Evelyn Waugh’s garrulous embalmers; Deborah Eisenberg’s urban neurotics.
Dear readers,
We all have our own literary love languages, the places behind the ears we like books to scratch. Fellow eavesdroppers, this newsletter is for you.
Nothing tanks my enjoyment of a novel quite like bad dialogue — stilted, unbelievable, unnecessary. It borders on authorial malpractice. But on the flip side: What a thrill to encounter nonpareil conversations in fiction, where all the voices are fully formed. Reading such exchanges is like watching the Apollonian ideal of a badminton match.
If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll be persuaded by no less than Barbara Walters. Her insanely idiosyncratic book “How to Talk With Practically Anybody About Practically Anything” has not aged especially well — it is from 1970, and as anachronistic as macramé — but she understood the timeless appeal of good dialogue: “Conversation can be such pleasure that it is criminal to exchange comments so stale that neither really listens.”
Co-sign, Barbara. And I promise, these books keep their shuttlecocks aloft.
—Joumana
“The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy,” by Evelyn Waugh
Fiction, 1948
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
