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The Style of a Wild Man

In his "Autobiography," Anthony Trollope writes that a novelist's language "must come from him as music comes from the rapid touch of the great performer's fingers." Prose style as music? I've never found it a terribly apt metaphor, and at least one American master of ecstatic prose, the late Barry Hannah, railed against it: "People who try to make a direct connection between prose lines and music are fools. You can't write music."

And yet the rhythms of Hannah's syntax feel musical in their fervor and oddity: "Lovers are the most hideously selfish aberrations in any given territory. They are not nice, and careless to the degree of blind metal-hided rhinoceroses run amok." What novelist wouldn't want to command a "musical" prose style, if the opposite of musical means sentences dull enough to make you doze?

When Charlie Homar, the narrator of my novel "Busy Monsters," first occurred to me in all of his wildness, I was forced to unshackle myself from the safe influences of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver and to embrace a more thrilling, disobedient mode of narration. It was Homar's mysterious and outrageous character that came to me first; his maniacal language grew from his conception of the world and his stance toward the quest he embarks upon.

That order is important: character first, style second. The insult "style over substance" will never be accurate if style rises organically from the character's vision of human circumstances and from the predicament of his own personality.

A middling writer with a banged-up heart, Charlie Homar publishes his memoirs each week in a popular glossy magazine. His conception of humankind is literary, and he affirms himself through language.

On first seeing his beloved: "She was if the word gustatory had grown legs and got a dress." In jail after an unwise decision, he contemplates "the Miocene logic and cruel outcomes afflicting all those with pluck but no punctilio." During an uncomfortable encounter with an ex-girlfriend and her new admirer: "This here was the difference between the smitten and the smote, and I had trouble telling who was whom and which was what."

An unconventional style, when wedded to a character's mode of moving through the world, of identifying in the world, is not color and noise for the mere sake of sensory indulgence or attention-grabbing ostentation. A novel's language must be the organic outcrop of its storytelling sensibility, its creative vision, and for Charlie Homar, that vision is Dionysian: inebriated, unruly, an expression of the madness that encircles him, the chaos he's powerless to alter.

In this way, style should always be an assertion of how characters think and feel and barrel through their lives. A superb writer's style, whether Dorothy Parker's or Vladimir Nabokov's, always achieves an accurate manifestation of the characters' temperament and disposition. Style must correspond to a character's truth. What is Humbert Humbert's charged language if not an embodiment of his hellward love for Lolita, his all-inclusive intellect?

Trollope may have called for the novelist to compose rapidly, similar to a performing musician, but he wasn't advocating for an anarchy of language with no connection to character. Charlie Homar's sentences might be unorthodox and exuberant, but they're not lunatic.

For well-made characters such as Humbert Humbert or any of the manifold bandits in Barry Hannah's warped world, voice and vision are inextricable. Style is substance, as the poets know. Every novelist yearns to be singular, but a beginning writer will falter if he summons an unusual style and then simply concocts a character to shout it.

—Mr. Giraldi's first novel, "Busy Monsters," was published last month. He teaches in the writing program at Boston University.

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