BEHIND THE GREAT STORIES THERE ARE GREAT SENTENCES

Author: By Tim Gautreaux

Date: SUNDAY, October 19, 1997

Page: P4

Section: Books

One of my favorite short-story writers is E. Annie Proulx, who uses words the way a stonecutter uses his chisel. While reading her collection ``Heart Songs,'' I ran across a nice beginning to a story titled ``Bedrock'': ``Maureen split wood in the bare yard, surrounded by a circle of broken bark. A blue sheet of cloud marbled with heat lightning lay against the horizon.'' I know I'm trapped when I read lines like those. I'll be stuck in a chair or leaning against a shelf in a library for a half-hour, at least. I'm not going to stop reading because I have been relocated by that language and have to read myself out of this new place where the storyteller has set me down. In the same way, when I had a taste of the first sentence of Proulx's story ``Negatives,'' I had to keep coming back for more. ``Year after year rich people moved into the mountains and built glass houses at high elevations; at sunset when the valleys were smothered in leathery shadow, the heliodor mansions flashed like an armada signaling for the attack.''

Now, not all language has to be as sinewy as a two-dollar steak to be riveting. Another of my favorite writers is Joy Williams, who, to my way of thinking, has written a landmark short story, ``Taking Care,'' which is a monument of direct, simple language and understatement, a story that taught me how to write about emotion. Witness: ``Jones is waiting in the lobby for the results of his wife's operation. Has there ever been a time before dread? He would be grateful even to have dread back, but it has been lost, for a long time, in rapid possibility, probability and fact. The baby sits on his knees and plays with his tie.'' People who have not written fiction have little notion of how complicated it is to write so simply. It takes a light touch to let the reader see life's great disasters looming under a thin glaze of words. I guess it's like watching one of those old pressure cookers working away, knowing that if that thin, quiet metal splits, the power inside . . . well.

Other great storytellers have delighted me with the way they generate original interesting characters through quiet, fiercely controlled language, a style summed up in the beginning of Andre Dubus's story ``The Last Moon.'' ``The murder began someplace in her heart, a place she had never been . . .'' I wasn't going to stop reading that one, either. As a matter of fact, I've noticed that most of the good language-handlers have a knack for getting the story going fast, as though the urgent beauty of their words demands that the reader not be delayed even for a moment.

Amy Bloom opens her story ``Love Is Not a Pie'' like this: ``In the middle of the eulogy at my mother's boring and heart-breaking funeral, I began to think about calling off the wedding.'' And her tale ``Only You'' tells us ``Marie, who is not a very sexual person, who cannot forgive her body or its middle-aged alterations, gets almost all her needs met at The Cut Above, Alvin Myerson's beauty salon.'' These stories are off and running. Their beginnings look simple, as though they were easy to write, and that's why I know they took a lot of thought and talent, the way something like ice dancing, which looks effortless, takes so much hard work.

Now, if I enjoy rarefied, lucid language, where do I go for the really classic stuff of legendary proportions? First stop here is Flannery O'Connor, of course, with her razor-blade sentences that make us smile and wince at the same time, little whiplashes of language that propel her stories along. The first sentence to come to mind, from ``Good Country People,'' is ``Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.'' And then there are her image sentences, such as the one describing the fundamentalist wife in ``Parker's Back'': ``She was plain, plain. The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two icepicks.'' When I feel I'm losing my sense of humor, or that I'm becoming sentimental, I read an O'Connor story and her prose adjusts my perceptions.

Some folks think that big language, the monumental, flowing, Cecil B. De Mille stuff, went out with Faulkner, and that any attempt to re-create it will sound pretentious and obsolete. Those readers are pretty close to right, but some of this language still can be found, most recently in the novels of Cormac McCarthy. ``All the Pretty Horses'' might be the best known. As Shelby Foote has told us, ``The novel's hero . . . is the English language.'' Once, I was in the middle of writing a flat passage of fiction and felt that I'd lost my grip on what it was that words were supposed to do, so I pulled down my copy of ``All the Pretty Horses'' and read a page, and that put me back in touch, let me view that country of words I'd lost sight of, and I felt like the two young cowboys in the book who had found the special place they'd been told to search out, where ``the grasslands lay in a deep violet haze and to the west thin flights of waterfowl were moving north before the sunset in the deep red galleries under the cloudbanks like schoolfish in a burning sea and on the foreland plain they saw vaqueros driving cattle before them through a gauze of golden dust.''

Some language I don't forget. It's a wonderful gift from the writer that lasts and lasts like a sweet medicinal lozenge captured above the tongue. The good language doesn't fade; even if I don't come back to it, it comes back to me on its own.