The Story of a Sentence: Patrick Nathan
On meaning-making, memory, & why so much current sex writing is abject
On Sunday, February 16, at 3pm ET, we’re having the first meeting of the To a Green Thought Book Club. The novel we’re discussing is Dinaw Mengestu’s Someone Like Us. It’s not too late to join us—all you need to do is sign up as (or upgrade to) a Founding Member of this newsletter. You can do that by clicking on the subscribe button below. Many thanks to those of you who have already signed up—I’m looking forward to seeing you all in the Zoom. (In case you missed it, I shared some thoughts about book clubs and why I love them in my last newsletter.) A quick note: we’ll be emailing all Founding Members no later than Friday, February 14 with a Zoom link for the meeting. If you haven’t received that by Saturday, and think you should have, please shoot a quick email to greenwellassistant@gmail.com and we’ll get things sorted. You can also direct any other questions there.
In a new piece in Modern Language Quarterly, the scholar Matt Seybold begins his review of Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth with an extended reading of a section of Small Rain. It’s the bit where the narrator meditates for a very long time on a very short poem by George Oppen, and it is an immense pleasure for me to read Seybold’s reading of my narrator reading. MLQ is an academic journal, which means often it can be prohibitively expensive to read; but I think that this link should get you free access for the next several weeks. I haven’t read Kramnick’s book yet, but I hope to soon—along with John Guillory’s new book on close reading. My favorite subject, as anyone who has read this newsletter, including the dispatch below, surely knows.
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Something new this newsletter, maybe the start of an occasional series. I’ve written before about how sometimes a sentence will stop me in my tracks, sometimes so forcefully that I can’t move on until I’ve tried to take it apart to see how it works. When the sentence is by Henry James, I’m stuck with my own poor resources; but it occurred to me, a couple of weeks ago, as I taught the Patrick Nathan sentence discussed below, that with living writers there might be richer possibilities, and that it might be fun to get the writer’s take on how a sentence came to be, the pleasures and frustrations of writing it. The story of a sentence. I’ve never met Patrick Nathan IRL, though we’ve interacted online and in print a bit, most recently a few months ago when he interviewed me for Foglifter. I’m grateful to him for agreeing to chat with me again.
What you’ll find below are, first, an essay in which I get very nerdy about Patrick’s sentence, trying to lay out why I think it’s so remarkable, both a departure from and an extension of certain traditions in writing sex. This was all written before my conversation with Patrick—a way both of preparing for that conversation and of keeping myself honest should Patrick’s sense of the sentence and my own diverge. And then, below that, you’ll find an edited and condensed version of the chat Patrick and I had over Zoom. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did; you can let me know in the comments.
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The sharpest pang of writerly envy I felt in 2024 came from an adjective on page 53 of Patrick Nathan’s The Future Was Color. I’m pretty sure it was the year’s sexiest word. (I’ve written about this novel, Nathan’s second, before in this newsletter; it was one of my favorite reads of the year.) The novel’s protagonist, George Curtis (né György Kertész) is sitting on some rocks with his colleague and crush, hunky Jack Turner, watching two other men frolic in the sea. The libidinal lines between them are complicated: George met one of these men, the young Jacques (George’s nickname; he’s just another Jack), at a movie theater, and their hook-up has become a longer, hot, not entirely comfortable entanglement; but Jacques has become the property, more or less—not very strictly, sharing is caring—of Walt, the older man chasing him in the water. Walt is married to Madeline, a famous actress who is their hostess and doyenne, and who knows all about his proclivities; she’s now taking a nap in the boat they’ve all swum from.
Suddenly Jacques is screaming; George and Jack see Walt carrying him out of the water, a line of welts, jellyfish stings, rising on his abdomen. Jack knows a remedy, he says, but it isn’t pretty; Jacques might want to close his eyes. Jack is still at least notionally straight, though he has been teasing George in late-night work sessions (they’re both screenwriters; George has just had a monster movie hit), unbuttoning his shirt and stroking his fly, just this side of deniability; he knows he’s made himself the center of attention, and surely he’s showing of for George, for everybody. Here’s how Nathan writes it: