Faulkner's book has a one-sentence chapter, a chapter with itemised points and different speaking voices in different chapters.
(With rather hamfisted symmetry, the novel's other one-sentence chapter describes the bachelor routine of the shoemaker, who is a sort of anti-Victor. He has Nureyev's perfectionism without his relish for life, while Victor has Nureyev's vitality without the sluice of art).
I appreciated fiction's relative adagio, and realized that writing a slowly blossoming manuscript allowed me to ruminate about language as well as the architecture of sentences, chapters and the arc of the entire God-only-knows-how-it-will end story.
The American author of A Visit From the Goon Squad had an online hit in April when she published "Black Box", a short story she'd written for the New Yorker in novel fashion: it appeared in miniature, one- or two-sentence chapters, each short enough to be tweeted.
The doctrine of proportionality between offence and sentence in chapter 20 echoes through the centuries too.
She announces this in the first sentence of Chapter 5 of "Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives," where she writes: I want a boy because I already know about girls.
A sentence in chapter 30 of A Natural Woman tells you quite a bit about Carole King, whose songs have been familiar for 50 years to anyone who knows anything about pop.
The additional form of status realism is only mentioned by John in the final sentence of chapter 17.
Take, for example, the first sentence in Chapter 1 of Hooper's Of Moths and Men (Hooper 2002): "To begin at the beginning, the Lepidoptera are divided into two orders: butterflies (Rhopalocera) and moths (Heterocera)." Those who have no experience of entomological classification may not realize that this first sentence is simply wrong.
In particular, the death of Henry Fleming's Christ-like friend, Jim Conklin, is noted for evidence of this reading, as well as the concluding sentence of chapter nine, which refers to the sun as "fierce wafer" in the sky.
It was absolutely liberating to just get up in the morning and go right back to the sentence or chapter I had been working on the day before, with nobody demanding that I make breakfast or tie shoes.
