"writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. but whose personality is it? as with all art, there is no straight road from the product back to the producer. there are writers loved for their humor who are not funny people, and writers admired for their eloquence who swallow their words, never look you in the eye, and can’t seem to finish a sentence. wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high i.q.: they just seem to have very little to do with one another. witty and charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness, and fretful neurotics can, to their readers, seem as though they must be delightful to live with. personal drabness, through some obscure neural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. readers who meet a writer whose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make a small adjustment afterward in order to hang on to the infatuation.



the uncertainty about what it means for writing to have a voice arises from the metaphor itself. writers often claim that they never write something that they would not say. it is hard to know how this could be literally true. speech is somatic, a bodily function, and it is accompanied by physical inflections—tone of voice, winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures—that are not reproducible in writing. spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary, contradictory, limited in vocabulary, loaded down with space holders (“like,” “um,” “you know”)—all the things writing teachers tell students not to do. and yet people can generally make themselves understood right away. as a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. it’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony."

-new yorker review of “eats, shoots & leaves.”-