Gorgeous Writing, Patchett-style

In Ann Patchett's most recent novel, Bel Canto (HarperCollins, 2001), a young priest listens for the first time to an aria performed live by a world-class soprano: "Never had he thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God that God's own voice poured from her. How far she must have gone inside herself to call up that voice. It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, reaching, lifting, warmed by her, and then out of the white lily of her throat and straight to God in heaven."

Writing like this has earned Patchett the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The prize is given annually to a writer whose collected work merits recognition for the quality of its prose style. Unlike more overtly poetic writers like Proust or Nabokov, Patchett is a deceptively uncomplicated stylist: individually, her sentences are often simple to the point of plainness; the music emerges from the interplay between passages, out of the way each sentence plays on and adds to the one before it, until finally the whole paragraph is singing.

In citing Patchett's contribution to contemporary letters, judges for the academy—Paula Fox, John Hollander, Romulus Linney, Reynolds Price, William Jay Smith and Edmund White—issued a statement, which reads in part, "In all these works, no matter how distant the action is from Patchett's own experience, the sentences and sentiments are as honest and harmonious as a grand piano." The award, presented at a ceremony in New York City on May 18, carries a stipend of $10,000.

—Margaret Renkl