Style and Story: Literary Methods for Writing Nonfiction by Stephen J. Pyne (review)

A decade ago, when I read and reviewed Stephen Pyne's first writing book, Voice and Vision, I was so entranced by how effectively the message and medium mingled that I missed the remarkable fact that the guidebook doubles as a work of criticism.¹ In reading this follow-up volume, Style and Story: Literary Methods for Writing Nonfiction, I was prepared for more prose pyrotechnics and structural symbolism—and, yes, abundant alliteration. But I noted, as well, how my positive response to Pyne's earlier work was a function of how much I appreciated his aesthetic, which is again on full display, assisted by a carefully curated selection of passages and appraisals, this time involving works other than his own. Again Pyne plays the role of critic; and again he demonstrates that paying close attention to writing is, at its heart, a way of respecting both the material and the reader. The reader, in turn, who pays close attention to Pyne's text should be, at times, surprised and delighted—but always rewarded.

Across nine chapters punctuated by four short 'interludes'—brief meditations on perspectives and advice for writers of non-fiction—Pyne presents a worthy successor to Voice and Vision. Among his chapters are offerings on openings, closings, details, narration, and humour. No joke: Pyne includes an entire chapter on humour in non-fiction; at twenty-eight pages, it is the longest in the book. (Chapters average eighteen pages; the shortest, at seven, is on the 'poisonous passive' voice.² The imbalance does not jar the reader but made me wonder how much of Style and Story began as material cut from Voice and Vision.) Pyne's chapter on humour stands out as distinctive among the scores of books on writing I have read and reviewed. It serves well the message of his preface, which mirrors the message of the book: that non-fiction need not be boring.

And Style and Story is anything but boring. Pyne rewards his readers throughout with startling moments of creativity and craft. In his second chapter, where he considers settings and how 'a text becomes a context' (27), he invokes a number of passages from works embodying his preferred aesthetic, where 'the prose is precise and lively' (38). (Readers might note that almost all of these authors fit an old-fashioned, 'old white male' mould: the predictability of Henry Adams, G. M. Trevelyan, Harold Lamb, Wallace Stegner, Richard Hofstadter, and Stephen Greenblatt is interrupted only by a welcome passage from Martha Sandweiss.) After an extended situational extract from Roger Crowley's 2013 City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas, Pyne appropriates Crowley's syntax (with a wealth of semicolons) but seems almost to one-up Crowley with a particularly efflorescent synopsis, referring, for example, to Corfu and Venice 'as entries and entrepôts, the hinged doors that control movement' into the Adriatic Sea, and concluding that lagoons 'define and defend Venice. The Adriatic is both buffer and bottleneck' (37). In another example of design supporting a theme, Pyne cites passages from Adams early in the chapter; a passage from Hofstadter later invokes Adams; then a passage from Sandweiss quotes Adams, as well. Here, without baldly mentioning the imbrications at hand, Pyne demonstrates his conclusion that 'our texts are full of literary fragments from the past' (43). Indeed.

Now that sort of cleverness comes closer to my idea of humour in non-fiction: writing where the writer is having fun and the attentive reader, in return, feels like a sleuth who picks up a thread, does a double-take, cracks a smile, exclaims 'Ah!' Perhaps I find humour in wit. Or perhaps I find that the author is humouring me when I register the subliminal or syntactical signals supporting an argument or thesis. Pyne, on the other hand, introduces...