The Decade's Best Paragraph
It was a close contest, this category; a paragraph in David Foster Wallace's title essay of the book "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" almost received the nod. A litany of things Wallace saw in a seven-night caribbean cruise was worthy of consideration just for the sentence "I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lamé projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator." It's an image at once glamorous, disgusting and ludicrous, and all the more notable because of that.
In the end though, the honor must go to Cynthia Ozick for "The Puttermesser Papers." The story of Ruth Puttermesser, a middle-aged bureaucrat and intellectual who creates a golem and becomes mayor of New York City, is a fantastical novel, yet it's written in lucid, evocative prose, as in this paragraph:
A city washed pure. New York, city (perhaps) of seraphim. Wings had passed over her eyes. Her arms around Rappoport's heavy Times, Puttermesser held to her breast heartlessness, disorder, the desolation of sadness, ten thousand knives, hatred painted in the subways, explosions of handguns, bombs in the cathedrals of transportation and industry, Pennsylvania station, Grand Central, Rockefeller Center, terror in the broadcasting booths with their bustling equipment and seductive provincial voices, all the metropolitan airports assaulted, the decline of the Civil Service, maggots in high management. Rappoport's Times, repository of dead freight! All the same, carrying Rappoport's Times back to bed, Puttermesser had seen Paradise.
Too many contemporary writers seem afraid of hyperbole or fantasy; it's as though they do not trust readers to take their words figuratively. "The Puttermesser Papers" requires readers from the beginning to accept a literal landscape (the New York City Civil Service) infused with the visionary and metaphorical. The result is exhilarating, and the paragraph above is just one example from a book filled with a glorious rush of words and images.
— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)
