The Art of Understatement

A softly thrown punch that hits hard.

Last month, I re-read Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing, which meant I got to re-read this paragraph and its laconic last line:

“I know people who own thousands of books and can tell you the exact spot where every single one of them is shelved. They colour coordinate them, or arrange them by alphabet or author or subject. Well, that is what collectors enjoy doing, with books arranged like stamps in albums. Good luck to them. My father’s sock drawer was just the same.”

I’d forgotten the line, so I got it fresh for a second time, and I laughed at this unexpected snark, her graceful derision, a crocodile smile. The unflashy flourish hits so hard because of how softly the punch is thrown. If she’d belaboured the laugh line the humour would sag, but it’s dropped in deftly and moved on from smoothly, the way these things work best.

This is one of my favourite novelistic tricks: when a writer casually shatters your heart or mends one of its fractures with a single sentence, while seeming infinitely chill about the whole thing. They raise a smile in the midst of a bad day with a few well-placed words, or toss a profundity into your soul like a penny into a fountain, and they do it with nonchalant confidence, the way Superman hops over tall buildings without breaking a sweat.

One of my favourites in this category comes in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, when Zuckerman is in Lonoff’s study and he hears voices in the room above:

“I thought of climbing onto Lonoff’s desk; it was easily a foot or so higher than the daybed and would put my ear only inches from the room’s low ceiling. But if I should fall, if I should alter by a millimeter the placement of his typing paper, if somehow I should leave footprints — no, I couldn’t risk it and shouldn’t even have been thinking of it. I had gone far enough already by expropriating the corner of the desk to compose my half dozen unfinished letters home. My sense of propriety, not to mention the author’s gracious hospitality, required me to restrain myself from committing such a sordid, callow little indecency.

But in the meantime I had done it.”

That turn! There’s nothing telegraphed to say brace yourself for the kick, nothing more than those eight words, and no milking the laugh. This kind of writing makes me want to throw pages of it at my friends.

It does more than make me laugh (though that would be enough). This single line exemplifies one of the novel’s central struggles — between the ought and the want. It’s a fight between Nathan’s superego and the writer’s id, reflecting the conflict between Nathan’s father telling him to stay quiet about his family’s faith and Nathan’s urge to display it all on the page, like a dissected frog pinned with skin spread and guts exposed. The writer here is a free-thinking scientist of the soul. Roth shows-doesn’t-tell with this understated one-line reveal.

There’s one of these in Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Here, the reader inhabits a character by way of the second person; you are in a hospital, in a coma, aware that your parents are at your bedside:

“Your mother is in the bedside chair. She is wearing a dress printed with strawberries and birds. Using a long needle, she is stringing brightly coloured origami cranes into garlands. [...] Though you cannot see him, you become aware of the fact that your father is sitting on the floor. He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them.

This is marriage.”

The greatest of these, for my money, comes at the end of The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro is the maestro of minimalist mood music, saying so much with so little and dazzling us even with mundane sentences. I’m not going to quote it. Read the book if you haven’t already. The context for what he achieves in Remains is the 236 pages that precede this single, devastating line, and I don’t want to diminish this one-sentence third-act climax by reproducing it here.

It’s worth, however, sharing Ishiguro’s thoughts on how the line came to be in his book:

“I thought I’d finished Remains, but then one evening heard Tom Waits singing his song ‘Ruby’s Arms’. It’s a ballad about a soldier leaving his lover sleeping in the early hours to go away on a train. Nothing unusual in that. But the song is sung in the voice of a rough American hobo type utterly unaccustomed to wearing his emotions on his sleeve. And there comes a moment, when the singer declares his heart is breaking, that’s almost unbearably moving because of the tension between the sentiment itself and the huge resistance that’s obviously been overcome to utter it. Waits sings the line with cathartic magnificence, and you feel a lifetime of tough-guy stoicism crumbling in the face of overwhelming sadness. I heard this and reversed a decision I’d made, that Stevens would remain emotionally buttoned up right to the bitter end. I decided that at just one point — which I’d have to choose very carefully — his rigid defence would crack, and a hitherto concealed tragic romanticism would be glimpsed.”

It’s no spoiler to say that the moment absolutely lands, that it’s timed just right without a letter out of place. This is the sort of writing that take years, tragedies, effort-effort-effort to carve out of life’s granite looking soft as silk. It doesn’t land the same way the second time, nothing’s quite like that first surprise, but it stays with you. The joy of it lingers as the freshness fades, a flower pressed between the pages of the book.

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