SOS has been reading up, this morning, on the just-sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and she found these extremely instructive sentences in a 2018 NYT article, so pay attention.
Unlike Mr. Deripaska, Lord Barker had a largely spotless reputation. His only minor brushes with scandal came in 2006, when he left his wife to live with a male interior decorator, and in 2012, while serving as energy minister, when he made the tabloids for using a microwave at Parliament to warm a cushion for his pet dachshund, Otto.
LOLOL. Do you see what the two extremely clever writers who produced these two sentences did? Do you see why the ghost of Lady Bracknell shines bright out of these two sentences? I mean, read it out loud, using her upperest of upper class British accents. Go on!
First, their set-up, and it’s vintage Oscar Wilde, as in
The General was essentially a man of peace …
Then … Bada bing bada boom: … except in his domestic life.
So here we begin with another insipid cliche: spotless reputation… Though that sly largely tells you Bracknell waits panting in the wings. Largely, essentially – insert a seemingly innocuous adverb in front of your cliche and let fly.
That short first sentence, in other words, is the set-up. The second, much longer sentence, will launch us into the realm of absurdity… Or not launch, really – launch suggests an instant liftoff, whereas the trick actually involves sort of the opposite of a liftoff… a kind of sly gradual fizzling out is more like it… an operation whereby the sentence, instead of gaining steam and significance (writers are typically instructed to put their most significant material toward the end of their sentences, to work up to it — in part so that the reader is led to want to read further), delightfully self-deflates, leaving us in a terrain so beyond-trivial, so astoundingly non-serious, so insanely petty, so infinitesimally small, as to …
I mean, ask yourself: Why didn’t they write dog? Why did they belabor, bedeck, and bedew the sentence with breed and name? With warm? With pet? Have the writers not read Politics and the English Language?
Of course they have. But I don’t pay a fortune to subscribe to the New York Times in order to march solemnly through a stern-faced rendition of what is in fact a farcical story featuring sleazy twisted self-regarding idiots – I want a sense, as I read, that, along with the obligatory surface rendition of events, the writers grasp the sick world that set the events in motion. The writers correctly pinpointed the dachshund detail as a … sly … opening to that world, and they went with it.
The only thing SOS thinks could have improved this writing would have been if Lord Barker had inadvertently put the dachshund rather than the cushion in the microwave, in the same way Miss Prism inadvertently put the baby rather than the manuscript in the handbag. Alas, real life seldom cooperates to this extent.
Though it is certainly true that we got more than we might have expected in the name Lord Barker. Here life lent the whole thing a very Richard Brinsley Sheridan touch. Nice.