What I Learned from Jennifer Egan’s Use of Sensory Detail
A Craft Essay
by Sandy Smith

On a friend’s repeated urging to read Jennifer Egan’s 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Visit from the Goon Squad, I went to my small local bookstore. They had no copies of Goon Squad in stock, but there was a single copy of Egan’s 2006 title, The Keep. Since Egan is a well-respected author and the flap copy looked promising (“…relentlessly gripping page-turner…rich forms…transfixing themes”), I took it home and dove in. I didn’t expect to be as engaged as the hyperbolic blurbs promised, but I found myself fully immersed almost immediately. When I came up for air nearly an hour later, I asked myself how The Keep had managed to pull me in so quickly and so thoroughly that I’d missed the ding of the microwave and the beguiling aroma of leftover lasagna.

Over a dish of sadly steam-logged pasta, I went back to the beginning to re-read, paying closer attention to try and suss out what was so gripping. It hit me that Egan was using sensory description in a way that allowed me to subconsciously ground myself in the novel’s world. And her sensory cues were so masterfully deployed, they’d superseded the sounds and smells of my own kitchen (a rarity).

At first read, I didn’t know what it was about the opening pages that had hooked me or even that I was hooked. Nothing much was happening in the story yet, and the only character introduced at that point was neither likable nor unlikable. Nevertheless, I’d lost track of time (and dinner) because I was so absorbed.

Right away, in the first two paragraphs of page 1, Egan incorporates descriptors affecting all five senses: sight (“the towers had those square indentations… that little kids put on castles when they draw them”—an especially effective use because we have to dig into our own recollection of kids’ drawings to access that image); sound (“he heard [the falling leaves] crunching under his boots”); smell/taste (“the air was cold with a smoky bite”—we can smell the burning leaves but the word “bite” here evokes taste as well); touch (“Danny felt [the leaves] landing in his hair”).

Egan’s particular genius in utilizing descriptors this way lies in her subtlety. At first read, I didn’t know what it was about the opening pages that had hooked me or even that I was hooked. Nothing much was happening in the story yet, and the only character introduced at that point was neither likable nor unlikable. Nevertheless, I’d lost track of time (and dinner) because I was so absorbed. Once I started paying attention though, it leapt out at me like one of those hidden pictures that emerges in 3D from a seemingly random pattern of shapes: Egan doesn’t avalanche the reader with a surfeit of showy adjectives and adverbs. That kind of showboating is tempting, and I’ve been guilty of it in my own work (and consequently grateful for editors), but being heavy-handed with spurious details comes off more as tedious than captivating. A deft writer like Egan knows restraint pays off, and instead she salts the text with sensory cues that dwell below even normally perceptive (as opposed to critical) reading, serving as a means of connection rather than distraction.

The sensory description continues throughout the narrative. Even brief passages contain elements of touch, smell, sight, and taste: “Danny picked it up and smelled: mold, wet wood. The glass was thin and hand-blown, colored bubbles around its base. The taste was outright freakish: a reek of decay mixed with some sweet, fresh thing the decay hadn’t touched.” ). Sensory reference points not only engage the reader viscerally in the moment, but they create the collective ambiance of the book, which lingers between reading sessions and helps the reader re-engage the next time they pick up the book. And wouldn’t this be an efficient way to add depth to a piece of short fiction too, where economy of language is especially important? I tucked this lesson into my craft toolkit as well.

Familiar sensory details take on additional significance when the narrative gets tricky, a consequence of varying settings and personas. The Keep’s narrative voice switches between close third person POV and first person. For long portions of text, these are distinct and easy to follow. But as the book reaches its climax, these voices blur and intermingle, as the story lines themselves do, so that the identity of the first-person narrator is eventually revealed through the third-person narration in a contextual flip-flop. This fairly complex structure is made navigable by a breadcrumb trail in the form of relatable sensory cues. Whether the text drops us into the dungeon of a decrepit European castle or an American prison cafeteria, we can orient ourselves in the foreign landscape by the smells, tastes, textures, and sounds that are as close as the dinner plate on our kitchen table.

At the castle, Danny observes the neglected pool: “Its water was black and thick with scum . . . a smell of something from deep inside the earth meeting open air, full of metal and protein and blood.” In prison, Ray describes the “smell that gags you when you first walk into the prison building . . . cigarettes, germ killer, sweat, chow, piss.” The details are so richly evocative, I had no trouble switching between the two wildly different locations and narrative voices. I stayed connected with the text because although I’ve never been in prison or fallen into a hell-mouth pool, I’ve smelled these smells, so my personal catalog of sense memories helps bridge the gaps in my experience.

Regardless of whether I believe in the possibility that an ordinary castle of stone and wood may be haunted, I’m willing—and, more importantly, able—to accept that it is because Egan doesn’t just tell us it’s haunted. She lets us smell and hear and taste how natural the keep is before hitting us with the supernatural. The jarring disconnect is what makes it scary, and I didn’t have to work too hard to suspend my disbelief. Even though there were a couple of implausible plot points that might otherwise have derailed my interest, I kept right on reading.

Though sometimes we do want readers to work a little harder, to penetrate the surface and mine for meaning on their own, I saw in The Keep that the more layered the detail, the better and faster the connection—the buy-in is achieved without making readers labor over it.

In Egan’s hands, sensory detail is revealed as a significantly useful implement in the writer’s toolbox. This turned out to be a critical takeaway for me, as I sometimes ask a lot of my readers. Leonora, the narrator of my slightly fabulist literary novel, is the ghost of a chimpanzee. When I set about revising my first draft, guided by the way Egan creates accessibility in The Keep, I paid extra attention to the sensory details that would help readers empathize with Leo, who’s not only nonhuman, but nonliving. This was important because as a character-narrator, she does the heavy lifting of the story. Although in her afterlife she’s anthropomorphized, Leo’s still a chimpanzee. To establish her humanity, I gave her memories (she has a nostalgic fondness for monkey stink); desire (for the taste of hardboiled eggs and fresh mango); and dread (she can’t bear the sound of children’s laughter), all tied tightly to the senses.

Though sometimes we do want readers to work a little harder, to penetrate the surface and mine for meaning on their own, I saw in The Keep that the more layered the detail, the better and faster the connection—the buy-in is achieved without making readers labor over it.

In the end, my bookstore’s failure to stock Goon Squad was serendipitous. I would have missed out on Egan’s object lessons in forging robust reader-text connection right away. When you need your reader to seamlessly acclimate, not interrogate, the skillful use of robust sensory detail delivers every time. That’s a lesson I didn’t know I needed, a keeper.

---

Sandy Smith is a writer and editor whose short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Brevity, Sky Island Journal, Gravel, and The MacGuffin. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside, and is currently at work on her second novel. Visit her website to learn more.

Cover Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

SISTERHOOD
How the Books we Both Read Helped Me Write My Sister’s Life into Fiction
A Craft Essay by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

When my sister, Susan, was still in elementary school, a family friend gave her a book for her birthday, The Wizard of Wallaby Wallow, by Jack Kent. Dyslexic as a child, Susan wasn’t much of a reader, so the gift was unusual. In time though, she overcame her disability, it seemed, because she wanted to read the instructions for building things.

Even after she managed to build her crystal radio set, or her darkroom, or teach herself how to play guitar, words and language were never Susan’s forte. Her conversations with friends and family often ended in arguments, and she could be cruel—prompting friends not to speak to her for years at a time—without meaning to be. During one of her lowest periods, when she was anorexic, my mother could not talk to her without the help of puppets. Mickey Mouse became her favorite interlocutor.

For years, I knew I wanted to write a novel about Susan’s life and death. She grew up gay in a straight world, but as a musician found somewhere she could be comfortable: at the center of the punk rock movement in Los Angeles. Singled out early in life as a genius—despite her difficulties with reading, she aced mathematics and figured out word problems by studying their patterns—she felt forced to succeed academically and professionally, though her desires lay elsewhere. Susan eventually forged a career as a software engineer in the dot-com boom, before her death from breast cancer. But how to render her into words, which had often defied her? How could I express her unique perspective on the world in her own language, when our relationship, like so many others, was marked by the failure of language, of communication?

When I began work on Sisterhood of the Infamous (forthcoming from New Meridian Arts Press, February 2021), I told myself I’d avoid this problem through the usual routes: research and interviews. I researched the causes that most inspired her adolescence (punk rock and gay liberation in the 1970’s), and interviewed several people. But Susan’s friends were as mystified by her sudden bursts of anger, crying fits and long-held grudges, as I was. They too did not understand what had made her so inconsolable, volatile, and why her favored target for that volatility was often herself. (“She was a raw nerve,” one woman explained. Another said repeatedly, “because that’s the way she was.” )

When I tried to mold the facts of her life and times into fiction, all I got was exposition: a mini-history of the L.A.’s punk scene, for instance; or a listing of the real-life slights and insults she suffered as a child and teenager. I realized I had yet to find her language, the rhythm and tone of how she spoke and thought; the linguistic framework that enabled her to always depict herself as an outsider, rather than the protagonist of her own story. Stumped, I thought back over the words we did share during her lifetime. And that’s when I realized: that language, Susan’s language—the characters it might animate, the conflicts it would alternately create and resolve, the subject matter it would be most concerned with—had always been available to me, in the form of books that she read.

Going back over the books we had in common—from picture books to children’s novels to the works of Kathryn Harrison and Dorothy Allison—I began to see a set of “instructions” for depicting a character with her life history, her passions, and her disappointments. Although the characters in these books did not have exactly the same problems Susan faced, nor necessarily speak or think in a way she might have, each of those authors had figured out a way to make those characters seen through language.

When I talk about the language of these books, I mean more than vocabulary, syntax, or style. I’m talking about the possibilities these books verbalized, the propositions they expressed about the world: Would you really want to change everything about your life, when that everything is all you know? How should a girl, or a woman behave, when burdened by a past that is unfathomable to others? Somehow, Susan had come to trust the characters and their circumstances in these books as authentic and deserving of her curiosity and sympathy. They also taught me about what could be credibly illustrated or interpreted of my sister’s life: how if she were to read a book about herself, what would it cover, and how might it sound.

The first book Susan and I shared was The Wizard of Wallaby Wallow that she received at age seven, about the perils of imagining a different life for yourself, and realizing something valuable about your current situation. This picture book apparently remains popular (according to Amazon’s sales figures), so no more spoilers here. But The Wizard of Wallaby Wallow has a winning message and a happy ending. My sister did not read the book for years, although I wish she had earlier. What impresses me now is what an adept choice it was for her, even at that young age. She had always wanted to belong somewhere, or to someone, a longing that’s addressed in another book she was given on a different birthday: Mandy, by Julie Andrews Edwards (yes, that Julie Andrews, now a frequent children’s author).

As a chapter book with pictures, Mandy is a bridge between reading levels. Susan was particularly possessive of this book (because I stole so much of her stuff, she had to be!), and I was allowed to read it only if I didn’t take it into my own room. So, read it I did, on the floor of the hall, next to the bookcase. I would return to it many times, for its fairy tale lyricism and the audacity of its protagonist. Mandy is an orphan story; orphans are common in children’s literature because they reflect a paradox about childhood. Children love and depend on their parents, but also feel encumbered by them; an orphan is a vehicle that enables readers to explore this conflict.

My sister wasn’t an orphan, of course, but she always felt unable to crack the code of friendships. More important to my sister’s story is the conundrum Mandy makes for herself as she pursues her heart’s desire. That Mandy may not know exactly what she truly wants is not some pedantic lesson, but a consequence of Mandy’s journey, her maturation. She is a good girl, much as Susan was. Nevertheless, Mandy surprises herself by lying and stealing to fulfill her quest.

This reflects the predicament I believe my sister often found herself in: she felt that her ethics were being tested by her friendships, or the actions of those she called friends. She struggled over how to honor those friends without losing her sense of self. Eventually she decided to do the right thing, or so she said, and it cost her dearly, and she became a loner afterward, pining for real connection.

Yet Susan was not friendless. At the time of her death, she had several friends in her own age group, and also counted some of their parents and even their children as friends. But she was often reclusive, preferring to stay home and sticking close to our mother. Our father was a complicated, charming but ultimately incompetent husband and parent (our parents divorced as Susan began college). She refused to speak to him for close to thirty years, and gravitated toward books that documented the sundering of the parent-child bond. Through these books I came to understand the physical and emotional fallout she endured because of that break.

I hadn’t read Kathryn Harrison’s novel Exposure when I noticed it on the floor of her bedroom as I watched Susan sort through her laundry one day. But I knew its premise and immediately recognized why Susan would be interested. Its depiction of a twisted father-daughter relationship, and the self-destructive path the daughter takes as a result, is still shocking two decades after it was published. Our father, for all his faults, was not the self-absorbed artist who alternately neglects and exploits his daughter, as is the father of the book, and my sister did not have juvenile diabetes, like the daughter, Ann, had. But as I read the book, I realized that like Ann, Susan found herself trapped by certain physical circumstances that deeply scarred her mentally. She became a prisoner of her body, its demands and aspirations. In Exposure, Ann’s body seems to drive her deadly fight or flight response. Susan’s size, her physical and emotional weaknesses, framed her conceptions about what is normal, beautiful; to a degree, even what is wrong and right.

Similarly, Dorothy Allison’s novel Bastard Out of Carolina is another tale of bad parenting; this time, the mother is the culprit. Set in crushing poverty that begets stunning violence, Bastard could not be more different than the world in which my sister and I were raised. But Allison’s brutal vision of growing up unwanted was a reminder that the elements of our upbringing that were merely rueful and regrettable to me were devastating to Susan. The long, slow breakup of our family amounted to a full-bore assault on her confidence and self-image. She also might have imagined redemption—in some form—in a similarly transgressive way as Allison’s alter ego in the book, Bone, accomplishes.

I gave Allison’s Cavedweller novel to Susan for one of her birthdays, because its lead character is a rock ’n roll singer. I thought she would appreciate the story of a rock ‘n’ roll singer, though I worried she’d misinterpret the gift. Cavedweller celebrates a quiet, nearly anonymous life over the supposed perks of stardom. I was not necessarily recommending the same for her, but hoped she’d be taken by the novel’s epic exploration of mothers, daughters, reconciliation and second chances. It turned out that Susan had already bought and read the book.

This was when we were both in our early thirties, both frustrated with careers and relationships. In the decade that followed, both of our lives changed in ways we couldn’t have anticipated, much like the sprawling destinies of the characters in Cavedweller. After that birthday, I stuck to safe gifts, like CDs or fancy dinners, or a T-shirt featuring her favorite concert venues or musicians. For her last birthday, which she failed to make by three days, I mailed her an early present of a hoodie that said, “Central Park Zoo,” guessing she could still appreciate the private joke (she was the keeper of a legion of stuffed animals) .

In fictionalizing my sister’s life, my job was not to imitate the scenarios or style of these books, but to remember them as a foundation. Once I’d re-read them all, I no longer wondered how my sister would like to be depicted as much as what would be plausible and how she would react in certain situations. In the novel I eventually wrote, there’s still much I did not include because I could not figure out how to make some situations believable, or relevant to the plot powering the narrative.

Though I had moved closer, I think, to rendering my fictional character, Barbara, into language and situations that honored Susan’s life and her own words, in the end, the book embodies, as of course it must, my own language. No matter how well informed I became, no matter how much I tried, in many ways I still failed to capture on the page Susan’s playfulness, what some might consider her best quality. But I believe in the character I created out of her life, fashioned from the hurt she could not forget and how it skewed her vision and prospects. The dilemma that my novel’s characters face is the one my sister tried to solve. Then she ran out of time. I hope, through yet another shared book, I was able to give her a little more.

---

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is a poet, novelist, and occasional essayist in New York. Her first novel, The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War (Amberjack Publishing), was a finalist in two categories in the 2019 Eric Hoffer awards. Her memoir is An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir (Jaded Ibis Press 2014), and her next collection of poetry will be Medusa’s Daughter (Animal Heart Press, 2021).

Cover Photo by Max Goncharov on Unsplash

A BOOK BY ANY OTHER NAME: ON TITLES AND DATING
A Craft Essay
by Melinda Scully

Imagine a reader is on a blind date with your book or short story. Maybe a friend set them up, or they ventured out for a local singles speed-dating extravaganza. The specifics don’t really matter. The point is, the reader is on the hunt for a new story to love, and it could be yours. How exciting!

Your story walks up to the table, and in mere moments, the reader subconsciously asks and answers about seventeen questions in their head, maybe starting with…

• What is your story wearing?
• Did it walk up confidently?
• Is it smiling?
• Does it smell weird?

Did your story pass the test? Did you even know you were being tested?

Let’s hope so, because by this time your reader already knows whether they want to proceed with the date. Readers are ruthless. If they don’t like your first-date disco suit, they’ve already rung the rotation bell and moved on to their next option.

That is the power of first impressions. In fiction, that is also the power of titles. Readers are supposed to judge a title. The author knows that you’re doing it, so theoretically, they’ve chosen that title with love and care.

Except… when they don’t. How often do we type “STUPID DRAFT #3” and hope a title will eventually manifest (and if it doesn’t, we resort to using the jazziest simile our story has to offer)? Or, we start the page with a title that sounds snazzy, and we never think about it again? Too many of us forget that the title should be a selling point—not an afterthought. We must craft it as an honest, interesting representation of our work that smacks the target audience right in the face. It should intrigue the reader. Flirt with them.

We could talk about what makes a title fantastic, but a great title is like a great date: there’s not a single formula, but you’ll know it when you see it. Bad titles, though? We immediately identify them on others’ work; unfortunately, we aren’t so good at recognizing our own. Can you confidently say you’ve never made a bad first impression without knowing it?

So, for all of our edification, behold—an incomplete list of weirdos you don’t want to show up on your blind date:

The Catfish

Wasn’t she supposed to be a 5’11” volleyball player?

Ever read something and think wow, that is not what I thought this was going to be about? You got book-baited. I know sometimes it is fun being fooled by a title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and To Kill a Mockingbird are fortunately not about birds. So, what’s the difference? If your title is misleading, ask yourself whether the deception serves a specific purpose. If not, please reconsider bamboozling your readers.

(Fake) Bad example: Boys Gone Wild

(Real) Good Example: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Bland-as-Toast Man

He’s wearing khakis, works in accounting, and good god, he has nothing interesting to say.

Unless your title is ironically boring, you probably don’t want your reader’s eyes to glaze over before the first paragraph. Come on! Your story isn’t tedious, so why should your title be?

Bad Example: Watching the Green Light

Good Example: The Great Gatsby

Lady of Mystery

“So, what do you do?” “Why do you own a Ouija board?” Ask away. She won’t tell you squat.

A title should at least hint at something interesting the reader will experience in the story. What’s the tone? Where is it set? Who’s it about? Can I have one teeny tiny little mental image? Give your reader something to react to.

Bad Example: Regrets

Good Example: The Kite Runner

The (Figuratively) Naked Lady

She has no boundaries. In fact, she already mentioned her raging yeast infection. Do you even need to know more?

I know, this doesn’t seem fair. You just told us not to be mysterious! Well, it’s a balance. If you share all of your secrets upfront, then what is going to keep the reader interested?

Bad Example: Death of the Southern Dream

Good Example: Gone with the Wind

The Philosopher

He’s soooooo deep. Too deep. He should really introspect introspectively.

This is when the author uses the title to make an unnecessary value statement (probably one that the text already makes for itself). Or, the author chose the title for their own personal or sentimental reasons (ones that the reader will never understand). Remember, the title is for your reader and the betterment of your story. Not for you.

Bad Example: Murdering Misogyny

Good Example: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Wait, what’s his name?

It definitely started with a K. Or… a Q. Is it tacky to ask for his business card?

These are the titles that sound clunky, are hard to remember, or are exceptionally difficult to pronounce. You need people to be able to say the name of your story out loud. As a test, try saying it five times fast. If you can’t manage it, your readers won’t be able to either.

Bad Example: Oliver Oglethorp

Good Example: Oliver Twist

He’s Wearing a Literal Disco Suit

Trying hard, but not in the right ways.

Mid-workshop: “I picked the title because it sounded cool.” Yeah, we can tell.

Bad Example: A Hodgepodge Monster Called Prometheus

Good Example: Frankenstein

Do these guidelines always apply? Well, no. There are a handful of situations where a disco suit might be the right choice—for example, if you’ve got sweet dance moves, and you’re headed to a Halloween party. The point is that first impressions matter, and also, there is a lot of room for error. Avoiding common pitfalls will maximize your chances of a second date with the reader. When in doubt, ask a brutally honest friend for an opinion. They’ll tell you if your suit has too many sequins.

---

Melinda Scully is a fiction writer and operations strategist based in Dallas, Texas. Besides writing, her skillsets include math, competitive swing dancing, and spreadsheets. She is working towards her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Find her on LinkedIn or on Instagram @melindascully.