration, conjecture, doubt, finality.  And in aggregate, over the course of a text, the rhythms of punctuation advance an author’s worldview and personality as surely as any plot or theme.  Patterns of punctuation usage are the writerly equivalent of an athlete’s go-to moves, or a singer’s peculiar timbre and range—those little dots and squiggles, in a sense, encode your voice.  Anthony Powell’s colon (pardon the inadvertent image) is as signature as Kyrie Irving’s crossover or Rihanna’s throaty cry.

For me, there is no punctuation mark as versatile and appealing as the em dash.  I love the em dash in a way that is difficult to explain, which is, probably, the motivation of this essay.  And my love for it is emphasized by the fact that many writers never, or rarely, use it—even disdain it.  It is not, so to speak, an essential punctuation mark, the same way commas or periods are essential.  You can get along without it and most people do.  I don’t remember being taught to use it in elementary, middle, or high school English classes; I’m not even sure I was aware of it then, and I have no clear recollection of when or why I began to rely on it, yet it has become an indispensable component of my writing.

It might be useful to include an official definition of the em.  From The Punctuation Guide:  “The em dash is perhaps the most versatile punctuation mark.  Depending on the context, the em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons—in each case to slightly different effect.”  The “slightly different” part is, to me, the em dash’s appeal summarized.  It is the doppelgänger of the punctuation world, a talented mimic impersonating other punctuation, but not exactly, leaving space to shade meaning.  This space allows different authors to use the em dash in different ways, and so the em dash can be especially revealing of an author’s style, even their character.

coverThe maestro of the em dash—as he was with many things (and apologies here, it is difficult not to annoyingly play, or seem to play, on a punctuation’s usage while writing about it)—was probably Vladimir Nabokov.  The locus of Nabokov’s attention is usually at least half trained on the fictional document he’s producing, so em dashes often serve as a kind of in-text footnote.  But in a more general sense, he simply employs them as part of his exemplary stylistic machinery, using them as counterweights against commas, as parenthetical ballast and rhetorical cog.  In Lolita, Nabokov is engaged in creating a calibrated ironic voice that half-emulates speech while retaining its smooth literary surface, and em dashes enable a more precise pacing of words and thoughts from the sentence to paragraph level.  A representative passage chosen completely at random:

I launched upon an “Histoire abregee de la poesie anglaise” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties—and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest.

I found a job—teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil.

Notice how the use of em dashes here, not strictly prescribed by any pressing grammatical need (the first could be justly replaced with a comma, the second eliminated), are used to create an internal structure that bridges paragraphs.  The long sentence at the end of the first paragraph closes with a short clause set off by an em dash, and the short sentence at the beginning of the next starts with a shorter clause also enclosed by the em.  The chief effect of this kind of bracketing is, I think, intuitive and rhythmical, adding to Humbert’s pompous purr, but there is a secondary effect of conjoining the ideas of transgression (his arrest) and seeming normalcy (finding a job), a pas de deux central to Lolita’s thematic heart.

A more contemporary user of the em dash is Donald Antrim.  Antrim’s em dash helps to create a faltering narration that expresses the pervasive emotional mood of his work, an almost paralytic anxiety.  Take this first sentence, from the story “Ever Since:”

Ever since his wife had left him—but she wasn’t his wife, was she? he’d only thought of her that way, had begun to think of her that way, since her abrupt departure, the year before, with Richard Bishop—Jonathan had taken up a new side of his personality and become the sort of lurking man who, say, at work or at a party, mainly hovers on the outskirts of other people’s conversations, leaning close but not too close…

The narrator has only just begun to have a thought about Jonathan’s wife before a new thought intrudes, needlessly clarifying who she is to him before we even know who he is.  “Needlessly” in story terms, though the larger narrative need is to exemplify, through halting syntax, Jonathan’s excruciatingly circumspect mental process.  This is, to a degree, Antrim’s own process, and we get doses of it even in more remote, comic narration, such as in the long beginning sentence—Antrim is a great lover of long beginning sentences—of “An Actor Prepares:”

Lee Strasberg, a founder of the Group Theatre and the great teacher of the American Method, famously advised his students never to “use”—for generating tears, etc., in a dramatic scene—personal/historical material less than seven years in the personal/historical past; otherwise, the Emotion Memory (the death of a loved one or some like event in the actor’s life that can, when evoked through recall and substitution, hurl open the floodgates, as they say, right on cue, night after night, even during a long run)—this material, being too close, as it were, might overwhelm the artist and compromise the total control required to act the part or, more to the point, act it well; might, in fact, destabilize the play; if, for instance, at the moment in a scene when it becomes necessary for Nina or Gertrude or Macduff to wipe away tears and get on with life; if, at that moment, it becomes impossible for a wailing performer to pull it together; if, in other words, the performer remains trapped in affect long after the character has moved on to dinner or the battlefield—when this happens, then you can be sure that delirious theatrical mayhem will follow.

Here, Antrim actually violates, as he sometimes does, a basic rule of parenthetical em dash usage, that you can only use one set per sentence.  The violation of this stricture is unsettling and makes it difficult to keep up with meaning.  Which, in a sentence and story about artistic chaos and loss of control, is, of course, the point.

Emily Dickinson is probably the most well-known user of the dash, to such an extent that “em” might justly be taken as short for “Emily.”  She habitually ended lines with em dashes, sometimes to an obvious effect, sometimes not.  Here is her most famous stanza:

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

What are the dashes doing here?  On the one hand, since they don’t serve any obvious syntactical function, they can be read simply as a stylistic tic.  But they do create a feeling of hesitation that serves the poetry.  Without them, this stanza is a nicely crafted, clever piece of thinking about the inevitability and dignity of death.  With them, we feel Dickinson’s hand hovering over the page, considering her subject.  This lends a poignancy to the poem, a sense of the artist thinking through her subject, considering the terms of her own death.  Her use of the em dash obliquely posits writing as an elaborative act, and in many of her poems the em transforms what would otherwise be somewhat inert, though great, common meter into something alive to itself, process-oriented.

My own favorite use of the em dash is for elaboration, similar to the way many writers use colons.  As a personal rule, I only use colons in a specific context:  that is, if what follows answers the question what?  Em dashes, I find useful for both narrowing and expanding a train of thought that might lose momentum in a new sentence—in this sense, they also stand in for the semicolon, but semicolons are best used (in my fuddled cosmology of punctuation) as dividing walls between two related but independent thoughts of approximate equal value (I wholly reject, by the way, that old bullshit about eliminating semicolons).

In truth, I probably overuse the em, find too much pleasure in asides, in explanation.  But I can’t do it, I cannot write terse little impregnable Tobias Wolffian sentences that stand on their own.  Though I can admire a page of these sentences—the calm presiding rationality, like civilized people queueing to exit the building in a fire drill—I am drawn instinctively to the dithering em, some contingency always butting up, worrying the previous sentence before it’s had a chance to end.  As Noreen Malone put it in a self-deprecating Slate article, “The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing.  It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence.”

This is true.  But is efficiency the point or purpose of writing?  It seems to me that novels, especially, are almost anti-efficiency devices.  Yes, we want to communicate clearly, but sometimes, just as crucially, we also want to clearly communicate the difficulty of communicating clearly.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

is a staff writer for The Millions and the author of two novels: The Grand Tour (Doubleday 2016) and The Hotel Neversink (2019 Tin House Books). His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, VICE, The Iowa Review, and many other places. His podcast, Fan’s Notes, is an ongoing discussion about books and basketball. Find him online at adamofallonprice.com and on Twitter at @AdamOPrice.

Essays

Namesakes

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July 1, 2016 | 2 7 min read
Anahi was a princess and political agitator who the Spaniards burned at the stake for being a witch. She accepted her fate honorably; instead of screaming out in pain, she prayed, asking God to save the Guayaki people.
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Why Are So Many Literary Writers Shifting into Genre?

Essays Notable Articles
September 2, 2011 | 95 7 min read

“I’m looking for a mystery,” my agent said.

That was the last thing I expected to hear. When I met David a little over two years ago, I was so struck with his Oxford-educated, sweater-vest-wearing persona that I’d wondered if my literary novel would be literary enough. But now he was not only looking for a mystery, but was also – I’ll spare you the precise language involved – highly dissatisfied with the ones coming across his desk.

“I could write a mystery,” I said.

It’s not just David and I. The good ship Literary Fiction has run aground and the survivors are frantically paddling toward the islands of genre. Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but there does seem to be a definite trend of literary/mainstream writers turning to romance, thrillers, fantasy, mystery, and YA. Justin Cronin has produced the vampire epic The Passage. Tom Perrotta is offering The Leftovers, a tale of a futuristic Rapturesque apocalypse. And MacArthur-certified genius Colson Whitehead is writing about zombies. It’s enough to make my historical mystery about Jack the Ripper look downright pedestrian.

What’s going on? Is it a mass sellout, a belated and half-hearted attempt by writers to chase the market? Are they being pushed into genre by their agents and publishers? Are the literary novelists simply ready for a change, perhaps because even the most exalted among them have a miniscule readership compared to genre superstars? Or are two disparate worlds finally merging?

Here’s my take on what’s happening – which, granted, is worth exactly as much as you’re currently paying for it.

Once upon a time, genre was treated as almost a different industry from literary fiction, ignored by critics, sneered at by literary writers, relegated by publishers to imprint ghettos. But the dirty little and not-particularly-well-kept secret was that, thanks to the loyalty of their fans and the relatively rapid production of their authors, these genre books were the ones who kept the entire operation in business. All those snobbish literary writers had better have hoped like hell that their publishers had enough genre moneymakers in house to finance the advance for their latest beautifully rendered and experimentally structured observation of upper class angst.

But while genre authors were always the workhorses of publishing, lately they’ve broken out as stars and are belatedly receiving real recognition. In 2010, there were 358 fantasy titles on the best seller list, more than double the number in 2006. Publishers, always the last to recognize a literary trend, are pursuing top genre writers who, for the first time, have not only bigger paychecks but genuine clout.

And as one part of the industry rises, another falls. Magazines and newspapers are dying faster than fruit flies, to the dismay of many writers who counted on nonfiction to supplement their incomes. Advances are lower than they used to be, multi-book deals are becoming as quaint as hoop skirts, and, thanks partially to the rise of ebooks, the author payout per book sale is shrinking. A lot of writers actually support themselves through other jobs, such as teaching, and they may be prepared to wait out the change and hope that literary fiction returns. But those of us who write full-time are scrambling to find additional streams of income just to survive.

Scott Spencer, who has published ten novels dating back to the mid-1970s, was once able to live exclusively on the income from his books and “make this kind of old-fashioned writer’s life work.” But, noting the inherent contradiction between the ups and downs and further downs of literary writing and his need to make a living, he is publishing Breed – “a horror novel that has no real place among the ten that have come before it” – under the name Chase Novak. He’s taken it to a new mystery imprint, Mulholland Books at Little Brown, and says the genre jump was entirely his idea. “In fact,” he says, “my agent was surprised when I sent her the first forty pages.”

“Creative people switch genres all the time,” says Miriam Parker, Spencer’s publicist at Mulholland, who started at Grand Central and has worked with a broad spectrum of writers. Her fellow publicist Crystal Patriarche agrees. “Writers just want to write,” she says, noting that quite a few members of her primarily female client list have shifted genres during the time she’s worked with them, often combining mainstream with romance or mystery. “They evolve through stages throughout their careers.”

Still, it’s hard to think of very many writers – save possibly Stephen King – who have moved from genre to literary. The floor seems to slope the other way, and Patriarche concedes that sometimes the difference isn’t so much in what the author has written as in how the publisher opts to describe it. “I’ve seen literary books blurbed as something like ‘the thinking woman’s beach read,’” she says. “And that’s a sign that the publisher is trying to appeal to consumers who are more mainstream. In this aspect the change is more industry-driven than author-driven.”

Ergo, the case of Dawn Tripp who clicked onto her Amazon page shortly after the publication of her novel Game of Secrets (Random House) only to learn that she’d written a thriller. “One reviewer called it ‘a page turning thriller,’ and another called it ‘a literary thriller told through a poet’s eye,’” says Tripp. “The tag ‘thriller’ surprised me. Although Game of Secrets has a mystery at the heart of it – an unsolved murder played out through a Scrabble game – it does not unfold in a linear way.”

Caroline Leavitt, whose Pictures of You has also been described as a literary thriller, started her career with a different publisher years ago. “My first two literary books were reviewed great but didn’t sell,” she recalls, “and then my publisher called me in and said ‘It’s time to go commercial with your third, so let’s all sit down and hammer out a plot.’” Leavitt followed the outline, “but with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach” and, predictably, the resultant book flopped on both the critical and commercial level. When her publisher didn’t think Pictures of You was commercial enough, she went to Algonquin, a place she describes as an Edenic paradise for writers, and now, after eight books, she has a New York Times best seller.

Even though Leavitt claims she isn’t entirely sure what a literary thriller is, she’ll take it. “A good book is a good book,” she says. “I’ve decided that genre is strictly a marketing tool.” Tripp is equally sanguine. “I don’t balk at the term ‘thriller,’” she says. “I don’t think in terms of genre. I write what moves me.”

While some writers find the genre shift has been almost sprung upon them, others are happy to produce books which are consciously designed to be commercial. Once they get the hang of genre – which can be a steep learning curve as they give themselves a crash course in learning how to plot – they end up having fun with the idea.

“There’s something about writing as Chase Novak that allows me to tell this story in a style that is leaner and more in service to propulsive story,” says Spencer. He took care to choose a style that innately appealed to him as a reader; although he’d never liked fantasy or adventure, “the possibility of horror rearing its head at any moment is something that I give a great deal of thought to while driving my car, taking a walk, or trying to fall asleep. My mother recently said to me ‘When you were little, you were always convinced that Dad and I wanted to kill you.’”

The key to a successful transition is that the writer chooses a genre they enjoy reading, with which he instinctively clicks. I’ve had a blast writing my historical mystery. Not only did the extensive research into Victorian England bring me back to my happy days in journalism, but I bought a bunch of mysteries and read them like a student, breaking apart the plots, analyzing movements through geographic space and time, using note cards to track multiple characters across a layered and detailed literary landscape. Only someone who’s never tried to do this would declare it easier than literary writing, or the books which result less worthy of respect. There’s a big difference between selling and selling out.

Of course, there’s always the danger that genre is a cul-de-sac and that once a writer turns into it, he’ll never get out. “I’ve had clients whose agents or editors turned down their second book because it wasn’t close enough to their first and thus what readers expect of them,” says Patriarche. Leavitt, who quite correctly points out that “writing the same book over and over is the opposite of what it means to be a writer,” also notes that “once you’ve had a commercial success, there’s definitely pressure on you to repeat it with your next book.”

So while publishers might happily support a literary author making the switch to genre they’ll probably be less enthusiastic when that writer develops an itch to move back toward literary writing. The obvious compromise – write literary under one name, genre under another – works for some, but is a stopgap solution while the industry struggles to catch up with the reality of what’s happening. Because it’s not just a matter of writers flipping back and forth, it’s a matter of genre and literary cross-pollinating to produce a new species. Genre books written by literary writers are different than those written by authors who have always embraced and exemplified that genre.

“You might call Dawn Tripp’s Game of Secrets a ‘psychological thriller’ but that somewhat misses the mark,” says Patriarche. “It’s a thrilling book, but does it play by the rules of a thriller? The problem is we don’t have names for these books, so we call them by the old names, even when the terms don’t fit.” But like any good publicist, she’s prepared to find the opportunity in the midst of the crisis. “It’s hard to get publicity for any book these days, especially one that’s hard to label, but a book that straddles genres can actually be an opportunity for a publicist to open it up to the readership of both genres.”

“More than ever the market requires publicists to approach all books on an individual basis,” says Parker. “I always ask myself ‘Who is the audience for this book and what’s the most effective way to target that audience?’ It can be fun, like when I was at Grand Central and we were bringing out Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. We created a great video trailer, which was widely viewed and shared, and built an active Facebook community around book.”

It will probably always be open to debate whether these innovations are the result of writers seeking creative expression and wider audiences or a calculated move on the part of publishers who are simply trying to sell more product, even if it means slightly misrepresenting a book to its potential audience. But either way, the future seems to be stories which combine the pacing and plots of genre with the themes and style of literary writing.

In other words, this crappy market may actually end up producing better books. Because hybrids, bastards, and half-breeds tend to be heartier than those delicate offspring that result from too much careful inbreeding. Just ask the Tudors. The best commercial writers were moving toward this anyway, creating highly metaphorical fantasy works and socially-conscious mysteries, expanding the definition of their genres even before the ex-pat literary crew jumped on the bandwagon. “We’re going to see more blending as everyone attempts to grab a larger audience,” predicts Patriarche, “and the literary snobs are going to have to stop looking down on genre.”

 

Image credit: Fotomatom/Flickr

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29 comments:

  1. Bravo. Though we may differ in our use of such devices, you’ve captured my approach to punctuation precisely. Over time, I’ve pared down my use of any punctuation that may be technically required but not absolutely necessary to guide the reader. At the same time, I’m fond of the em dash, the semi-colon, and the ellipsis for communicating pace, dramatic emphasis, and things like hesitation or uncertainty. I’ve had heated arguments with peers about this practice—the chief objection being that readers, particularly so-called modern readers, don’t know what the punctuation means, that it gets in their way. My position: readers incapable of or unwilling to learn such notation of language are probably going to miss other qualities in my prose. They are not my readers.

  2. Oh my God! I am also a huge fan of the “dithering”—such an accurate characterization!—em dash.

    My TA hates this, of course—a common criticism of his in my essays is my (neurotic?) tendency to be “interventionist”—but eff him!

  3. Also, can this be a series? If you couldn’t tell, I definitely enjoyed geeking out over this.

  4. Damascus,

    Glad you enjoyed it. I don’t know about a series, but I may write something about the unjustly persecuted semicolon!

  7. I don’t think it disrupts flow; although I do miss the semi-colon. Having said that: what is with the Rhianna reference? That does not compute (haha).

  8. One of my favorite discoveries about Word–when I began using it years ago–was that it would automatically substitute an em-dash for a double en-dash. (This comment editor apparently does not.)

  11. I am heartened that there is another writer entranced by the em dash. O’Fallon Price, I applaud your fascination and explanation for it. I personally overuse the mark—it’s easy to do—it creates a pause as if the writer is speaking—as if one is looking for a right word—it is a way to temper a fragile thought.

    Now, take on the en dash. Try to raise it from the dead.

  12. How do you like your em-dash? Set tight (closed)—like this—or set loose (open) — like this — (with spaces) or as a double dash “––” for an extra push, or replacing it with a single loose en-dash ” – ” …all subject to whatever the typeface offers (not all match the “M”).

    I see the author (Adam) and commenters have chosen tight-set. I’m not judging, just observing, and curious about variations in the wild. Whether by feel, font, craft, or unexamined tradition—the preference is underscored by changes in technology, eg. 1780 vs 1890 vs 1950 vs 2007.

    Here’s what I found: A 1979 imprint of J.K. Jerome’s ‘Three men in a Boat’ uses a loose-set en-dash, as does a 1980 imprint of P.G. Woodhouse’s ‘Pigs Have Wings’ and a 2000 imprint of John Wyndham’s ‘The Chrysalids’ … all Penguin imprints. An 1890 imprint of Robert Burns verse uses tight-set long dash (double em? custom dash?), as does a 2015 imprint of Neil Stephenson’s ‘Seveneves’, while the 2013 Orbit imprints of Iian Banks’ ‘Consider Phlebas’, ‘Excession’, etc., follow the Penguin style guide with a loose-set en-dash.

    Oh, and I see Erik Spiekerman’s ‘Stop Stealing Sheep’ is set in loose en-dash — is this a trademark move on his part (because he definitely typeset it), or a style he was projecting for that specific work?

    Most of the other paperbacks I thumbed through are tight-set and full length … most exceed the width of their respective M’s. (And look at all those ellipsis…!)

    I will also add online fonts present new issues; Gizmodo.com for example confuses longer than usual hyphens with shorter than usual tight set em-dashes…hard to tell sometimes if two words are hyphenated or two clauses are being held apart. Just saying.

    FYI: American Press (AP) style guide recommends setting em-dashes open with spaces, as does Canadian Press and UK Guardian, while The Chicago Style Guide and others say the exact opposite.

    Fun with em-dashes — sorry if TLDR;

  13. Thank you very much — I had thought that I was alone in my admiration of em dash as such a friendly mark. Before about 1900, the em dash was usually surrounded by en spaces. That makes it yet more beautiful on the page.

  14. Edgar A. Poe has— if my memory serves me well— a wonderful mini-essay in his collected Marginalia on the value of the dash; I used to describe it as trhe zoom lens of punctuation.

  15. Adam, since I happen to agree with your every word here, I would definitely read a similar piece on the semicolon. If you do indeed write such a post, could you include a section on whether to hyphenate the world semicolon itself?

    You largely use it as a closed compound, which I happen to prefer, although you do hyphenate it early on. But in general I’m puzzled by the sheer number of people who hyphenate it regularly when I can find little justification in any of the major dictionaries or style manuals (with Merriam-Webster, various Oxfords, The Chicago Manual of Style, all favouring the closed version and only Wikipedia allowing for both)! I’m especially curious about this, given the modern dictionary’s claim to be more descriptivist than prescriptivist.

  16. Wonderful. Frankly I have used the dash for many many years but only at this reading have I learned it`s name–and yes, having it named after Em(ily) Dickinson is a gleaming idea which delights me. Cheers.

  18. @Mark Suggitt: Hey there, fellow! Enjoyed your observations! Maybe The Millions ought to solicit your services???

  19. True confession time –
    I love the em dash! I also use it more often than I should – but I don’t care! I also use the tilde in a completely inappropriate manner – as a prettier version of the em dash. I may as well just admit that I also use {braces} as spiffed up versions of parentheses.
    Now if I could just find a way to incorporate more schwas into my life, all would be perfect!

  20. Very nice essay on one of the less-understood punctuation marks—the em dash.

    As a professional typographer and book designer, I encountered the various dashes and dash-like characters early in my career. I realized that nowhere in my prior education had I ever seen or heard any explanation of the nuances of these various markings. (Though later in my career I was involved in such discussions!) Of course, back in the days when I learned to type (on a manual typewriter) we only had the hyphen — and two were used (as here) to act as a em dash. (There was no concept of an en dash.)

    Another commenter wonders about the open vs. closed (extra space or not between the ends of the dash) em dash. In part, this is a matter of how the typeface designer has created the em dash that accompanies the typeface. They vary in length and they vary in the side bearings allowed (and some are considerably longer than the em space as it is generally calculated). In addition, while I personally prefer close em dashes—I have had clients who couldn’t stand them and insisted in additional space before and after the em dash. This was usually accomplished by adding a “thin space” before and after the em dash itself—but sometimes, if the em dash in the face being used was one fo the extra long ones, I’d just use an em dash from a face with a shorter one—thank goodness for search and replace.

  21. How wonderful—an essay about one of my favourite punctuation marks! Thank you.

    I must admit I am a little confused about when to use an en dash and when to use an em dash.

    Either way, I like to include a thin space either side of them — a purely visual preference. Is this wrong? I’m in The Antipodes and hear the rules may be different than in The States.

    Love to hear your thoughts!

    p.s. Might I thank the hard-working hyphen for all its tireless labour, but I *do* wish the common folk would realise that it falls short (pun intended) when used in place of a nice, long, leggy dash.

  23. Do you distinguish between the em dash and its little brother, the en dash (which is half its length)? I find the en to be less jarring, and so makes for more readable prose. Your mileage may vary, of course.

    As for the semicolon, George Orwell (no mean prose stylist) believed that it was unnecessary, and never used it. While I don’t agree, I do find that I use it too often in situations where a comma or period would set the breath-mark of the prose more accurately.

  24. Rachel + Nemo,

    AFAIK the em is preferred to the en for the purpose of prose writing. I don’t believe they’re interchangeable–the en usually being used for scores, date ranges, etc. I believe no spaces is also preferred by copy editors, but then you’re talking someone who double spaces after periods, so what do I know?

  25. Thank you. I love the em dash — with the proviso that for the digital age we need a new em dash typography. With “[space] em-dash [space]” everything from HTML to .mobi will have readable line breaks. Use “[space] em-dash [space]” please?

  26. The two correct way to write this dash is to a) just write an em dash or b) write en dash with spaces before and after. Most editors prefer the version “a)”. I would like to explain why I am a devoted fan of version “b)”. When one looks at the version “a)” within a block of space—it becomes one of the most distinctive visual signs. It is a strong visual rupture in the rhythm of letters. It has a very long horizontal bar that unapologetically breaks this rhythm. It becomes visually more important than, what should structurally be above it in the hierarchy of information—the marking of the end of a sentence – a dot, space and a first large letter of next sentence. I feel that version “b)” – en dash with two accompanying spaces – looks a bit softer, blends a bit better with surroundings and simply visually belongs to the block of text more.

  27. Ahhh just wonderful. I love the idea of the em dash being named after Emily Dickinson because of her annoying excessive use of the thing. I was fortunate (or maybe not, because no one is as particular as they used to be and it drives me nuts) to have my start straight out of high school as a typesetter back in the day when typesetting was an art. One of our clients was McGraw-Hill, and I would set type for mathematical textbooks, including very long equations. They were extremely particular about spacing around dashes and between certain characters…there were thin spaces, en spaces, em spaces, and even a hair space. After awhile you could tell at a glance which had been used, and whether or not it was correct. And in paragraph copy, you were expected to know what that particular customer’s preference for spacing around en and em dashes should be. All dependent on the font and the customer, but all had to be consistent. No wonder my eyesight is horrible. Thanks for this trip down amnesia lane.

  28. As a huge lover of punctuation in general —I once named a cat Apostrophe — and the em dash in particular, I thank you for this article. My own sense of the em dash is that it can make way for a slightly less linear narrative, and more accurately convey the way that some people think. I recall hearing about some research which identified that the em dash has been noted more frequently in writing by females, however cannot, alas, cite the source. Cheers, Erin

  29. I, too, have an affinity for the em dash. It was a punctuation mark my highschool english teacher actually insisted I practice using – as I had a terrible habit of writing run-on sentences with numerous commas. Your article on semi-colons brought me here, and I enjoyed both pieces of writing. Cheers!

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Is This Book Bad, or Is It Just Me? The Anatomy of Book Reviews

Essays Notable Articles
September 11, 2012 | 38 9 min read

1.
The book review is dead. At the very least, it’s very obviously dying. Anyway, we can all agree that it should be killed off, because it’s gotten to be irrelevant. If not downright parasitic. (Though maybe it might be salvaged if the average review was a little meaner.)

I exaggerate only slightly here. This past August, a pair of meta-critical essays by Dwight Garner in The New York Times and Jacob Silverman in Slate sent everyone who fancied him- or herself a critic — whether institutionalized or not — into a collective fit. It was probably the biggest literary-cultural dustup since the Great MFA Debate of 2010-2011, when Elif Batuman’s London Review of Books article, “Get a Real Degree,” made everyone feel just a little bit bad about the existence of MFA programs.

I found it hard to get terribly worked up about literary criticism’s emotional register. For every Laura Miller or Lev Grossman who has foresworn negative reviews, I know that there will be just as many qualifiers for the Hatchet Job of the Year Award to fulfill the angry review quota. For every purchased five-star review, there will be that lady on Goodreads who says that the only good thing about the new Junot Diaz novel is that it taught her the Spanish word sucio.

But enough about the State of the Art! I enjoyed all of these essays, but the one thing that struck me was that they were all essentially negative, in the sense that they set out to describe how things were going wrong or why things ought not to be the way that they are. What they didn’t do a very good job of was describing what criticism or book reviewing is, or what it should be.

Okay, there were some nice, bold mission statements thrown in there. Here’s Dwight Garner: “What we need more of…are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics.” Agreed. Or Daniel Mendelsohn, in the New Yorker: “the critic is someone who, when his knowledge, operated on by his taste in the presence of some new example of the genre he’s interested in…hungers to make sense of that new thing, to analyze it, interpret it, make it mean something.” Sounds great. Or Richard Brody, again in the New Yorker: “Criticism is the turning of the secondary (the critic’s judgment) into the primary.” Sure, why not.

So I think we can all agree that A) the “book review” is a prestigious class of writing that people aspire to write, and B) there is a continuum of, shall we say, critical perceptiveness — what in the pre-everyone-gets-a-trophy age we might call “value” or “quality” — on which the multiple-thousand-word, tightly-argued essays of the New York/London/L.A. Review of Books reside at one end, and the rapid reactions of John Q. Tumblr reside at the other.

(By the way, I don’t want to suggest that there is something philosophically corrupt or intrinsically wrong about the latter, or that just because something is edited and not self-published, it is automatically better than a blog post. Advanced degrees, journalistic credentials, and/or getting published in hard copy is not a guarantee that a book review is any good. See, for example Janet Maslin’s misreading of This Bright River.)

But what should this excellence and interpretation and maybe a little bit of hard-headedness actually look like, in practice? Why has it been absent? And why does any discussion about literary criticism turn into a giant game of dodging the question, as if the concept of a book review were like the concept of pornography, in that you might not know how to define it, but you’d know it when you see it?

In the interest of getting everyone on the same page (book pun!), I thought it would be an interesting exercise to dissect a book review, to pick apart what makes it work or not work, what makes some book reviews great and others — most of them, really — bland and unhelpful and immediately forgettable. Because book reviewing is a genre with its own conventions, just as every murder mystery must start with a body, and every epic fantasy must feature elvish words with too many apostrophes. It’s worth figuring out what those conventions are.

2.
In the beginning, there is ego. As George Orwell put it in his essay “Writers and Leviathan”: “One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually ‘I like this book’ or ‘I don’t like it,’ and what follows is a rationalization.”

The decision to like or not like a book is where every book review begins. This is what gives the genre its underlying suspense — will Michiko Kakutani like this book or won’t she? — but also its frustrating sense of chaos, because no matter how technically sound or philosophically sophisticated or beautiful a book might be, something minor or tangential can turn off a reviewer so much that he or she decides the book is not good.

A lot of book reviews never get past this first stage, and this is where the whole free-for-all of online reviewing can get frustrating. For instance, the Goodreads lady on Junot Diaz, or the people who unironically give one-star reviews to classic literature: all of these reviews consist entirely of the initial response and a subsequent explanation, and no self-reflection about whether there might be more to the book — and to the reviewer’s response — than that initial, emotional decision. If the nauseating chumminess of the publishing world is the Scylla of book criticism, than this kind of reviewerly narcissism is surely its Charybdis.

But hopefully, no matter how much reviewers are in love with themselves, they will at least step aside and say a few things about the book. In the case of fiction, its plot, its characters, some of the backstory, and the setting. In the case of nonfiction, the overall narrative or argument of the book, the author’s source material and expertise in the subject matter.

This is the next stage in the evolution of a book review, and it is plain nuts and bolts kind of stuff. But it’s so important to do readers this simple courtesy because, unlike an oil filter or a frying pan, the world of literature is so expansive and dependent on authorial decisions and whims that two books within a genre, or a sub-genre, or even a sub-sub-genre, may vary wildly in so many ways. Is the protagonist of this hard science-fiction story an astrobiologist on a generation ship or a detective on an asteroid base? And so on.

This is where things start to get complicated. The average paid reviewer gets one scant paragraph in Publisher’s Weekly, maybe four or six in your average major metropolitan daily, to appraise a book. And more often than not, they splurge on summary — often to the exclusion of everything else. So their concluding paragraphs tend to be a little overstuffed, as these recent examples show:
But finally, of course, this kind of rigidity exacts its own price, and Natalie can’t avoid paying. Each of the novel’s sections ends with a scene of violence, something Ms. Smith presents as inescapable in northwest London. Some characters die from it, others survive, but none are unscathed. What Ms. Smith offers in this absorbing novel is a study in the limits of freedom, the way family and class constrain the adult selves we make. In England, the margin for self-invention is notoriously smaller than it is in the U.S. — which is one reason why Ms. Smith, with NW, seems more than ever a great English novelist.
(Adam Kirsch, review of NW in The Wall Street Journal)


There are moments here and there in Telegraph Avenue where Mr. Chabon, himself sounds as if he’s trying very hard “to sound like he was from the ’hood,” but for the most part he does such a graceful job of ventriloquism with his characters that the reader forgets they are fictional creations. His people become so real to us, their problems so palpably netted in the author’s buoyant, expressionistic prose, that the novel gradually becomes a genuinely immersive experience — something increasingly rare in our ADD age.
(Michiko Kakutani, review of Telegraph Avenue in The New York Times)


The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving deals with sorrow and disability and all the things that can go wrong in life. But mostly Evison has given us a salty-sweet story about absorbing those hits and taking a risk to reach beyond them. What a great ride.
(Ellen Emry Heitzel, review of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving in The Seattle Times)

In other words, you can see where these reviews are trying to do too much with too little space. Trying to sum up the quality of the prose with a few abstract descriptors. Making a final plea for the cultural relevance of the book. Ending on a gnomic, life-affirming mantra. And all this in fewer than 100 words.

The fact that these reviewers are reaching for something beyond what they have space to cover is, to me, a tacit admission that there is more to be done here; that saying “Here is the plot of the book, and here is a pile of adjectives to show how much I (dis)liked it” just barely scratches the surface of what book criticism can cover. But if you’ve already done all that and you still feel that readers ought to take away one more big idea — what do you do?

3.
Matt Taibbi hated The World is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded. He hated their titles. He hated their premise. Hated their predictability, their utter lack of real insights, and most memorably of all, hated their language. In his reviews of Thomas Friedman’s two books, Taibbi tracked dozens of bizarre proclamations and just plain bad writing, from the first confusion between herd animals with hunting animals to his last, triumphant-until-you-think-about-it graph of freedom vs. oil prices, which used four data points selected basically at random to make a point about the march of democracy across the globe. (“What can’t you argue, if that’s how you’re going to make your point??” wrote Taibbi, two question marks included.)

This might make Taibbi sound like a prescriptivist grump, a Grammar Nazi who just happened to find the one guy who was famous enough and bad at writing enough to deserve this kind of thrashing. Except that the reviews do more than that. It turns out that Friedman’s “anti-ear” is actually the most obvious symptom of a larger case of intellectual and moral fraud. In Friedman’s world, the rules of basic logic and historical causation do not exist; he invents new realities out of a few cherry-picked events and the limited frame of reference of a privileged, jet-setting columnist based out of New York City.

On the one hand, this entire review stems from an act that we all can do: to try and gauge the quality of Friedman’s writing and thought. But Taibbi manages to do more than wag his finger at Friedman for writing poorly — he discovers something important and true that we didn’t know before, and more importantly, couldn’t know just by taking Friedman at his word. So Taibbi passes Daniel Mendelsohn’s “meaning” test, because we now know something new about Friedman’s book that we didn’t before. He certainly passes Dwight Garner’s bar for being both excellent and punishing. This is not simple aesthetic snobbery: it’s formal criticism that actually matters.

Then there is the big picture. It’s hard to get much bigger than James Wood’s famous 2000 proclamation: “A genre is hardening.” In it, he identifies the “perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity” that characterized novelists like Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, and mainly, Zadie Smith, whose then-new book White Teeth Wood was reviewing. These practitioners of “hysterical realism,” Wood argued, were to the novel what the van Eyck brothers were to medieval painting — artists who thought that conceptual virtuosity and an inexhaustible supply of detail substituted for a plausible, profound exploration of the human experience.

Instead of treating the text as a mirror for the writer’s psyche, this kind of criticism assumes that the novel in question is a mirror of some kind of shared worldview, brought on not just by the writer’s personal choices (of character, setting, plot, and so on) but also by the context in which he or she is writing. In the case of the hysterical realists, they are all too in love with their grand, underlying, and basically untrue idea — everything and everyone is interconnected in ambition and subject to the same fate — that they have to make their characters essentially inhuman to make their plots work.

But not everyone has to be present at the birth of a genre to do this sort of criticism. Rosecrans Baldwin discovered a trope that’s almost as old as the modern novel — the “distant-dog impulse” — from Tolstoy to Picoult.

Evgeny Morozov tracked not only the intellectual vacuousness, but also the stylistic commonalities imposed by the new line of TED Books.

What’s going on here? Elif Batuman explains that all of these reviewers are looking for context in the morass of personal and artistic choices that go into every piece of writing:
Literature viewed in this way becomes a gigantic multifarious dream produced by a historical moment. The role of the critic is then less to exhaustively explain any single work than to identify, in a group of works, a reflection of some conditioned aspect of reality.
Maybe it doesn’t sound great when reduced to a mission statement like this — in fact, I think it sounds vaguely totalitarian, especially when you consider that this sort of criticism is called “Marxist criticism” in academic circles. But in practice, it definitely works.

4.
So. Reaction. Summary. Aesthetic and historical appraisal: these are the four classical elements of literary criticism. To that I might add that it helps to be negative — of the twelve reviews I quote here, eight are at least moderately negative, and about five are relentlessly so.

That people are even having this conversation about the supposed niceness of book reviews is great: it shows that book reviews are anything but irrelevant. And now that we’ve teased out the ground rules of what can and should go into a book review, it’s time to turn you loose. You now have the tools to cut through the morass of literary criticism and decide for yourself not only if a book review is worthwhile, but why. You can critique the critics. You can be a meta-Michiko. Use this knowledge wisely.

As for me, I eagerly await the next big, invented crisis to strike the world of literature. I hope it involves deckled edges.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

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