Writing at Its Best

By Eliza Browning

Whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, or personal narrative, especially lyrical and well-crafted prose can resonate with you long after you’ve finished reading. Memorable writing often shares several qualities: the vivid and striking use of language, moments that illuminate wider messages or themes in the text, the connection of a character’s personal experience to bigger ideas underlying the narrative, and an exploration of the human condition that causes you to look at the world in a new way. Passages from three novels, The Great Gatsby, The Idiot, and Greek Lessons, especially resonate with me because of their combination of beautiful prose with an examination of the narrative’s larger themes and ideas, creating the opportunity for thought-provoking reflection.

“And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The last sentence of The Great Gatsby is one of the most famous in modern literature, yet the preceding paragraphs are just as evocative and beautiful. Here, Fitzgerald connects the trajectory of Gatsby’s life to wider ideas about love, the American Dream, and the changing landscape of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The lyrical language in these sentences builds up like a crescendo at the end of the novel, evoking the imagery of color and light as well as the vastness of human connection.

“I could see it all so clearly—the traffic light changing all night for nobody’s benefit, the first cars passing by as the sky grew light—and I was overcome by the sense of how much more there was in his life than mine, by the things to do and distances to travel, while I never had done anything or gone anywhere, and never would… Worse yet, I knew I had no one to blame but myself.” —Elif Batuman, The Idiot

Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, about a college freshman learning to navigate the world around her through intellectual inquiry, is especially attuned to language on a sentence level, questioning and subverting social conventions that we often take for granted. It’s a pleasure to get lost in Batuman’s prose, which feels like an exhilarating conversation with a friend about life, literature, and art. The author is especially adept at evoking distance and memory, as in this passage when the protagonist, Selin, contemplates her complex relationship with a classmate that exists mostly over email. Comparing the ongoing passage of time through the changing of the traffic light with both the physical and emotional distance between the characters, Batuman perfectly captures the simultaneous loneliness and exploration of young adulthood.

“A familiar room wrapped in vibrant blue thread. A letter dozens of pages long and composed of bright holes that he must now read. Lying at his side and exuding cold, the indistinct contours of a person who smells of apples.” —Han Kang, Greek Lessons 

Han Kang’s poetic prose is especially impactful in this scene in Greek Lessons, where the male protagonist slips into a dreamscape while navigating the experience of slowly going blind. Kang masterfully conveys this transition through her description of the senses, starting with the visual imagery of the “vibrant blue thread,” indicating his gradual loss of sight through the letter full of “bright holes,” and evoking the “indistinct contours” and specific feeling and smell of a figure he can no longer see. Greek Lessons, in its sparse but vivid imagery, embodies the possibilities of literary translation through its narrative about characters navigating the boundaries between different languages and senses.

Reading lyrical prose that instantly captures my attention, making me slow down and savor the author’s words, is one of the enduring joys of reading. These three passages, which capture the nature of these works as a whole, embody the power of literature to continually move and inspire readers.