That's a great question. I'm really curious about the book now. I hope you have a great trip!

Interesting... I live such a busy life with a toddler that I don't think about 'immersion', only wether it's good or bad. I can't get immersed in a book, because I'm forced to read in snatches. But here's a questions: are the same qualities that let us get immersed, the same that don't require us to do much thinking? I really like Virginia Woolf, but I don't get lost in those books. I have to really think about them. They're kind of hard work.

I will check it out. But this comment of your friend's struck me as very unfair. Some people prefer a strong style, others want the transparent sentence, and they don't typically share books well. The sample on Amazon shows the beginning at least to be excellent---quiet, clear, and not at all the sort of noise I expected from your friend's complaint.

this is a charge often leveled against cormac mccarthy.

It can never be other than an unmitigated disaster so to construct over complex and, so far as relevant, long, convoluted sentences, or indeed in the case of some authors mere sentence fragments, that they evade comprehension on first or second reading and necessitate backtracking and significant mental effort, thus performing a disservice to the otherwise kindly disposed reader.

Bzzzt. A voyage into the work of my dear Marcel Proust occasionally requires me to go back and re-read a sentence once or twice before I get the flow of it and comprehend. But since he was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century and reading In Search of Lost Time, sinuous sentences and all, is damn near a religious experience, I'm going to give him a pass. (Kudos on your clever post, though. :)

Closer to the topic, if there's a prose style that's too gorgeous for me, I haven't found it yet. I had a friend tell me once that he wouldn't read prose that didn't scan more or less like everyday speech. What?? Clearly, I have a different conception of what I'm looking for in literature-as-art.

Dave, that passage you quoted from didn't seem like good writing AT ALL. The word choices seemed wrong, too over the top--the editor in me cringed.

Some books can be over-written and under-written but too well-written? That's...almost an oxymoron. Certain writers intimidate me with the level of skill and intelligence they bring to their craft. Can't read them while I'm at work on a project or my confidence dries up like a desert rainstorm.

But...TOO well written? Nah...

Now, see, I wouldn't call that writing "gorgeous". I'd call it overblown and overwritten.

Oops! CliffBurns beat me to it!

That's a good point about Cormac McCarthy. Most writers who try to actually *do* something with their writing, something out of the ordinary, take some flak for it. I, for one, am glad that not all writers write the way we speak in everyday life. Some of the most beautiful and interesting writing is created by people who think outside the box. If people think that sample is overwritten, I'd suggest they stay away from poetry! I don't actually mean that to be snide, only that some prose shares more in common with poetry and makes different demands on the reader. In a perfect world, people would be able to switch back and forth between styles with ease. So they could read Elmore Leonard, then Cormac McCarthy, then Jane Austen.

I third Lilithcat and Cliffburns. This is noise masquerading as skill.

When I hear people saying this style is overwritten, I can't help but wonder if we've all been brainwashed by the books being mass-produced by writers workshops. I know whereof I speak, because I went to one. I saw the idiosyncracies of really innovative writing put down all the time. A certain aesthetic was always being pushed-- one that would make editors happy, but that never pushed the boundaries, never tried anything new or truly interesting. We have enough unimaginative writing. Imagine if Joyce had taken the advice to never write something that challenged the reader, or Proust or David Foster Wallace or Pynchon or Gaddis or McCarthy or Milton or Shakespeare. We wouldn't have anything worth calling literature.

If the original post wasn't enough to make me want to read the book, all the disagreement definitely is! Mission accomplished, Mary

Since Mary's away, I'll step in to respond.
Brin, Teri: You bring up a great point. A lot of books are marketed today as a way to get relief from the daily grind. There's a place for that sort of book. But we also should challenge ourselves now and then with a style or subject that takes us out of our comfort zone.
My reading tends to alternate between quick reads, and those that are more challenging. Too much of either one doesn't work for me.

Brad: This discussion makes me want to go back and read a bit of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tim Wolfe. That was horribly over-written, but it also was true to those crazy times. Experimentation can be fun.

p.s. Brin, congratulations for keeping up with your reading during the toddler phase. It's a challenging time. You might like a short story collection such as Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth.

Looks like she's actually a bit older than you guessed:
http://www.kentucky.com/964/story/796860.html

Thanks, Dave! I have to admit, I feel proud of myself anytime I'm able to read something that isn't the back of a box of Cheerios! ha
And thank you for the recommendation. Short stories definitely are the way to go during this stage. I really love Flannery O'Connor and John Updike, in particular. And I've definitely noticed the book you mentioned. I'll have to pick up a copy.

Teri,
There's an interesting discussion going on over at The Elegant Variation regarding that very issue. It all stems from a recent New Yorker essay about writer workshops and whether or not writing can be taught:
http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2009/06/must-read-show-or-tell.html

good thoughts for those who commented on the mccarthy connection.

i have a wide enough taste to enjoy both something very ornate and something very minimalistic.

Can you imagine if Melville was writing today? Some critics would destroy him. Today's preferences are for small micro stories. No tolerance for epic philosophical fiction.

Hawthorne would be derided as heavy handed and "quaint."

I think the quote from the book ("Then came her own shuddering response...") is appropriate for this conversation in more ways than one - part of what I see as 'good' about the prose in this book is that its virtuosity is stricken through with dissonance. It occurs to me that what might at first seem 'overwritten' is actually a kind of intentional atonality, a reflection of the 'joy in misshapen things.' A lot of what people immediately perceive as 'good' writing is what feels 'natural' to them. I think part of my respect for this book comes from the fact that the characters and the author gesture towards the strangeness that is lurking in the 'naturalness' of life, in death, sex, and relationships for example. I think it captures the dissonance of human life, which is rarely as 'natural' or straightforward as we'd like, and what feels 'overwritten' to some people feels to me more like discomfiting honesty to me.

I haven't read the book, but if this is a description of Sacred Harp singing, it's a darn good description! "Hollered", "mismatched", and "abraded" pretty much sums it up. Just my 2 c...

Proust, Henry James, and Evelyn Waugh can sometimes write too well. In writing, it is nice to come across gorgeous passages, but not be overwhelmed by stylistic beauty. It's the whole "eating chocolate cake for the rest of your life" scenario.

But they succeed, since they divide their gorgeous descriptions between passages of bitchy satirical dialogue. And since they all were wannabe aristocrats, it is reflected in their heavily ornamental writing. Overcompensation, as it were. Not as bad as Paris Hilton's diamond-encrusted Bentley, but the intent is the same

In Colm Tóibín's The Master, he puts the following words into William James' mouth as he talks to Henry about his books: "Harry, I find I have to read innumerable sentences you now write twice over to see what they could possibly mean."

I think "She sought the joy of misshapen things" is overstating the case a little bit, but I'm on board up until that point. I like the phrase "hollered singing," and I'm always for people using any conjugation of the word "abrade": a very useful word that, for whatever reason, doesn't often make the trip into people's vocabularies along with "abrasion."

Anybody familiar with Sacred Harp singing? I think that's a pretty good description of how it often sounds.

I actually read this book recently after seeing it mentioned in the New Yorker. I loved it, but just a couple thoughts:
-It seems very strange that people are jumping to conclusions based on a single sentence. This seems kind of symptomatic of a sound-byte culture. I think it deserves a much closer examination. Like fifty pages, perhaps? That would seem more reasonable. If you still don't like it, then you're on to something.
-Kswollf, it might interest you to know that the book is actually a mix of beautiful, lyrical passages and very terse, frank, regional dialogue. This review doesn't really touch on that. So I think it might be up your alley. Also, despite what people are saying about it's overwrittenness (if that's a word), it's actually quite spare. This is the problem with judging off one sentence. You really can't get a sense of the book very acurately.
-The person who said this is noise masquerading as skill is so off the mark it just boggles the mind. this book is the furtherst thing from noise. It's heartfelt, wise, and has more meaning crammed into its spare sentences than most writers manage to cram into their entire body of work.
- finally, for Brin: I just read Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (short stories) and thought they were really good, and very funny. If you're looking for short stories, you might want to check it out, though they're very... masculine, I guess. Obviously written by a guy.

Could someone please explain what you mean by 'overwritten'? I wouldn't have thought twice about that particular passage.

Hmmph. I think I sang in that choir.

Jen Cochran, thank you. I thought it was just me, being a cranky old woman again! What in the world would make anyone think that s/he could use one sentence to judge the entire book?

For many people, 'overwritten' could mean any prose style that uses more words than absolutely necessary, making the prose feel flowery, descriptive, over-heated, forced, etc. Of course, as I mentioned above, this would eliminate many of the great writers of the past. Prose styles come in and out of fashion like... well, fashion.
For example, to use Ms. Morgan's sentence, Hemingway (minimalist, duh) might have written it like this:
"They sang and the singing was poor and rough. She shivered. It was ugly, but she liked it. She liked ugly things."
No one could accuse that of being 'overwritten'. That kind of style (Hemingway, Carver) is still big at writers workshops. People have been taught that adjectives are bad.

Too well? Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence certainly wrote some over-ripe descriptive prose. Some, at least, of the books are good.

Thank you, Eve! Glad I'm not alone in thinking that a patient approach is the right one when reading literary fiction. Especially since I think this book is one that could be destined for awards. I wouldn't be surprised to see this one nominated for the National Book Award. It reminded me a little bit of Cold Mountain which also won that prize.

There's no such thing as writing that's too well-done! Why are people so afraid of "too much?!?! It all sounds like boring, bourgeois propriety to me! Bring on the sensuality, the sex, the words piled on words, the vibrant, the grotesque, the macabre, the overdone, the too-big-for-its-britches, the crazy. We can't always sustain it in real life, so let's get it all out on paper. What are people so afraid of? That you might feel something out of the ordinary? That you might actually live?

Well, the way you phrase it, "Can a writer write too well?" is pretty loaded. There's a value judgment in the question. You ought to rephrase it to ask, "Can a writer write too lushly?" and I think the answer there is an obvious yes, since for some readers it's a turnoff. I happen to like lush writing (witness elsewhere my gushy praise for Cowper Powys's recently released masterwork, Porius), and I can't imagine paring down my own style in attempts to avoid turning off someone who doesn't have the attention span to follow a long, convoluted sentence. At the same time, I myself find it burdensome when a writer doesn't have the sense to practice some self control and variety. Sometimes a short sentence works best.

I don't think it's a case of "writing too well," but of a certain spare, uncomplicated style being so popular and seen so often now that many readers regard it as the norm and other styles as abberrations. I haven't rerad the whole discussion referred to, but David cites here the reviewer, who was drawn to the book, and one friend of the reviewer, who was put off by the "lush" writing.

I like spare prose for the most part (65%) but also enjoy a lush book from time to time. It's when it's lush for the sake of lush, the metaphor no longer making sense, that I get annoyed.

Ok, but what is "lush for the sake of lush"? Does its counterpart exist: "spare for the sake of spare"? It seems to me that you can obfuscate just as much with lean prose (leaving out essentials, especially emotional depth) as you can with descriptive prose. Maybe what matters most is if every word seems like it contributes to the whole in a meaningful way. A lot of words, or few words. I have to agree that there's no way to tell from one sentence, because the whole has to be taken into account.