In Matthew Baker’s The Sentence, the new government of the United States is a military dictatorship that executes dissenters and displays their rotting bodies on the steps of the Supreme Court, with a soldier posted to shoot any vultures that fly too near. The methods of execution are creatively gruesome in the way of speculative fiction, rather than just gruesomely gruesome in the way of actual dictators—for example, they strangle a blogger with internet cables and then stuff those cables down the blogger’s throat before displaying the body.
But this description doesn’t capture the effect of seeing these things described on the page, because it is physically hard to recreate the text of the book, which is full of solid and dashed lines and words that are set at angles. The book is the first-person narrative of Riley S——, who is threatened by “the regime” and has to go into hiding, and who has chosen to tell their story in the form of one long, diagrammed sentence.
Reading a long, diagrammed sentence is a lot like reading a stream-of-consciousness story. There were times when I tried to take my time with each branch of the diagram, to make sure I saw every word there and to understand how it was connected to the rest of the diagram. But because the diagram is oriented from top to bottom more than from left to right, I had a kinetic sense of falling downward through the story, and much of the time I experienced the words as little clusters, with each part having equal value. For example, when Riley, a university lecturer, receives a court summons in their campus mailbox from the regime, the main words of the clause are “I checked mailroom,” surrounded at angles by “when,” “the” and “between classes.” There are times when this enhances the pleasure of a passage, such as when Riley, trying to figure out why a rule-follower and a nobody like theirself would be accused of treason, describes theirself with the word “person” on the main branch and then tags it with “quiet timid responsible,” like they’re scattering the small change of these nonthreatening adjectives.
Does a sentence diagram lend itself too easily to certain kinds of weak prose? Their department chair finds them slumped on the carpet under the mailboxes and whispers that she knows a place where they can hide. Before accepting her offer, they stare “tentatively” at the summons. Was this adverb included just because it was so easy to stick it on there? There are also many lists of actions (hiding in the trunk of the department chair’s car, thinking about the life they are leaving behind, Riley hugs a book to their chest, hunches their shoulders, bites their lip), and adjectives (it is fall, and the leaves are turning gold and scarlet and orange and maroon.) Lists like these have a nice visual quality in the diagram, which places them all together in vertical columns, but they read like a drumbeat that overemphasizes the mundane. It may be that Riley, a grammarian who is supposed to be the sort of person who would choose to tell a dramatic personal narrative in the form of a sentence diagram, is not the sort of person who would choose unexpected words or descriptions. But I would have enjoyed some.
I thought the prose in The Sentence showed the greatest complexity whenever it used parentheses. Trying to understand the relationship of the words within the parentheses to the rest of the sentence always sent me on a treasure hunt, and gave me the greatest incentive to search the internet for the grammatical rules behind the diagram, which I could normally intuit. Parentheses are used for appositives, which are nouns that name other nouns, and the phrases associated with those appositives.[1] These sometimes appear at moments of special emotional density for Riley, such as in the early descriptions of gruesome execution methods, and when they explain what a sentence diagram is. The prose grows more complex, the sentence diagram reveals that by becoming more technically abstruse, and the book seems to surpass itself and achieve a higher potential with its form.
There are also times when the book’s layout increases the suspense of the story. Riley’s department chair has dropped them off at an anarchist commune in the woods, where they are totally cut off from the outside world, until one day the music on the radio is interrupted by a government broadcast. If you read from top to bottom, as I did, you see a list of comically innocent people—a kindergarten teacher, a hospice nurse, the owner of a corgi, a pair of hairdressers, a school librarian, a ballet dancer, the owner of a beagle, a pair of mathletes—who have each been caught littering or making too much noise. You know, of course, that terrible things are going to happen to them. If I had followed the line of the diagram I would have been told right away that they were going to be executed, but instead I read the whole column describing the people and their offenses before reading the information that would have come first in a sentence that was written out in the normal way. Different readers will probably experience this book differently, but the possibility of experiencing things out of order, or in your own way, is one of the interesting things about it.
Riley claims that sentence diagrams impose order on chaos. But the person who is actually dealing with the diagram of The Sentence is me, the reader. And my relationship to sentence diagramming as a concept and practice is different than Riley’s. I wanted to read this book because the experiment sounded audacious; I was afraid I’d be an inadequate reader/reviewer because I haven’t diagrammed a sentence since 7th grade; and I experienced The Sentence without feeling what Riley described—a sense that order was being imposed on chaos and that this provided emotional comfort. Did Baker’s book bridge a gap for me, between my own outlook on the world and their narrator’s? The truth is, Baker’s effect, from the audacious promise to the modernist experience, seems so different from their stated premise (that sentence diagrams impose order on chaos) and implied premise (that order is evil) that I think that premise might be a red herring.
I wanted to know how The Sentence would read when written the usual way, from left to right, with punctuation, so I retyped the first couple thousand words of the book. Ironically, the book as a physical object is always struggling to escape. The two hard covers are not attached to each other with a spine. The paper in between is a single long strip that you unfold as you read, and as I was trying to hold it open somehow while I retyped it, one cover kept leaping to the floor and pulling the rest of it behind like a Slinky.
Riley says people have suggested that they may be “on the spectrum,” but that they were never tested. They describe their need for order—tucked-in shirts, shoes with arch supports, a wristwatch with timer functions—their dread of breaking rules, and their disapproval of other children when they did so. These things alienated them from the other children, and made them lonely and friendless. Coming so soon after the revelation that the military regime punishes harmless people for small nuisance violations, Riley’s need for order suddenly takes on a sinister hue. And Baker always uses the language of choice when they talk about Riley’s preferences—“my preference” for tucked-in shirts, “my obsessive insistence” on keeping track of due dates. Words like preference and insistence hint that Riley had many chances to choose personal connection over order, but did not.
And then Riley takes ten pages for a single column dedicated to sketches of each of the anarchists they live with on the commune. The impressionistic effect of the diagram is good for a character sketch—the guy who likes Tarot cards carries a deck in his pocket, “where somebody else would keep a wallet.” The anarchists love each other, and they are the first friends they’ve ever had. But whenever it comes to order vs. other values, Riley will still choose order, starting with their choice to narrate this book in the way they have.
I don’t want to end this review on that idea, because I think it gives a little more power than deserved to the force of characterization and ideas in this book. These seemed mostly like excuses for the textual experiment. The book seems very strange. But when I retyped the sentence, the book, which seemed the thickness of a novel, revealed itself to be the length of a short story, written in stately prose, and divided rationally by commas.
The Sentence, by Matthew Baker. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Dzanc Books, April 2024. $31.95, hardcover.
Ashley Honeysett’s debut book Fictions won the Miami University Press Novella Prize and was published in May 2024.
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[1] https://www.english-grammar-revolution.com/appositive.html#:~:text=To%20diagram%20appositive%20phrases%2C%20put,dark%20hair%2C%20sang%20a%20song.
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