I was about halfway through Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, when I stumbled while reading the following:
Whenever he was gluing up a piece of furniture it was my job to set out all the right cramps, each at the right opening, while he lay out the pieces in precise mortise-to-tenon order—painstaking preparation for the actual gluing-and-cramping when we had to work frantically in the few minutes open to us before the glue set, Hobie’s hands sure as a surgeon’s, snatching up the right piece when I fumbled, my job mostly to hold the pieces together when he got the cramps on (not just the usual G-cramps and F-cramps but also an eccentric array of items he kept to hand for the purpose…
The reason I tripped over these lines is due entirely to the use of the word cramp. It popped me out of the story, puzzled me, and continued to nettle me through the ensuing days, enough so that it engendered this blog post.
The stages of my reaction were as follows:
- Oops. That should have been clamp. Bad copy-editor. No biscuit.
- Wait a second…it’s cramp this and cramp that. Five times in one paragraph. That’s a big slip.
- Maybe it’s supposed to be cramp. I’ve never heard of it used like that.
- Is it an intentional error? Are we supposed to take something from this?
- Is the author trying to say something about the first-person narrator? Is it his mistake? Is it to show his inexperience? Maybe it’s a regional thing?
- No, it’s all isolated to one paragraph. Maybe the senior copy-editor had the flu and it went to a junior ed. But wow, it had to get past the author also, and the proofreader. Weird.
- (Days later, still annoyed, I searched for the term.) Damn. It really is cramp. A clamp with a screw thread is called a cramp, especially in the UK. Serious woodworking boffin stuff, that. I wonder how many other readers stumbled over that section.
- Why use an obscure word that is so close to the synonym everyone would know? Why pick a word that pops out to the reader like an error?
Admittedly, I tend to overthink questions of this sort—word choice, syntax, dialect and accent, rhythm—but in this case it led me to another question: Should the editor have changed them all to clamp?
There are reasons to keep it as cramp. The scene is about furniture repair, and Hobie is an expert with a British background, and the narrator is learning from him, so the use of the word cramp is justifiable. It’s accurate and appropriate to the subject. It does tell us something about the narrator. But if I have to look up the use of the word to understand what the author is implying, is that word the best choice?
It’s correct, but is it right?
Conceivably, this is all due to a lacuna in my knowledgebase, a thing that most people know and I don’t. That’s happened before, but I don’t think it applies here. I’ve done woodworking in the past, built furniture from scratch, even subscribed to Woodsmith magazine for a handful of years, and never did I come across the word cramp used in this context. So it’s conceivable that all y’all knew what the author meant and I didn’t, but I’m not going to bet on it.
It’s very possible that Tartt and her editor had a discussion on this very topic and Tartt stuck firm to her word choice. At least, I hope they had that discussion, because otherwise, I think the editor erred.
Regular readers of this blog and of my books know that I refuse to “dumb down” my prose, but the issue here isn’t one of accessibility. I didn’t balk at the word cramp because it’s a relatively obscure use of the more common word. If she’d referred to a small package as a fardle, I would have picked it up from context. No, I balked at cramp because of its similarity to the more universally known word (and generally synonymous) clamp.
I may change my mind, but right now, I see it as a flaw that should have been changed.
Any thoughts to the contrary?
k
I made it further in the book and noticed that the author uses the word “clamp” – paperback edition, bottom of page 495.
If the author’s plan was get people talking about her writing, it’s working 🙂
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😂
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I am an avid woodworker and got to this part in the audio book today. My wife has the printed book and I immediately went for it to see if the (amazing) narrator David Pittu screwed it up. Nope, it’s printed that way. I was really happy to find your blog entry on the topic since it validated my annoyance with choice of the word in this context. Great book none the less.
Thanks for sharing your thought process and analysis on this part of the book!
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Ha! Glad I wasn’t alone in this confusion. Sorry I didn’t like the book as much as you did (my issues were unrelated to the clamp/cramp issue), but then, I’m in the minority there. Thanks!
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The book is atrociously written from the very first sentence – on all levels, from single sentence to character, motivation, language and plot. Which leads to an interesting question: how did it become such a phenomenon?
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Well, my opinion of it isn’t as harsh as yours, but I’ve heard your sentiments echoed by some friends. It _is_ a definitive style that I know puts some readers off — as this was my first read of Tartt’s work, I didn’t realize this is her go-to style — however I didn’t find it too grating as long as I felt the characters were acting (instead of being acted upon).
As to how it became a phenom, you’d have to point to the Pulitzer it won. It obviously resonated strongly enough with the critical literati to garner support and a following, and the publishing world still respects the Power of the Pulitzer as a sales generator.
Frankly, though, I wonder if any of the panel read more than the first three chapters… 😉
Thanks, Menny.
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[…] at this point that I hit the whole cramp vs. clamp dilemma, which irked me enough to engender a blog post on the topic. Shortly thereafter, I came across the word “fubsiness,” and began to […]
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When I read it, I thought, “How interesting. I’ve never heard that word before. I’m excited to look it up and find out more.” That’s my usual gut reaction to obscure words. However, I can become annoyed depending on the context. Is the narrator a person who would naturally use the proper term? Or are they a pretentious jerk, word-dropping for ego reasons? In my writing (memoir) I might say, “…cramp. It’s a British woodworking term for a specific type of clamp. I like using obscure words, so I’m sticking with ‘cramp’”.
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For a rather obscure, technical term (which is what I consider this use to be) I would have either added a few words of description, and/or used “clamp” alongside for contrast. The fact that the word “cramp” shows up five times in one paragraph and then never shows up again in subsequent pages/chapters, made the problems with this word choice even more glaring.
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Follow-up: In subsequent chapters, “clamp” was used instead of “cramp,” which only adds to my consternation.
Later still, Tartt’s use of words like “exegesis” (which I _should_ know) and “fubsiness” (which there’s no way I’d know) have caused other stumbles. Based on the Google auto-complete suggestions, I’m not the only one who had a problem with fubsiness (adjective: being cubby and somewhat squat). Tartt’s name appeared in several items.
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Gasp! I need a copy editor for my comments. I should have said, ” I know nothing about tools,” not “I NO nothing!” I guess my psyche was saying no to tools.
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Something along the lines of “repletion”, or “tranches”? 🙂
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You’re…mocking me, aren’t you?
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Neither do I!!! I’ve always wondered about it.
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Agreed!! Not too fond of this author. She tends to do it a lot!!! Too much wordiness!
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I’ve not read any of Tartt’s other books (Boy, that’s a tough last name to go through life with, ain’t it?), but this book resonates with me on several levels: a boy who’s mother dies, who’s an introvert, who enjoys objects from ages past, etc., etc.
Several times I’ve asked myself, “What is this section for? Why are we spending so much time on this part of his history?” I don’t mind the wordiness or the erratic/rambling syntax, as I hear it as part of the first-person narrator’s own conversational style, but if she does it in every book, I’d grow tired of it damned quick. As with almost every Pulitzer Prize winner I’ve read, I wonder why it was selected.
However, there are frequent moments when the imagery or the turn of phrase is just SO beautiful and apt that it keeps me reading.
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Yes, it’s in other books she’s written. If that’s her style, great; but I do wonder how she gets to have a Pulitzer when there’s far greater writers. I guess it just goes back to different people’s preferences. And yes, there are still some beautiful moments. I won’t take that away from her 🙂
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Interesting. And the selection process for Pulitzers has always puzzled me. I generally don’t like the prize winners.
Thanks!
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I don’t think there really is any person as an “editor” any more and I think that no one reviewed this material. I think the sentences should have been broken up into some shorter ones and some alternative expressions used, such as “grip tightly,” “hold in place,” instead of the same word “cramp” over and over. Since I no nothing about tools, I wasn’t sure what was happening in this procedure of making something and gluing some components.
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No, this definitely had an editor. Several, in fact (editor, copyeditor, proofreader). A book with a profile as high as this will definitely have a brace of editors, minimum.
The lines preceding the excerpt, establishing the setting in the furniture restoration workshop, would help you know what was going on, but some of the words–nouns–can’t be replaced with alternate verbs, but I agree. It was such a rapid-fire repetition of a confusing word that it stood out as a problem. Reread the excerpt with the word “clamp” and you don’t get the problems caused by “cramp.”
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The phraseology of the passage gave me a cramp in my eyelids.
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Snort! It’s easier when you’ve already plowed through 400pp of similar syntax.
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Better you than me. I don’t “do” tools.
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