When I was young (middle school) my favorite novels were The Lord of the Rings, though my friends always complained that they were too long and boring, with too much description and not enough action. Middle school boys, of course, shouldn’t be relied upon for literary judgement, but there is a underlying truth to what they say. Tolkien does love to describe things. The Fellowship of the Ring famously opens with a prologue titled “Concerning Hobbits,” in which the author makes sure we know everything about these plucky heroes, including their physical dimensions (“Their height is variable, ranging between two and four feet of our measure. They seldom now reach three feet; but they have dwindled, they say, and in ancient days they were taller.”), their clothing (“They dressed in bright colours, being notably fond of yellow and green.”), and their houses (“A preference for round windows, and even round doors, was the chief remaining peculiarity of hobbit-architecture.”), all before any actual narrative action begins.
But to me, Lord of the Rings was good precisely because of these overlong descriptions—as a child in bland, suburban Northern California I loved to lose myself in these lyrical passages describing the geography of an unfamiliar world like Middle Earth. Here, for example, is an early section from Fellowship, of Sam, Frodo, and Pippin traveling through the Shire with a group of Elves:
The woods on either side became denser; the trees were now younger and thicker; and as the lane went lower, running down into a fold of the hills, there were many deep brakes of hazel on the rising slopes at either hand. At last the Elves turned aside from the path. A green ride lay almost unseen through the thickets on the right; and this they followed as it wound away back up the wooded slopes on to the top of a shoulder of the hills that stood out into the lower land of the river-valley. Suddenly they came out of the shadow of the trees, and before them lay a wide space of grass, grey under the night. On three sides the woods pressed upon it; but eastward the ground fell steeply and the tops of the dark trees, growing at the bottom of the slope, were below their feet. Beyond, the low lands lay dim and flat under the stars. Nearer at hand a few lights twinkled in the village of Woodhall.
This village and these woods serve no larger purpose in the story, and what follows is a conversation between Frodo and the elves about the Nazgul pursuing them. But without this description, the novel’s unique atmospheric quality would be lost.
As I grew older, I turned away from fantasy novels and towards contemporary literary fiction, but I never lost my love of descriptive passages. Unfortunately, though, I noticed a growing trend in literary fiction, one that eschewed lyrical descriptions for direct, spare, action-oriented sentences. My fellow English majors idolized the “muscular” writing of Hemingway over the “turgid” prose of Fitzgerald (they should be relieved they never read any Thomas Wolf), while my fellow creative writers argued that descriptions should be used only for details “relevant to the story.” But this idea I never fully understood. What counts as being “relevant to the story?” Isn’t setting up an atmosphere with a lyrical description of the novel’s world just as “relevant” as character or plot? What would Lord of the Rings be without all its long descriptions of the Shire?
Recently, I’ve read many novels set in New York that don’t take the time to describe the setting at all. I’ve only been to New York twice, and while I can visualize the city because of countless movies and T.V. shows, I do wish some of these authors would give me a lyrical passage about their novel’s world. Agents and editors in the publishing industry may find another evocation of New York’s streets and skyline tedious, but to a reader living elsewhere, those details can make a sterile world come alive. Even descriptions of familiar places can do so much for atmosphere. An early chapter of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland contains the following long description.
The Wayne estate occupied a dozen hillside acres south of San Francisco, with a view of the Bay, the San Mateo Bridge, and Alameda County through the smog on certain days, though today was not one of them. The house, dating from the 1920s, was in Mediterranean Revival style, presenting to the street a face of single-story modesty while behind it and down the hill for eight levels sprawled a giant villa of smooth white stucco, with round-topped windows and red tile roofs, a belvedere, a couple of verandas, gardens, and courtyards, a hillside full of fig and olive trees, apricot, peach, and plum, bougainvillea, mimosa, periwinkle, and, everywhere today, in honor of the bride, pale plantations of jasmine, spilling like bridal lace, which would keep telling nose-tales of paradise all night, long after the last guest had been driven home.
San Francisco is a familiar city to me, and I can imagine the house’s architectural style and surrounding buildings, but still, this long passage creates a necessary atmosphere, the juxtaposition of the plants and flowers alongside California real estate wealth, two clashing images which set up an essential part of the novel’s thematic tension. More than that, it’s simply a beautiful piece of prose, two magnificent sentences that lead us from a house and a hill along a trail of flowers to end on a vaguely wistful note. Without such descriptions, names like “New York” and “San Francisco” become empty placeholders, default settings without any actual atmosphere.
One contemporary author who admirably refuses to pare down her descriptions for the sake of a more direct style is Rachel Kushner. The Flamethrowers is full of long, lyrical passages describing the deserts of Nevada and the streets of 1970s New York. Reading it, I felt again a little of the joy I’d felt when I’d first read Lord of the Rings, that joy of getting lost in a different world:
Through the familiar orbit east of Reno, the brothels and wrecking yards, the big puffing power plant and its cat’s cradle of coils and springs and fencing, an occasional freight train and the meandering and summer-shallow Truckee River, railroad tracks and river escorting me to Fernley, where they both cut north. From there the land was drained of color and specificity, sage-tufted dirt and incessant sameness of highway. I picked up speed.