An Art That's in the Details: Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests
“Now the vision she had had—the room, the freedom, the dizzying leap—it was in her head, small, small as a mustard seed, but taking root.”
I happened to be reading this book when I made a trip to the dentist. The hygienist, when she came to collect me from the waiting room, spotted the huge hardcover in my hands and commented, “That’s a long book!” My impression was that she considered its thickness a point against it. I replied, “It’s an excellent book!” I didn’t bother to tell her that in addition to having an exhilarating experience as a reader, as a writer I was falling in love with Sarah Waters. The Paying Guests introduced me to her work; instantly, I felt a strong affinity to the ways she was making art. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I learned from The Paying Guests?
Suspense and conflict have a place in literary fiction. I delighted in the fact that, in Waters’ hands, the most mundane plot is a page-turner, right from the beginning. How does that work exactly? Not by way of a ticking time bomb or the promise of high stakes drama or trauma. It’s through a subtle and sensitive use of detail. The richness of the inner life of this heroine, Frances, is conveyed via the precise and accurate use of detail, which enables us to experience nuances in her moods and shifts in her thinking. As readers we are ushered along, becoming more and more invested in Frances’ minor plans and hopes and worries. When life starts to fall apart in spectacularly big ways, those climactic events are anchored in the minutiae of Frances’ life, and have indeed arisen from it. I think it makes them all the more compelling.
Details are what allow us to inhabit others in intimate ways. Here, detail is employed in the service of intimacy. The Paying Guests has finely drawn characters with, we feel, lives of their own off the page and beyond the scenes in which they appear. Even if those lives are not remarkable, objectively, each of these characters understands themselves to be at the center of their own, unfolding story. (Just like we feel, as individuals.) Waters’ characters evince this sensibility and solidity.
Yet the narration (third person point of view) is mostly outward, by which I mean the narrator is not often observing or voicing Frances’ thoughts directly. Instead, we are looking through them, so to speak, utterly immersed in Frances’ world. It is through her perceptions, her attempts, the ways she negotiates this place and its people, that we develop a picture of who she is as well as a dynamic depiction of her external situation and circumstances. Notice how artful and efficient is this method of double-sided depiction.
Words are the brushstrokes that create details. The writing is so admirably fresh. Not because the words are particularly unusual or voluptuous. It’s the hair-trigger precision of the words and their unique associations and combinations that make Waters’ prose delicious. There is nothing showy here, for it’s about fit: the image, the analogy, the verb, that will carry the mood best, or evoke the moment in its fullest. In other words, page after page after page of hard work!
Her are some phrases and sentences, taken absolutely at random, to give you an idea of the persistent quality of Waters’ prose and the fine-grained nuances she achieves.
“…her resolutions were peeling from her like bark from a tree.” (p. 132)
“She felt another gust of loneliness.” (p. 135)
“The glass was sticky in her hand.” (p. 138)
“And when, with a smudge of discomfort, she thought of her mother in the room below, the thought had another feeling mixed up with it, something dark and unkind…” (p. 141)
“With dragging feet, she left the last stretch of arid grass and started for home.” (p. 280) “She shook the idea off.” (p. 293)
“He sat back, it seemed to Frances, as if not quite satisfied with what he’d heard, but with an air of patience, of calculation, of being prepared to accept it for now…” (p. 395).
In this literary blog I review novels and other works of fiction, deconstructing and appreciating them from the perspective of craft, or how the writer is creating the work’s effects. I am “reading like a writer” to use author Francine Prose’s coinage, and I’m endebted to her wonderful book Reading Like a Writer for showing how much can be gained by this approach.