Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch

Anthony Lane, in a crackerjack piece for The New Yorker on the writing and work of Elmore Leonard:

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 ...”

The ellipses are Leonard’s, or, rather, they are Moran’s musings, reproduced by Leonard as a kind of Morse code. We join in with the dots. But it’s the “Jesus” that does the work, yielding up a microsecond of salivation, and inviting us to slock around in the juice of the character’s brain.

The genius in the second example is the verb choice: slock. There are dozens of verbs that could have worked there, but none better.

Leonard is probably tops on the list of authors whose work I love, but of which I haven’t read nearly as much as I should. There are novelists who are good at creating (and voicing) original vivid characters, novelists who are good at plot, and novelists who are just great at writing. Leonard hits the trifecta.

★ Monday, 14 July 2025