The Post-Punctuation World?

Perhaps no single emblem better epitomizes the perversity of my colleagues than the lowly quotation mark. Some rogue must have issued a memo, "Psst! Cool writers don't use quotes in dialogue anymore" to authors as disparate as Junot Díaz, James Frey, Evan S. Connell, J.M. Coetzee, Ward Just, Kent Haruf, Nadine Gordimer, José Saramago, Dale Peck, James Salter, Louis Begley and William Vollmann. To the degree that this device contributes to the broader popular perception that "literature" is pretentious, faddish, vague, eventless, effortful, and suffocatingly interior, quotation marks may not be quite as tiny as they appear on the page.

Lionel Shriver laments the demise of quotation marks in much modern fiction in the Wall Street Journal [via Literary Saloon].

This is an argument we've had on this blog before. And as I said back then, personally I'm not a fan of quotation marks (stuffy, old fashioned, unnecessary things!) and have no problem when authors such as McCarthy, Coetzee and Diaz drop them. (Though as I've said before, McCarthy's apostrophes are another matter!)

These authors are not a jot more effortful to read, I'd say, than Ms Shriver. (Members of my book club complained about needing a dictionary by them to cope with all the new vocab chucked up in We Need to Talk About Kevin. "No-one would really use these words in a letter," thay said.)

But maybe Shriver has a point that the lack of quotation marks is a bit of a turn off for the less convinced reader?

Perverted Commas?

Of the many accomplishments of the fiction-writer's art, dialogue is surely the least exalted, the literary equivalent of peeling onions during the course of preparing a grand feast. While theoretically it could call for quite as great a level of skill as the narrative that surrounds it, in practice it hardly ever displays evidence of any such effort, particularly in the contemporary novel. All too often, dialogue is simply the default way of maintaining a vague sense of momentum, or a recognition that, with any luck, the novel will end up as a film treatment anyway, and here is the embryonic screenplay ...

Stuart Walton on the Guardian blog has a sound-off about dialogue in modern fiction as:

... a fairly obvious bulking agent in the kind of writing that isn't about narrative drive ...

and has a go at writers (such as Iris Murdoch and Henry James) who:

... never got the hang of dialogue, but persisted anyway...

If so many writers fail at writing dialogue, as Mr. Walton suggests, why is it so hard to get it right? (And it is difficult! Many is the page of aborted conversation I've scrunched into the bin.)

Which writers do you think handle dialogue well? I love Roddy Doyle's dialogue in The Barrytown Trilogy (though Mr. Walton probably wouldn't have approved of the "rendering of accents" , and Magnus Mills' utterly banal conversations (used to great comic effect) in The Restraint of Beasts. Paul Auster also handles dialogue very well in The Brooklyn Follies where the plot is very much developed through conversations. Readers of the blog have plenty more suggestions to add in the comments.

And how do you prefer your dialogue to be punctuated? James Joyce took against what he called "perverted commas" preferring the long dash, while writers such as James Kelman, for example, use no punctuation marks at all, leaving the writer to work out where the conversation begins and ends. (I must say, I like this method the best.)