July 7 & 14, 2025 Issue

The tagline of Anthony Lane’s “Easy Music,” in this week’s issue, hooked me: “How Elmore Leonard perfected his style.” I’ve never read anything by Leonard. But I am interested in how writers develop their style. Lane’s opening made me laugh:

Out of interest, could this be the best beginning to the sixth chapter of any book, by anyone, ever?

The girl with the stringy blond hair over her shoulders and the trading beads and the black turtleneck and Levi’s and the half-filled water glass of domestic wine in front of her on the bar said, “Do you like sex?”

Ryan hesitated. He said, “Sure.”

The girl said, “You like to travel?”

Ryan said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

The girl said, “Then why don’t you fuck off?”

In case you can’t pin the passage down, it is not from “Mrs. Dalloway,” or even “To the Lighthouse.”

Lane’s piece is a review of C. M. Kushins' Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard. He likes the book and he likes Leonard’s writing. Of the latter, he says,

Has anyone listened more intently than Leonard to the infinite bandwidths of spoken English? So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx. That is why he earns his slot in the Library of America: he turns the page and starts a fresh chapter in the chronicle of American prose. His genius is twofold; he is unrivalled not only as a listener but as a nerveless transcriber of what he hears. No stenographer in a court of law could be more accurate. His people open their mouths, and we know at once, within a paragraph, or even a clause, who dreamed them up. Many folks, in many novels, might remark, “You certainly have a long winter.” But only someone in a Leonard novel would reply, “Or you could look at it as kind of an asshole spring.”

Lane analyzes how Leonard's style evolved. He writes,

With all writers of substance, as with all ministers of religion, it’s useful to reach back to their novitiate. Here is Leonard, kicking off a 1955 tale titled “No Man’s Guns”:

As he drew near the mass of tree shadows that edged out to the road he heard the voice, the clear but hesitant sound of it coming unexpectedly in the almost-dark stillness.

To his fans, this doesn’t quite sound like him. It’s not yet Dutch enough. The adjectival caution, the suspense-flattening adverb, the archness of that hyphen before “dark”: the sentence is not so much loaded as overloaded. No wonder it jams. So, when does Leonard become himself? Is it possible to specify the moment, or the season, when he crosses the border? I would nominate “The Big Bounce,” from 1969—which, by no coincidence, is the first novel of his to be set in the modern age. As the prose calms down, something quickens in the air, and the plainest words and deeds make easy music: “They discussed whether beer was better in bottles or cans, and then which was better, bottled or draft, and both agreed, finally, that it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. Long as it was cold.”

What matters here is what isn’t there. Grammatically, by rights, we ought to have an “As” or a “So” before “long.” If the beer drinkers were talking among themselves, however, or to themselves, they wouldn’t bother with such nicety, and Leonard heeds their example; he does them the honor of flavoring his registration of their chatter with that perfect hint of them. The technical term for this trick, as weary students of literature will recall, is style indirect libre, or free indirect discourse. It has a noble track record, with Jane Austen and Flaubert as front-runners, but seldom has it proved so democratically wide-ranging—not just libre but liberating, too, as Leonard tunes in to regular citizens. He gets into their heads, their palates, and their plans for the evening. Listen to a guy named Moran, in “Cat Chaser” (1982), watching Monday-night football and trying to decide “whether he should have another beer and fry a steak or go to Vesuvio’s on Federal Highway for spaghetti marinara and eat the crisp breadsticks with hard butter, Jesus, and have a bottle of red with it, the house salad . . . or get the chicken cacciatore and slock the bread around in the gravy . . .”

I love that question – “So, when does Leonard become himself?” I love the way Lane pursues it. Style is what draws me to writers and artists. Lane’s piece makes me want to read Leonard. That’s the sign of a good review. I think I’ll start with Rum Punch.