Elegant Tricksiness
Mike Hender
Critical Reading
29 November 2012
Approach
• Context
• Genre/Audience – middle-class, middle aged women
• Purpose/Message – men are not fulfilling our needs
• Structure – classic ‘making the sale’
• Use of Language – clear, rich, varied, emotional
• Conclusion – buy this book (if you’re a woman!)
My Context
• Book Group – 7 men, 60 – 75
• Public Sector/Business, Technology/Humanities
• My last course – English Lit ‘O’ Level 1959
• Then 50 years of Science/Tech/Management
• Non-Fiction OK, Fiction a Challenge
• Example: The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
Author’s Context
JENNI RUSSELL
Sunday Times 1 Jan 2012
• Influential journalist and
broadcaster
• Writing at the turn of the year
• In the leading middleclass broadsheet
• In the fiction section of the book reviews
• ~70% of fiction is read by women
The Hook
“They flourish their elegant sentences,
their self-conscious tricksiness and their
implausible plot twists as if this were
the point of writing.”
JENNI RUSSELL Sunday Times 1 Jan 2012
Two nights ago I stayed up until 3am, unwilling to put the light out until I had
finished my book. I was reading that rare thing: a novel about contemporary
life that felt revelatory, wise and true. I didn't want to leave the company of
my characters until I had no choice. I was caught up in the thoughts and
emotions of strangers' lives. . .
Emotive
Language
The Hook
“They flourish their elegant sentences,
their self-conscious tricksiness and their
implausible plot twists as if this were
the point of writing.”
JENNI RUSSELL Sunday Times 1 Jan 2012
Two nights ago I stayed up until 3am, unwilling to put the light out until I had
finished my book. I was reading that rare thing: a novel about contemporary
life that felt revelatory, wise and true. I didn't want to leave the company of
my characters until I had no choice. I was caught up in the thoughts and
emotions of strangers' lives. . .
Tricolon
The Hook
“They flourish their elegant sentences,
their self-conscious tricksiness and their
implausible plot twists as if this were
the point of writing.”
JENNI RUSSELL Sunday Times 1 Jan 2012
Two nights ago I stayed up until 3am, unwilling to put the light out until I had
finished my book. I was reading that rare thing: a novel about contemporary
life that felt revelatory, wise and true. I didn't want to leave the company of
my characters until I had no choice. I was caught up in the thoughts and
emotions of strangers' lives . . .
Anaphora
Message/Audience
What is missing are today's home-grown equivalents of Updike, Roth, Tyler,
Shields and Franzen – the confident chroniclers of swathes of middle-class life.
The big literary prizes are going to foreign, historical or small-scale books. I am
baffled by the praise and prominence given to McEwan's Booker-shortlisted
On Chesil Beach, or to Barnes's Booker prizewinner, The Sense of an Ending.
Both are principally devoted to the close examination of the psyche of dull,
mean-minded men. They are dismal, crabbed little narratives, without warmth
or depth or exuberance, written in a limited emotional register.
They flourish their elegant sentences, their self-conscious tricksiness and their
implausible plot twists as if this were the point of writing. It isn't. Great writers
offer more than this stunted view of humanity. They ally elegance to a sense of
human potential as well as its limitations. That is what is absent here.
“Ladies, men aren’t fulfilling our needs!”
Metaphors?
The Vision
Novels have taught me how to live. They have taken me beyond
the barriers of diffidence and convention into other people's
private passions, longings and doubts.
Through books I have known what it is to be a bewildered
Russian count caught up in battle; a disillusioned Victorian wife
married to a stolid bore; a clever, wary, socially insecure courtier
to Henry VIII.
I have been inside the minds of French revolutionaries, Philip
Pullman's witches, Iris Murdoch's bed swapping couples,
Marilynne Robinson's gentle, dying pastor.
Tricolon
Metaphors?
Emotive
Language
FUD
My friends in middle age, like everyone else, are dealing with private anxieties that
occasionally surface in a moment of anguish.
Women married for 20 years despair about their loss of desire for their husbands.
Men in second marriages find they have nothing in common with their younger
wives. Parents watch with fear as their children drop out of university, or return
home without confidence, ambition or jobs.
Fiftysomethings fear their careers have peaked and their status and income will
start to fall. They don't know how to face years of declining power and health.
Twentysomethings are haunted by the anxiety that their careers may never take off
and they may never meet the right partner.
The wealth of choices haunts everybody.
Did I make the right one? How will others think of me? What did other people do?
And the recommended book is . . .
William Nicholson's trilogy of life in contemporary Sussex, which
begins with The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, is what's been
keeping me up at nights.
Nicholson follows a group of families, including unfaithful couples,
sexually precocious teenagers and difficult grandmothers over the
course of a week in each book.
He writes about doubt, love, equivocation, treachery, loyalty and joy,
but he does so with such empathy and shifts one's perspectives with
such unobtrusive skill that he widens one's sense of what it means to
be human.
One finishes his books exhilarated by liking and understanding others
more than one did before.
Classic Structure for Making the Sale
• Get the Attention of the Audience
– “Two nights ago I stayed up until 3am, unwilling to put the light
out . . .”
• Identify and pump up the Need, Want or Pain
– “They are dismal, crabbed little narratives, without warmth or
depth or exuberance . . .”
• Create a Vision of the Ideal State
– “Novels have taught me how to live . . . !”
• Show how it Relates to the Audience
– “Women married for 20 years despair about their loss of desire
for their husbands . . .”
• Offer a Solution
Use of Language
•
•
•
•
High on emotion
Knows her Audience
Tricolons
Variation in Sentence length
Conclusion
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Nicely structured article
Clarity and strength of message
Well structured emotional trajectory
Highly targeted to her audience
Builds openness, relevance, empathy
Ends with a clear recommendation
I bought the book – but alas, it’s not for me!
End
Links:
Our book group – http://www.hender.net/book-group
Oxford Critical Reading course – http://www.hender.net/books-oxford
Jenni Russell
Jenni Russell is a British columnist and broadcaster. She writes
the Monday political column for The Evening Standard and also
writes regularly for The Sunday Times and The Guardian.
She worked for many years at the BBC and ITN, most recently as
editor of The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4. She was tipped as
one of the candidates to be the next controller of BBC Radio 4,
following the resignation of Mark Damazer.
She is married to media executive Stephen Lambert and lives in
London, with their two children.
Jenni Russell
Russell studied History at St Catharine's College, Cambridge and went on to become a
BBC News Trainee. She worked for the BBC, as well as ITN and Channel 4 News. In
1998 she became joint editor of BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight, becoming one of
the first people to pioneer job-sharing within the BBC.
On leaving the BBC, Russell began writing comment pieces for The New Statesman
and The Guardian and now also regularly writes for The Sunday Times. In 2011 she
began writing the Monday political column for The Evening Standard. She is a vocal
critic of the failings of the education system and of the increasing abuse of civil
liberties under the Labour government.
According to The Spectator she is a key figure in the New Establishment, due to her
friendship with both Steve Hilton, David Cameron's director of strategy, and Ed
Miliband, the newly elected Labour leader.
In September 2010 she was shortlisted for the Commentariat of the Year award by
Editorial Intelligence.
In May 2011 she won the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism in 2011.