Brian Dillon's New Book Focuses on Sentences From Anne Boyer, Robert Smithson, Joan Didion, and More

At LARB, Katie da Cunha Lewin looks carefully at Brian Dillon's new book, Suppose a Sentence (New York Review Books, 2020), which is "composed of essays of varying length, each focused on a single sentence from the works of 27 writers, ranging from Shakespeare to Anne Boyer." An excerpt of da Cunha Lewin's precise attention:

Dillon is a great appreciator of that vexing descriptor, style, even when it is awkward or clunky, as seen in his essay on Robert Smithson. Smithson’s sentence, “Noon-day sun cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture,” Dillon explains, “insists on [its] main conceit,” an image of an image of an image. It also echoes Smithson’s sculptures, becoming “a sentence as container for the rubble of meaning”; its awkwardness becomes a model of making art. I like these inclusions; I like to see writers not always producing elegance — after all, not all thoughts are elegant. Dillon generally seems to be drawn to ambiguities, odd word choices, confusing pairings: “[I]sn’t this also a slightly confusing phrase?” he asks about Elizabeth Bowen; “Is it not in the nature of a flash that it should flash rather than quiver?” he wonders in his piece on John Ruskin. Many of the sentences prompt more questions than Dillon could ever answer. These moments are united by the idea that so much of writing is the product of fortuitous accidents: an overzealous editor could have changed something, a translator could have done something else, or the writer could have decided against that extra syllable, but they didn’t, and here is what remains.

Read more of this essay at Los Angeles Review of Books.