The Art of the Sentence Fragment

“Four A.M. in the cashmere blackness.” I love that sentence. Well, it’s not really a sentence. There’s no verb. It’s what’s known as a sentence fragment. “Four A.M. in the cashmere blackness.” It’s from John McPhee’s great Looking for a Ship (1990). It’s like an entry in a journal or log book. But it also has the compression and vividness of poetry. What does it mean? For that you need the context in which the fragment is embedded. Here it is:

The four-to-eight ends. The four-to-eight begins. Four A. M. in the cashmere blackness. We have entered Columbian water. 

The fragment embodies a particular moment in time. McPhee is on the bridge of the S.S. Stella Lykes with his friend Andy Chase as they enter Columbian water. “Cashmere blackness” brilliantly evokes the warmth of the tropical air and the darkness of the night.

McPhee uses a similar fragmentary construct in “Coal Train” (The New Yorker, October 3 & 10, 2005): “Black Thunder Junction, 5:45 P.M., nineteen degrees, dark, snowing.”  I love it. Here’s the context:

Traced from a map, the Coal Line has the receme structure of a bluebell or a lily of the valley, as dainty an image as nature can provide for a stem whose flowers are coal mines. Black Thunder Junction, 5:45 P.M., nineteen degrees, dark, snowing.

The juxtaposition of those two sentences is surprising and delightful – the lyricism of “bluebell and “lily of the valley” shattered by the brute reality of “Black Thunder Junction.” 

Consider this exquisite passage from McPhee’s “Season on the Chalk” (The New Yorker, March 12, 2007):

From Breaky Bottom out through Beachy Head, under the Channel, and up into Picardy, and on past Arras and Amiens, the chalk is continuous to Reims and Épernay. To drive the small roads and narrow lanes of Champagne is to drive the karstic downlands of Sussex and Surrey, the smoothly bold topography of Kentish chalk—the French ridges, long and soft, the mosaic fields and woodlots, the chalk boulders by the road in villages like Villeneuve-l’Archêveque. Here the French fieldstone is chalk, and the quarry stone—white drywalls, white barns, white churches. The chalk church of Orvilliers-Saint-Julien. The chalk around the sunflowers of Rigny-la-Nonneuse. The chalkstone walls at Marcilly-le-Hayer. Near Épernay, even the cattle are white; and vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

Note the sequence of three sentence fragments: “The chalk church of Orvilliers-Saint-Julien. The chalk around the sunflowers of Rigny-la-Nonneuse. The chalkstone walls at Marcilly-le-Hayer.” Each fragment is like a Cézanne brush stroke – quick touches, one following the other, intensifying the scene’s chalkiness. 

You see the same accretion of detail in this passage from McPhee’s “Land of the Diesel Bear” (The New Yorker, November 28, 2005):

After the interstates’ oceanic sameness, the silver tanker in those suburban streets was something like an anadromous fish coming out of the sea and going up a river, suddenly having to pick its way through narrow channels past bridge piers and over ledges up rapids past erratic boulders. Old Howarth Road, Oxford, Massachusetts. The groin vaulting of shade trees. The blind curves. The bouldery suburban houses. Dudley Road. Old Webster Road. The hunkered companies. International Photonics Group. Stop, start—stop sign to stop sign, light to light, the truck was kicking like a mule. 

Eight impressionistic sentence fragments, a montage of images that McPhee sees through the windshield of Ainsworth’s big diesel, as they pick their way through the suburbs. I find the eighth fragment particularly intriguing. It’s the name of a company – “International Photonics Group” – plucked from the countless commercial signs streaming by McPhee’s window. He uses it to evoke the suburban landscape he’s traveling in. Art is where you find it. 

For McPhee, the fragmentary sentence is just one implement in his extensive multi-drawer toolkit. For Iain Sinclair, it’s a defining element of his style. The opening paragraph of his magnum opus, London Orbital (2002), is typical of his approach:

It started with the Dome, the Millenium Dome. An urge to walk away from the Teflon meteorite on Bugsby’s Marshes. A white thing had been dropped in the mud of the Greenwich peninsula. The ripples had to stop somewhere. The city turned inside-out. Rubbish blown against the perimeter fence. A journey, a provocation. An escape. Keep moving, I told myself, until you hit tarmac, the outer circle. The point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts.

Here's another example from London Orbital – a paragraph made entirely of sentence fragments:

Dawn on a wet road. Travelling east into the rising sun; drowned fields, mountains of landfill, ancient firing ranges. Everything smudged and rubbed. With the M25 as your destination, Purfleet and Grays as staging posts. Bridge, river, oil storage tanks. The. Border chain of chalk quarries occupied by Lakeside, Thurrock.

Here's an example from Sinclair’s Ghost Milk (2011):

Rusting metal poles looped with barbed wire. A pebble shore protected by sharp-angled Vorticist obstructions, concrete blocks crusted with orange lichen. Wrecked cars turned on their backs and absorbed into nature. Footpaths doubling into aggregate dunes, dark-shadowed lakes. Refuse dumps dressed in meadow vetchling and rosebay willowherb. Cattle, on strips of land between creeks, might be part of a real farm or target practice. Across the marshes, in the soft haze, smokestacks of constantly belching power stations. 

That’s part of Sinclair’s description of what he sees as he walks a path along the Thames Estuary. Details accrete, one after another, building a picture. The buildup is the action. Some of the fragments are ugly (“Rusting metal poles looped with barbed wire”); some are beautiful (“Refuse dumps dressed in meadow vetchling and rosebay willowherb”).  

Perhaps the most ingenious writer of fragmentary sentences is Robert Macfarlane. Here are a few samples from his superb The Old Ways (2012):

I walked up the avenue, skirted the earthworks of a large Iron Age ring-fort, crossed a road and then entered a wide meadow that rises to the top of a chalk down, whose summit floats 250 feet above sea level. Charcoal trees, a taste of pewter in the mouth.

I glanced back at the sea wall, but it was barely visible now through the haze. A scorching band of low white light to seaward; a thin magnesium burn-line.

Mid-morning departure, Stornoway harbour, which is also known as the Hoil: hints of oil, hints of hooley. Sound of boatslip, reek of diesel. Broad Bay’s wake through the harbour – a tugged line through the fuel slicks on the water’s surface, our keel slurring petrol-rainbows. Light quibbling on the swell. We nosed through the chowder of harbour water: kelp, oranges, plastic milk bottles, sea gunk.

The sun above us, bright and high, but the sky darkening swiftly further out. Black sky-reefs of cloud to the east. The sea: graphite, lightly choppy, white stippled. The wind: a near-southerly, Force 3 or 4, with just a touch of east in it.

A rainless gale rushing out of the east, deer tracks in moor mud, a black sky, gannets showing white as flares above the sea. Dawn on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Lewis. Thin light, cold and watery. Burly clouds at 1,000 feet, the day forming from the dark.

On the mantelpiece and window ledges were dozens of found objects: bird’s eggs, bones, antlers and pebbles. A swan’s wishbone with no central join. A skua’s egg from the Shiants. A pure-white golden plover’s egg, fragile as a bubble. Dark-brown sea beans, floated in from the Caribbean, like little leathery kidneys. 

Creamy waves moshed and milked on the beach and rock, making rafts of floating foam just offshore and sending spray shooting above the level of the tent. Wave-surged infralittoral rock, tide-swept circalittoral rock, micro-terrains of lichen and moss.

Right beneath the north face, where the rock dropped 500 feet sheer to the moor, was a pool called the Dubh Loch – the Black Lake – by whose shore I rested. Tar-black water, emerald reeds in the shallows.

Macfarlane’s latest book, Is a River Alive? (2025), contains dozens of imagistic haiku-like sentence shards. For example: 

Spruce, pine, alder, rowan. Waxwings on the rowan.

A single star. A thin line of orange light to the east, smudged by rain. Three loons on the water, calling now and then. A strong northerly wind.

Bronze of the rivers, gold of the sandbanks, red-green sphagnum tapestry.

Water blue-black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs; peat-brown where it is stretched towards and away from the rapids; churning green, gold and cream in the rapids and falls.

Lacustrine calm. The kayaks wrinkling the smoothness. Everything mirrored. Double the trees, double the cliffs. Clouds crossing the water before us with huge slowness.

Scent of pine resin in the cool air.

Grey, greasy dawn. The rain has grudgingly stopped.

Hot sun. River glitter.

Long days of hot sun and hard work. Nights crisp, and the moon waned by a sliver each time. 

Sentence fragments are a form of short-hand used to paint word pictures. They convey immediacy and intensify vividness. In the hands of great writers like McPhee, Sinclair, and Macfarlane, they’re a concentrated miniature art form.

Credit: The above illustration is based on photos by Yolanda Whitman (John McPhee), Joy Gordon (Iain Sinclair), and Charlotte Hadden (Robert Macfarlane).

June 6 & 13, 2016 Issue

This week’s New Yorker is a fabulous treat, not because it’s the Fiction Issue, but because it contains four delectable critical pieces – James Wood’s "Making the Cut," Anthony Lane’s "In the Picture," Alex Ross’s "Cello Nation," and Peter Schjeldahl’s "The Future Looked Bright."

Wood’s “Making the Cut,” is a review of Emma Cline’s novel The Girls. To my knowledge, it’s the first piece in which Wood criticizes use of sentence fragments. First, he praises such usage. He says, “Generally, Cline favors sentence fragments, sharp scintillae of impressions, and by and large these ably forward her project: Evie, unmoored, lost, greedily swallows the world, in bright pieces.” But later, he comments,

One strength of the novel gradually becomes a vulnerability. Cline loves phrasal fragments: “The dark maritime cypress packed tight outside the window, the twitch of salt air.” Or this, near the end of the book, as the victims are herded into Mitch’s living room: “Linda in her underpants, her big T-shirt—she must have thought that as long as she was quiet and polite, she’d be fine. Trying to reassure Christopher with her eyes. The chub of his hand in hers, his untrimmed fingernails.” This is a metonymic style, in which the zealously chosen detail (those untrimmed fingernails) stands in for a larger set of facts. It looks like tidied-up Joyce (a version of stream of consciousness), but it is really broken-up Flaubert: heavily visual, it fetishizes detail and the rendering of detail.

And, in his concluding paragraph, he says,

The sentence fragment is suddenly everywhere in fiction today, and increasingly seems an emblematic unit of the literary age. It is vivid and provisional, inhabits the vital moment, and renders the world in a cascade of tiled perceptions. But it also tends to restrict a novel’s ability to make large connections, larger coherences, the expansion and deepening of its themes.

This is a variation on Wood’s case against Flaubert and the “cult of the detail” (How Fiction Works). A sentence fragment is almost pure detail. It’s a form of description. I relish it. Consider the following passage from Iain Sinclair’s superb Ghost Milk:

Studying the Ordinance Survey Map for the Thames Estuary, I saw no good reason why I couldn’t walk the shore from the village of Grain, along Cockleshell Beach to the London Stone; or, failing that, down a track past Rose Court Farm to Grain Marsh. But maps are deceptive: they entice you with pure white space, little blue rivulets, a church with a tower, the promise of a shell-hunting foreshore; and then they hit you with tank traps, warning notices. Military firing range keep out. Rusting metal poles looped with fresh barbed wire. A pebble shore protected by a sharp-angled Vorticist alphabet of obstructions, concrete blocks crusted with orange lichen. Wrecked cars turned on their backs and absorbed into nature. Footpaths doubling back into aggregate dunes, darkly shadowed lakes and refuse dumps. Cattle, on strips of land between tricky creeks, might be part of a real farm or target practice. Across the marshes, the smokestacks of constantly belching power stations. When the coastal path failed, I tried the quiet back road: running up against ponds reserved for the angling club of Marconi Electronic Systems, the privileged fishermen of BAE Systems. A huddle of police cottages monitored access to North Level Marsh and the London Stone. Private MOD road. Residents and visitors to police cottages only. I backtracked, walked for hours – and eventually found myself, once more, on the wrong side of the Yantlet, near the colony of huts and holiday homes where my original walk started. The only stones to be found were a blunt obelisk commemorating the “completion of the Raising of the Thames Flood Defences between 1975-85” and a compacted cairn, like the remains of a fireplace after a bomb blast, from which the plaque had been removed.

This passage is substantially built of sentence fragments. It’s a typical Sinclair construction. What would Wood make of it? Would he choke on it? In How Fiction Works, he says, “But I choke on too much detail.” Is this description of the Thames Estuary too much? Do its nine sentence fragments restrict its meaning? Yes, it’s heavily visual. Does it fetishize detail or does it vigorously and vividly evoke a walk along an industrial river, put us squarely there with Sinclair as he searches for the London Stone? Wood’s view on sentence fragments raises interesting questions. I hope he elaborates on it in future pieces.

Anthony Lane’s “In the Picture,” a review of Arthur Lubow’s Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, is a positive delight, as are all his photography pieces. I wish he’d collect them in a book. There are at least ten (counting the Arbus piece) that I know of – “A Balzac of the Camera” (Eugène Atget) “The Eye of the Land” (Walker Evans), “The Shutterbug” (William Klein), “Faces in the Crowd” (August Sander), “Road Show” (Robert Frank), “Candid Camera” (on the Leica camera), “Some Bodies” (Irving Penn), “Head On” (Richard Avedon), and “Shadows and Fog” (Edward Steichen). The first three are included in Lane’s Nobody’s Perfect, but the rest are uncollected.

“In the Picture” contains several wonderful epigrammatic lines:

Freaks may abound in her art, but not once do they freak her out.

It was as if “Leaves of Grass,” in need of an update, had been handed to Sylvia Plath.

All creatures great and small: nothing was foreign to Arbus, as she roamed the human zoo.

Even her most outlandish pictures come to seem like self-portraits: windows transmuted into mirrors.

Imprecision, like mercy, did not make them less true.

My favorite line in “In the Picture” is Lane’s reaction to Lubow’s description of a mosquito biting Arbus’s breast:

When a mosquito lands on his subject, Lubow is right there: “Changing its strategy, the insect whined upward and then landed on the nipple of her right breast. This time, it sank its feeder deep into her flesh and drank.” Even Boswell never got that close.

Alex Ross’s “Cello Nation” reviews Los Angeles’s Piatigorsky International Cello Festival. I’m not a cello fan. But I read Ross’s piece anyway because I savor his writing. “Cello Nation” 's last paragraph is a beauty. Ross writes,

The performance that will stay longest in my mind, though, was of the Elgar concerto, with the Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk. No player at the festival produced a handsomer tone: Mørk had the benefit of a magnificent instrument, a 1723 Domenico Montagnana, and he made it sing with unforced splendor, his expansive, Russian-inflected bowing and vibrato insuring that quiet passages floated into the far reaches of the hall. As an interpreter, Mørk avoided the noble-minded protocol—the high-school-graduation tread—that is too common in Elgar. Unmannered rubato gave a sense of moment-to-moment improvisation, of a halting search for honest expression. What emerged was a monologue set against a landscape of shadows: the cellist as Shakespearean actor, uneasy with the crown of power.

That “he made it sing with unforced splendor, his expansive, Russian-inflected bowing and vibrato insuring that quiet passages floated into the far reaches of the hall” is inspired!

Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Future Looked Bright,” a review of the Guggenheim Museum’s Moholy-Nagy retrospective, brought me news of an exquisite artwork that I was unaware of – László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930). Schjeldahl describes it as “a sleek, motorized medley of finely machined rods, screens, perforated disks, and springs in metal, glass, wood, and plastic, set in a box with a circular cut in one side. The gleaming parts—a sort of industrialized synthesis of Cubist and Constructivist styles—reflect a play of colored electric lights inside the box.” He says, “Its rhapsodic inventiveness—there had never been anything like it before—puts it in a class of twentieth-century utopian icons.” A gorgeous photo of this “one-of-a-kind gizmo” illustrates the piece.

Other pleasures in this week’s issue: Bendik Kaltenborn’s "Thundercat" illustration for Matthew Trammell’s "Night Life: Rock Bottom"; Trammell’s “If Bruner’s lifelong craft as a bassist buries him in the low end, his voice beams goldenrod from a crack in the ceiling”; GOAT’s "Art: Mark Lyon" [“Lyon photographs landscapes in upstate New York while standing inside the bays of self-service car washes, boxlike spaces that supply the images with ready-made frames (graced by the occasional hose). The views—gas-station pumps, strip malls, a swatch of unnaturally green lawn—are transformed by Lyon’s keen eye. He works in daylight and darkness alike, regardless of weather, as fog, rain, and falling snow turn the everyday oddly magical”]; Jiayang Fan’s “The joy of Korean barbecue lies in part in its performance: watching ruby-red curls of brisket caramelize while translucent slices of Pringle-shaped tongue sizzle, crisp-edged and glinting” ("Tables For Two: Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong"); and Becky Cooper’s terrific "Bar Tab: Yours Sincerely," which I’m tempted to quote in full (it’s so damn good), but instead will simply highlight this superb detail: “The taps are porcelain doll heads, which stare like angelic witnesses to the evening’s festivities.” Check out the newyorker.com version of Cooper’s column; it features a wonderful Julia Rothman illustration. 

September 17, 2012 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

Patricia Marx’s Talk story “Happy Hunting” (The bit about the six-year-old cupping “an oodgy-colored something” is inspired.)

The “Briefly Noted” review of Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk (Its description of Sinclair’s prose as “lacerating, off-kilter” is perfect. In my opinion, Sinclair is one of the greats. Maybe someday The New Yorker will do a longer piece on him. He merits fuller analysis.)

Anthony Gottlieb’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” [Contains several witty lines, e.g., “We are, in short, all running apps from Fred Flintstone’s not-very-smartphone,” “American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens." But Gottlieb’s mention of Stephen Jay Gould doesn’t do justice to Gould’s view on evolutionary psychology. For example, Gould would be vehemently opposed to the “snappy slogan” (“Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind”) that Gottlieb says sums up the current line of post-Darwinian thinking. In his “Natural Selection and the Brain” (The Panda’s Thumb, 1980), Gould says, “The brain is vastly overdesigned for what it accomplished in primitive society; thus, natural selection could not have built it.” However, there’s at least this to be said for Gottlieb’s piece: it’s rekindled my interest in Gould’s writing. Gould wrote one of the most powerful book reviews ever to appear in The New Yorker. I’m referring to his extraordinary “Curveball” (November 28, 1994), an evisceration of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. The piece is a fit subject for a “Retrospective Review.” Maybe someday I’ll get around to writing it.]
 

Peter Schjeldahl’s “All Stripes” (Regarding Gerhard Richter’s “STRIPS,” Schjeldahl writes, “I like and don’t like the work.” But when he says earlier in the piece, “I can’t think of any other important art that has seemed to expect so little imaginative participation from a viewer,” I’m left wondering what there is to like about it.)

Anthony Lane’s “Sail Away” (I like reviews that proceed by raising questions, and this piece poses a beauty: “Here is frustration made flesh, with fearsome results; would it be heretical or ungrateful to say that there are times, when Phoenix is in full spate, and when Hoffman is revealing similar ruptures of rage in Dodd’s more genial façade, when there is just too much acting going on, perhaps with a capital ‘A’?”)