It doesn't have to be prosaic

I bought Paul Auster's novel Oracle Night solely because the hardback was on sale for only $5 and I can't resist that kind of price, but I enjoyed it an awful lot more than other Auster novels that cost three times as much. I've read a lot of Auster and I often admire his novels' style and structure, but I generally don't enjoy them. Oracle Night is an exception: from the moment I started, I didn't want to put it down. The main character is a writer who gets carried away by his writing until it threatens to consume his entire life, and the novel contains a series of stories nested within one another with intricacy and grace but without the artificial feeling so common to contemporary metafiction. I cared about the character, empathized with the urgency of his quest, and relished Auster's delicious sentences:

I was damaged goods now, a mass of malfunctioning parts and neurological conundrums, and all that frantic getting and spending left me cold. For comic relief, I took up smoking again and whiled away the afternoons in air-conditioned coffee shops, ordering lemonades and grilled cheese sandwiches as I listened in on conversations and worked my way through every article in three different newspapers. Time passed.

This may be a boring scene, but it is not a boring passage; the language sings with energy and precision. When time passes in an Auster novel, it passes in a playful and elegant manner.

The same cannot be said for Caitlin Flanagan, who is currently making the rounds of the talk shows to push her book, To Hell With All That. I haven't read the book but I've read Flanagan's essays in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, including the one in the current issue called "How to Treat the Help," and I'm just not impressed. Others can and will argue over Flanagan's ideas about how women should live, but I have a more basic complaint: her prose is...prosaic. It doesn't sing. It betrays little rhythm, elegance, playfulness; it just goes clunkety-clunking across the page like the Little Engine With Wax in its Ears:

It is a culture in which people with no experience of having staff in their homes are becoming the employers of small retinues of servants--the nanny, the once-a-week housecleaner, the cheap 'mow, blow, and go' gardener with his truckload of day workers. It is also a culture in which the servants oftentimes have no previous experience of a life in service (many were factory or agricultural workers in their native countries; many are educated). They are, moreover, cowed not only by their employer's power over them but also by the fact that they are quite often in this country illegally and thus loath to make waves.

Here we see Flanagan's favorite syntactic move: the long parenthetical statement, set off either by parentheses or sets of dashes. I'm fond of dashes myself, but a person who uses dashes and parentheses as frequently as Flanagan does demonstrates an unwillingness to think about how her ideas are related to one another. We also see her favorite rhetorical move: the vague generalization lacking evidence, as in "many were factory workers...many are educated." How many? It makes a difference. And we also see "oftentimes" followed, in the next sentence, by "often," once again raising the ugly question: why do we need both words? What does "times" add that "often" does not accomplish on its own?

Flanagan is a competent writer, but I resist revisiting her fraught and frenetic afternoons. Auster, on the other hand, makes even the slow passage of time sound like music.