The Red-Haired Woman represents so poor an effort at stringing

together a shambolic and pretentious narrative in which no one

could possibly believe a word, that it appears to suggest that once

you have won the Nobel Prize, which Pamuk did in 2006, that from

then on just about anything goes – and everything does exactly that

in this slow-moving, repetitive drawl of a yarn, largely told by a

smug narrator who brings self-absorption, along with purple prose,

to new levels of irritation.

The above is the second paragraph of a book review by a well-known critic in one of Ireland’s leading newspapers. The novel under consideration is The Red-Haired Woman by the Turkish writer Orphan Pamuk. The review, surprisingly, contains many examples of the faults assigned to the novelist’s writing. The following is a breakdown of these deficiencies in just this one eighty-three word paragraph.

The first criticism leveled against Pamuk’s prose is that it’s shambolic, which means disorganised or chaotic. The critic’s phrasing of this observation is itself confused. Lets examine the first two clauses of the sentence:

/The Red-Haired Woman represents so poor an effort at stringing

together a shambolic and pretentious narrative/ /in which no one

could possibly believe a word/

The problem with the first clause is that no writer ever sits down in the morning and tries to string together a shambolic and pretentious narrative. What I presume is meant, is Pamuk’s effort at stringing together a narrative was shambolic and pretentious. When writing criticism, one needs to be exact. The second clause in this section is verbal padding. Nine words can be replaced by positioning a single adjective before the referenced noun. These issues can be resolved by using phrasing that clarifies the meaning and removing any redundancies.

The Red-Haired Woman represents so poor an effort at

stringing together a shambolic and pretentious narrative

in which no one could possibly believe a word,

becomes

The Red-Haired Woman is such a disorganized, pretentious

and unbelievable narrative

The next section is a great example of redudancy and unnecessary repetition.

/that it appears to suggest that once you have won the

Nobel Prize/ /which Pamuk did in 2006/ /that from then

on just about anything goes – /

The construction ‘appears to’ is redundant, because suggest is a indefinite term that doesn’t need the modification ‘appears to’. The second clause is almost completely redundant because the prior clause implies Pamuk won the Nobel Prize, and the only new information it contains is the year in which he did so, which isn’t a significant strut of the argument. However including this clause necessitates the awkward ‘that from then on’ beginning to the third clause of this section, and in no way does knowing the date Pamuk won the Nobel Prize compensate for the atrocious phrasing. This may appear like nit-picking, but a sensitivity to redundancy is an important element of stylistic rigour.

Repitition should also be avoided. ‘That’ occurs three times over the course of two short lines in this section, and this kind of recurrence is simply lazy. The ‘just about’ preceding ‘anything goes’ is the kind of verbal padding that should never make it past a copy editor. These issues can be resolved by removing the second clause entirely, and any other redundancies.

/that it appears to suggest that once you have won the

Nobel Prize/ /which Pamuk did in 2006/ /that from then

on just about anything goes – /

becomes

that it suggests once you have won the Nobel Prize,

anything goes –

The second half of this overlong sentence, which begins with the questionable use of a hyphen, demonstrates the same problems of semantic confusion and unnecessary repitition:

and everything does exactly that in this slow-moving,

repetitive drawl of a yarn, largely told by a smug narrator

who brings self-absorption, along with purple prose,

to new levels of irritation.

The first clause of this section could be rewritten as ‘and everything does exactly that in this slow-moving, repetitive slow-sounding yarn.’ To drawl is to speak slowly, which doesn’t really make sense in this context because the speed at which a book ‘speaks’ is entirely based on how quickly one can read. The drawl may refer to the pace of the narrative, in which case the critic has just repeated ‘slow-moving’ and repetition, in a clause complaining of that exact phenomenon, is ironic to say the least.

The second and third clauses detail traits of the narrator the reviewer finds unpalatable. The judgement of self-absorption is unremarkable, but assigning purple prose to the narrator is problematic. A narrator doesn’t produce purple prose because a narrator is an imaginary character. It is the author who is the source of purple prose, and it’s difficult to tell who exactly the critic finds smug, self-absorbed and irritating – the novel’s narrator or the author who thinks once he has won the Nobel Prize, anything goes.

The conflation of the author and the narrator is unfortunate as it opens the review to the charge of being ad hominen. I’m willing to hazard that the critic in question is unfamiliar, in an intimate sense, with Pamuk, and to attempt to deduce the personal characteristics of an author from their writing is a rookie approach reliant on the worst kind of pop psychology. Behind every author is a living, breathing human who, at least according to the SF writer Issac Asimov, can be classified into one of two kinds: those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review. To avoid a charge of ad hominem it is best, when conducting a literary postmortem, to be meticulous and impersonal, clinical even, and that way your comments can’t be misconstrued as being inspired by personal disappointment, inadequacy or venom. Hate the game, not the player.

These problems can be resolved by excising the repitition and any redundancies, and clarifying who exactly the purple prose belongs to.

So overall the paragraph:

The Red-Haired Woman represents so poor an effort

at stringing together a shambolic and pretentious

narrative in which no one could possibly believe a word,

that it appears to suggest that once you have won the

Nobel Prize, which Pamuk did in 2006, that from then

on just about anything goes – and everything does exactly

that in this slow-moving, repetitive drawl of a yarn,

largely told by a smug narrator who brings self-absorption,

along with purple prose, to new levels of irritation.

could be edited to:

The Red-Haired Woman is such a disorganized,

pretentious and unbelievable narrative that it suggests

once you have won the Nobel Prize, anything goes –

and anything does in this slow-moving, repetitive

yarn, largely told by a smug narrator who brings

self-absorption, in purple prose, to new levels of irritation.

When you shrink an eighty-three word sentence to a forty-nine word one, and still manage to clarify its meaning, it is a fair criticism to say that sentence is overwritten, slow moving, lumbering and shambolic. It is also pretentious to attempt such a long sentence and pad it out with redundant dross. A long sentence should have elegant, streamlined architecture; its meaning should be concise and transparant, capable of leading a reader through its delicate maze without them ever losing grasp of the semantic thread; and most importantly, it should know when to stop.

I am not acquainted with Pamuk’s work nor do I write this analysis in his defence. However, I do value good writing, and it is depressing to see a leading critic in a well-regarded newspaper conduct reviews in the kind of sloppy prose that would be discouraged upon entry into any decent English Lit. undergraduate program.