Fraction called my prose style "florid" today, in a way that suggested that this is a Bad Thing.
(He called me "creepy," too, but I remain unconvinced of that.)
Fraction, of course, is a Man Of ACTION!, and thus heir to the terse, jagged music of Papa Hemingway, whose influence has held a slightly improbable sway on several generations of "cutting-edge" writers (Coupland, close the door on your way out: Chuck, enjoy it while it lasts). The Man of Action (as opposed to the Man of Letters) rejects the ornamental, impeccably-turned sentences of the Victorians in favor of a sparse, highly-fraught staccato. The Man of Action takes prose out of the salon and into the streets, the coffeehouse, the savannah, the battlefield literal or metaphorical. His work is reportage, spare and pithy and closely-observed. His constructions are simple, his words few.
It's still a valid model: but it is not the only model.
And it is, I would argue, an outdated model. To wit, that Every generation gets the prose style it can afford. That is, an era's prose is influenced, consciously or no, by that era's dominant medium for communication. For Hemingway, that was the telegram: the prohibitive cost-per-word pared his line down to its shapely nakedness, and legions followed his lead.
But that's really no longer necessary, is it? Cost is hardly a driving factor for brevity in Web-based prose: images are bandwidth-hogs, yeah, but text? A pittance among pittances.
So why not a return to the looping, recursive constructions of De Quincey and his ilk? Studies suggest that reading and writing complex prose strengthen neural pathways in the brain and can help to stave off Alzheimer's disease.
The time is now.
Your brain is at stake.
Long live the New Fop!
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