Barrelhouse Reviews: Suppose a Sentence, by Brian Dillon

Review by Nathan Dragon

NYRB / September, 2020 / 232 pages

“But constellations are accidents of our limited vantage point, and this one could easily vanish, in fact has already folded into the larger design (if that is what it is) of all the sentences I found, or found again, once I realized I was writing a book about sentences.”

—Brian Dillon

Intro/info:

Suppose a Sentence by essayist and critic Brian Dillon was published in the second half of 2020 by New York Review Books (NYRB) in the US and Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK. Suppose a Sentence is almost like a sequel to his 2017 book Essayism. Suppose a Sentence gets its title from Gertrude Stein’s affection for the word “suppose.” The idea for the book/project was born out of Dillon’s habit of copying down sentences for the last 25 years, specifically sentences he copied into the back of his notebooks that didn’t necessarily have to do with the projects he was working on, just sentences he liked, for whatever reason. So he turned those sentences not originally meant for projects into a project.

Dillon ended up dedicating a notebook to Suppose a Sentence and made a rule for himself that if he copied a sentence from a text or an old notebook into this new notebook for the project, he’d have to follow through on writing about it. He admits he broke the rule once and did not follow through on something regarding Francis Ponge.

In an essay on a sentence written by Frank O’Hara, Dillon mentions that he, Dillon, first wrote professionally for Time Out London writing 300-word reviews. Below is my 300-word review of Suppose a Sentence. Excuse this intro/don’t include this intro in the word count (is that cheating?) I might repeat myself a bit. But Dillon is in favor of repetition, it seems, as well as interruption (and parentheticals). See Dillon’s “(if that is what it is)”. He interrupts himself, but in a way that keeps him going, as if saying maybe we’ll find a better word or phrase in place of larger design later. 

Okay, Here’s the 300-Word Review:

Suppose A Sentence is a collection of 27 essays, each regarding a specific sentence composed by well-known writers. Dillon notes his book has little to do with conveying how to write a good sentence. Instead, his book is about his affinities for these sentences and all their possibilities. He says, “About may not be the right word—better towards or among.”

The 27 essays are ordered chronologically, from William Shakespeare to Anne Boyer. More specifically, the collection of essays begins with Dillon’s writing toward Shakespeare’s sentence from Hamlet, “O, o, o, o” and ends by pointing to Anne Boyer writing about a little girl’s obsession with O’s in Garments Against Women—which isn’t contained in the sentence by Boyer that Dillon originally notes as his subject. He does this a lot. Catalogue one sentence, write about several others by the same author...or not.

The sentences catalyzing each of the essays are pulled from novels, plays, memoir, and New Yorker profiles. De Quincey, Woolf, Stein tunnel their way into several other essays.

Suppose a Sentence is fun to read for most of the book and a little boring. Boring can be nice, though. (And sometimes it was boring when I didn't know the references—that's my fault.)

It’s certainly the type of book that could never be someone’s first or second published work. I think only an established writer like Dillon would have the opportunity to publish this. It’s the type of book people want to read, I think, because of the author, and wanting to know what that particular someone thinks. It's certainly a book of thinking and train of thought.

Sometimes an essay thinks and refers. Sometimes an essay feels like it’s among a sentence’s machineries—the form and context. Sometimes an essay stumps Dillon and he doodles.

*

(This isn’t part of my word count either.) Dillon says a sentence can be a lot of things: an animal shaking loose of your grip and trying to bite you, a drug, the lens of a camera, church decorations, a storm heading towards a lake, a balloon, a gate closing. And he likes to demonstrate his thinking about what a sentence is or something going on in a sentence by using the moves in the sentence that he is trying to describe. Say a sentence written by Barthes contains what Dillon sees as a balloon, thanks to parenthesis and a trailing string of words. Dillon’s sentence pointing to that balloon will do the same. So I’ll leave you with this, another sentence written by Dillon, in fact Dillon’s closing sentence in his essay on Barthes, containing parentheses to mirror Dillon’s “(if that is what it is)” in the quote opening this review, to now close it:

“Eventually, Barthes’s sentence parcels up, ‘a wad of air’, in enclosing parentheses, like a balloon attached to the end of the sentence (and the end of this essay), which has grown light enough for me to let it go.”

Did I close the gate all the way? Did I close the right gate? Tie a couple balloons to it.

Nathan Dragon's work has been in NOON Annual, Hotel, Fence, and New York Tyrant. Dragon also co-runs Blue Arrangements, a publishing project.