Opening statements

It’s become quite the adage that, when deciding upon a book to read or a manuscript to buy, if the first line doesn’t grab you, out it goes. David Knopf, writing for the Kansas Dispatch Tribune, editorializes upon the idea to great length:

Deciding whether a book’s good is child’s play compared to officiating. But I use the same principle: Read the first paragraph (sometimes only the first sentence), make the call, and don’t look back. If I’m wrong, I’ll never know because I’ve stopped reading. Either a book’s well-written, or it’s not. It’s safe to continue reading, or the book’s outta here.

There are no yellow cards for bad books, just red cards.

I love to read and don’t have time to mess around. I know there’s a subjective aspect to this, but when it comes to writing I can’t pussyfoot around. Either I like a book, or I don’t. Writing’s not like moss.

Grab me with your first sentence, or go away.

Eventually, Knopf goes on to give a thumbs up to Ralph Ellison and Joe McGinniss for their enticing opening lines, but isn’t nearly as kind to Philip Roth’s OPERATION SHYLOCK. Now, one has to take any statement from a man who calls Roth “a writer of some fame” with several grains of salt, but since my own distaste for Shylock is well-documented, I can’t really disabuse Knopf of the notion.

Though the essay’s got a little too much sports metaphor for its own good, the topic’s been on others’ minds as well. Laura Lippman, in the comments thread of a recent post about memorable first lines, explains that she didn’t take to Shirley Hazzard’s THE GREAT FIRE (even though other folks, most memorably OGIC, loved the author’s work) because, although she didn’t dislike it, the first line “didn’t engage [her].” I haven’t tried any of Hazzard’s works yet so I can’t comment specifically, but there have been many books–from classics to “must-reads” to outright trash–that didn’t grab me from the very beginning. Sometimes it’s a mood thing; I remember picking up Lauren Henderson’s BLACK RUBBER DRESS and for whatever reason, I wasn’t into it; the first line didn’t grab hold of me. Then a few months later, I tried another of her books, (STRAWBERRY TATTOO, which transplanted Sam Jones to New York in a most amusing manner) and loved it. I went back to BRD and suddenly, the book clicked, and I’ve read everything of Henderson’s since then.

It’s all a matter of taste, of course; obviously, OPERATION SHYLOCK garnered raves from a great many people who didn’t mind that the 54-word opening sentence was unwieldy or not (and it does get the point across about what to expect with this novel) and Hazzard’s book won the National Book Award. But all this talk of first lines brings to mind a literary journal that takes the concept and runs with it. It’s called, appropriately enough, The First Line, and the idea is that the opening sentence is pre-determined. Then it’s up to the writer to do what he or she likes afterwards to produce a short story between 300 and 3000 words.

As it happens, I submitted a short piece making use of the current first line under consideration: “I was born Rosa Carlotta Silvana Grisanti, but in the mid-Eighties, I legally changed my name to Eve.” There was something gleefully absurd about the sentence, and my resulting story was similarly skewed. No doubt all other submitting writers went off in other directions, but that’s precisely the point: we’re all starting in the same place, but the possibilities for development are still endless.

But honestly, the next issue’s first line doesn’t really grab me….