Notes on S P R A W L

I want to talk about S P R A W L, a fascinating work of innovative prose by Danielle Dutton, an instructor at the Jack Kerouac School (where I studied). I don't actually know Ms. Dutton, but I heard her at a reading and was immediately enamored with her funny, eccentric, surprising sentences. It is rare that I enjoy a prose reading; for some reason, it's easier for me to listen to poetry being read aloud. But whatever it was Ms. Dutton was reading commanded my attention more than anything else being read that evening.

So I bought her book, years later, and read it.

What is S P R A W L? A lot of things, I guess. A commentary on suburbia, on marriage, on the structures and norms of domestic life. S P R A W L could be called a monograph, a story, a novella, or simply a really long paragraph. It could be called fiction, or more likely, a work of innovative (experimental? whatever that means) prose.

If this book has a plot, I don't know what it is. Plotlessness is a complaint often lodged against particularly complex or heady books (David Foster Wallace's novels come readily to mind). The single-paragraph story--it's really just one long paragraph--is a seeming hodgepodge of first-person impressions. The narrator, a suburban woman, cooks dinner and dances around the sidewalk and writes (imaginary, unsent?) letters to her neighbors. The book is a series of fragments that, pieced together, don't seem to adhere to any larger plot structure.

So if it doesn't have a plot, is it a story? Sure, why not. It is, after all, a narrative (all prose works, and arguably poems, too, possess a narrative through-line, even without a superstructure like we associate with most fiction). This book, like much so-called innovative or experimental (whatever that is) fiction doesn't operate so much as a whole but as a collection of individually crafted, independent sentences.

My tentative thesis: if traditional fiction operates on the level of the book, the chapter, or the paragraph, innovative prose pieces operate at the level of the sentence.

For Ms. Dutton, each sentence should be read and swallowed and digested separately from its neighboring sentences; the author crafts her sentences with such wit and lapidary intensity that the parts overwhelm the whole. Why would you want to see the forest when its individual trees are already so spectacular?

An example, chosen at random:

In the morning, over coffee and eggs, I'm exhorted to be an individual. In the afternoon we wash our cars. The cat climbs in and out of empty boxes in the hall. I sleep with the window open and imagine. (98)

Four sentences, each portraying a different scene, a different set of impressions and concerns. The whole book is like this, really; an assemblage of disparate life-segments, memories in the making. Even though this book is written in the present tense, it seems to operate the way memory does: in fragments and non sequiturs.

I want to try writing sentences the way Ms. Dutton does. Here are mine:

My wife points out that older cats are less likely to be adopted than kittens. I drink my coffee and pick crust from my eyes. On the train to work I try to get inside the head of a shoe fetishist; does anyone fetishize flats or must they have heels? The secret to weight loss is portion control, everybody says. 

That was tough. My sentences kept slipping into one another.