On the Line: Egan, Burnside, Whitehead

“And if more than eight lines of awkward dialogue threaten irrevocable awkwardness, silences like the one now elapsing between M and me are an even greater peril. And I am a guy who knows how to measure silences. But whereas in music, a prolonged pause adds power and vividness to the refrain that follows it, pauses in conversation have the opposite effect, of debasing whatever comes next to the point that a perfectly witty riposte will be reduced to the verbal equivalent of a shrunken head, if too long a pause precedes it.”

That is from The Candy House, Jennifer Egan’s excellent sequel to her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. The bit about how the speaker is “a guy who knows how to measure silences” is a call back to a bit in Goon Squad when the younger version of this character kept track of songs with pauses in them. Here, older and maybe a little wiser, that character finds additional (and painful) meaning in silence.

. . .

"I stood out in the road, by Brewster’s Yard,and waited for a ghost, since ghosts were true,a pair of Clydesdales pressing to the fenceto listen: rain; the music of the spheres;or else, those calls I knew, from other worlds,the wind across the sands, a whimbrel’s cry."

That is from one of two poems by John Burnside published in the March 21, 2024, edition of the London Review of Books. I didn’t know what a “whimbrel” was before I read this. I enjoyed the comprehension void before I filled it with a simple Google search, during which the word could have referred to anything at all. It’s nothing special, but I won’t say what a “whimbrel” is so you, too, can — if you also don’t know — take a pause before doing the search yourself. 

. . .

“Out of the Zenith hi-fi shook crazy saxophone stuff from the Village. Freddie could have identified who was playing, and on what basement bebop nights he'd seen them, but whenever Carney heard those sounds he felt trapped in a room of lunatics.”

That is from the novel Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, whom I had not gotten around to reading until now. It’s a great book, and there’s a lot packed into those two sentences, key among the data: (1) the identification of the make of hi-fi relates the main character’s job as a furniture salesman, a form of employment that begins as background information but comes to serve as a filter for how he processes the world around him, and (2) the notion of jazz as being like something from “lunatics” is a marker of a cultural divide between that character, who is Black, and certain aspects of the culture in which he was raised. (I’ve been on a novel-reading tear. Harlem Shuffle was my eighth in 2024. Reading is a form of writing procrastination that sort of doubles as research.)