What do you consider beautiful prose?

I admire the evocative use of metaphor or simile; done with a deft touch, it can add so much depth to a story. It doesn't have to be purple to be effective.

One example that comes to mind which I just jotted down recently is from Mary Renault's The Friendly Young Ladies, when a woman spots a dear friend of hers across a theater aisle:

A little star of pleasure and happiness shot up within her and hung for a moment like a rocket at the top of its trajectory, sharpening the edges of things with light. She rose in her seat to make her way round to him, then stopped and sat down again, while the rocket turned earthward, diminished to a fading point, and went out.

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That's incredibly rich and evocative, and (trust me) that much the more so in its context, for the incremental way in which it exposes an emotion and advances the book toward its climax.

I am always struck by writers with the ability to give emotions that kind of physicality. I keep examples of them to hand because it's what I want to learn to do. (And when I feel that I have managed it myself, I bust open with delight.)

The question asked in the original post is "what do you consider beautiful prose," which is a different question from "what do you consider effective prose," although for many readers there might be some overlap between the two - and for other readers, there might be no overlap at all. So it's important to define your terms, I think.

I'm relatively new to AW, and one thing that has surprised me is how discussions like this go on with relatively few examples. Perhaps the "respect your fellow writers" rule - which is an excellent rule - makes people hesitant to point out examples of things that don't work for them or styles they do not care for; but I am also not seeing a lot of specific examples of what people do consider beautiful. I think it would help a lot to define terms; not everyone has read everything, of course, so I won't necessarily be familiar with whatever other people name as their examples of this or that, but it can at least provide some kind of metric for what we are talking about.

BethS said:

I think Lakey meant actual excerpts, not just book titles. Though I could be wrong.

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Excerpts would be great; I offered one up thread because I happened to have it handy. But really, even just naming titles and authors (which some have also done) is better than nothing, because it provides some metric for what is in your head when you think of "beautiful". And of course not everyone will have read the thing you offer up as an example - I acknowledged that - but some folks might.

So, here are some more examples that come to mind - and now I do not have excerpts to hand so I won't offer them - since I am the one asserting that examples are more useful than just making assertions about beauty.

Consider Lawrence Durrell, who is generally said to write gorgeously. I read the entire Alexandria Quartet and indeed did find his way of describing the city and the natural landscapes around it remarkably lovely. But I cringed right and left at his juvenile characterizations of women. So do I find Durrell's writing beautiful? Maybe for some definitions of beautiful. I didn't enjoy reading him. I might enjoy analyzing his sentence structure and use of language, though, on some carefully selected excerpts. But the beauty of his writing doesn't get in the way of the enjoyment for me - it's not overly purple in a distracting way. What gets in the way of the enjoyment is something else, something in the way he conceptualizes women.

Another example: I read some Djuna Barnes earlier this year, a modernist, a high expressionist, a favorite of T.S. Eliot. I found her writing incredibly beautiful and at the same time almost impenetrable. It was more like listening to music than reading, in the sense that the passages evoked emotions even when I couldn't follow the thread of the narrative. There was a whole sequence involving circus performers at a cocktail party and, later, characters attending a circus and falling in love there. Was the circus real, or was it a metaphor? I don't know, and I almost don't care, because I'm not sure it matters. Barnes is painting ideas, to the extent that the narrative sequence is not of prime importance. But it is not always easy to read. I think one could argue that Barnes is a case of beauty getting in the way of story; one could argue the other way, too.

Then on the other end of the spectrum: Shirley Jackson, who awes me with straightforwardness. There is nothing flashy at all; her prose is incisive and evocative and moody. I find beauty in that deceptive simplicity. It's beautiful because it is unadorned and stunningly effective. But that plainness is not the absence of richness. She's never just telling a story, although you could certainly read her that way if you want to. The layers of meaning are there, and in a sense the prose is getting out of the way to expose them.