We live in a time of linguistic plainness. This is the age of the tweet and the internet meme; the soundbite, the status, the slogan. Everything reduced to its most basic components. Stripped back. Pared down. Even in the world of literature, where we might hope to find some linguistic luxury, we are flirting with a recessionary mood. Big books abound, but rhetorical largesse at the level of the sentence is a shrinking economy. There is a prevailing minimalist
sensibility in the twenty-first century.
Novel Style is driven by the conviction that elaborate writing opens up unique ways of thinking that are endangered when expression is reduced to its leanest possible forms. By re-examining the works of essential English stylists of the late twentieth century (Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis), as well as a newer generation of twenty-first-century stylists (Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, David Mitchell), Ben Masters argues for the ethical power of stylistic flamboyance in
fiction and demonstrates how being a stylist and an ethicist are one and the same thing. A passionate championing of elaborate writing and close reading, Novel Style illuminates what it means to have style and how style can change us.
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The work of Angela Carter, Martin Amis, and other stylists of excess, has become difficult to read in recent years, as our capacity to account for the effects of literary style has weakened. To respond to these stylists - to respond to style - requires us now to invent a new critical vocabulary, and to forge a new kind of critical voice. Ben Masters, in Novel Style, has achieved both of these things. He has a striking critical voice that is as revealing as it is
original, and his work offers a new way of understanding the ethical power of style. This book will become a necessary reference point for any discussion of literary fiction in the modern and contemporary period.
