Ten Favorite Books Written in the Ecstatic Register
(By the “ecstatic register,” I mean prose that foregrounds its music, aiming for high feeling and rhapsodies of decoration. Think the Molly Bloom soliloquy. It’s the most difficult register to maintain because when it falls short of its ambitions it quickly becomes embarrassing; one lapse and that balloon floating in the air will go twirling across the room with the noise balloons make. Here are ten books that maintain the register successfully, arranged by how clearly they illustrate its use.)
Thereafter Johnnie by Carolivia Herron
The Remnants by Robert Hill
Blind Argus by Gesualdo Bufalino
The Torturer’s Wife by Thomas Glave
The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Farther Along by Donald Harington
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
No Animals We Could Name by Ted Sanders
I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek (Dybek is a special case because, while he uses the register very well, he writes story collections rather than novels, and they always adopt a variety of registers; I chose I Sailed with Magellan because it contains “We Didn’t,” perhaps the most ecstatic of his stories.)
— December 16, 2020