Suppose a Sentence

July 1, 2020
Dillon follows up on his last book about essays with one on the briefer, "slippery sentence." These chronologically arranged picks from the 17th century to today are the "few that shine more brightly and for the moment compose a pattern." The author plumbs biography, autobiography, and history to add context and background, with particular attention to each author's literary style. Dillon follows a road taken earlier by the French critic Roland Barthes, the "patron saint of my sentences," explicating the pleasure of writing about writing and close reading, puzzling over the "Two colons, two sets of parentheses?" in Barthes' sentence. The title of the book is inspired by a sentence in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons that uses the word "suppose" nine times. Dillon's intriguing inquiry begins with the briefest of sentences, from Hamlet, as the prince dies: "O, o, o, o."--"nothing more or less than the vocal expression, precisely, of silence." Most of them are much longer. Dillon also includes Charlotte Bront�'s "The drug wrought," from Villette. Taken from a sermon shortly before his death, John Donne's sentence is a "paratactic heap of language" while Thomas de Quincey's "demands patience; it is like waiting for a photograph to develop." Elizabeth Bowen's employs a "style by turns exact, easeful and bristling." James Baldwin's sentence, by way of Norman Mailer, has Dillon pondering over Baldwin's use of "ofay." Annie Dillard's sentence about an eclipse, "with its central colon, feels balanced but loose, centrifugal and strange." In Korean American artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's sentence, Dillon hears echoes of Samuel Beckett, and an imperfect translation of Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy's sentence gives Dillon fits. Near the end, Dillon writes about how he tried to take notes on Anne Carson's sentence but only came up with an "ambiguous doodle." A learned, spirited foray into what makes a sentence tick.

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July 6, 2020
In this delightful literary ramble, Dillon (Essayism), a creative writing professor at Queen Mary University of London, expounds upon remarkable sentences from a variety of voices in literature, past and present. Explaining he has 45 notebooks filled with favorite sentences, Dillon focuses each of the book’s 27 essays on a different one. A line from Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette, “The drug wrought,” is praised for its brevity and emotional power, while Gertrude Stein’s paragraph-long example is commended as showing her commitment to the experimental and unorthodox. What’s particularly intriguing is that Dillon’s choices disregard what one might call the “significance” of the work of their provenance. Frank O’Hara is represented by a line from a brief review of a Paul Klee exhibit, rather than one from one of his many celebrated poems, and Joan Didion by a photo caption she wrote for Vogue early in her career—yet these seemingly trite examples capture the genius of their respective authors with precision. Elsewhere, an essay riffing on a James Baldwin sentence explores the author’s contentious relationship with Norman Mailer. The well-chosen sentences themselves are worth the price of admission, but Dillon’s encyclopedic erudition and infectious joy in a skillful piece of writing are what stamp this as a treat for literary buffs.