Facing a Long Sentence

An unusual novel wins the Pulitzer, taking me back to a childhood filled with words — and the three that changed my life.

When I was a restless inmate at primary school, back in the days of dip-nub pens and messy inkwells, I learned to form letters, shape them into words and then string those shining nuggets into sentences, which I was told should express a single thought, though I had trouble mastering that particular skill, partly because my brain was not yet fully developed, but mostly because I grew to love my sentences, wishing they could go on forever, and so

I grew up writing — and talking — in an endless stream of prose that paused only when a listener began to doze or an editor whacked it with a period, which saddened me because I had so many great thoughts and silvered words to share,

a behavioral pattern that was, to my surprise and satisfaction, officially endorsed this week by the Pulitzer Prize committee when it bestowed its 2026 award for fiction on “Angel Down,” a luminous novel by Daniel Krause set mostly in a World War I battlefield and told in a single, 304-page sentence, the first such work ever to win one of America’s top literary honors,

but hardly the first novel to consist of only one sentence, a genre that is little-known among the ordinary reading public but has for decades been a valued, if elusive, animal among literary types, who largely admire its daring inventiveness but rarely attempt such audacity themselves,

perhaps because they learned the elementary-school lessons of concision and restraint better than I did, or they have persnickety editors and market-savvy publishers who nudge them toward structural convention, or maybe because sustaining a single sentence at great length seems too difficult, purposeless and self-indulgent for a serious author, though a few intrepid scribblers have for decades been doing just that, or at least coming close to it,

among them James Joyce, whose 1922 masterpiece “Ulysses” includes Molly Bloom’s famous 4,391-word monologue, and William Faulkner, whom was the Guiness Book of Records inexplicably cited for having written the “longest sentence,” a 1,288-word joy ride in his much later (1936) novel “Absalom, Absalom!,” followed in subsequent decades by a stampede of gutsy authors pursuing the most elusive beast of all: a single sentence long enough to fill an entire novel and compelling enough to get published,

a feat that was eventually accomplished in 60 by Poland’s Jerzy Andrzejewski in “The Gates of Paradise,” a 40,000-word saga about the 13^th century Children’s Crusade, and before you could say “Andrzejewski,” established authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende were pursuing the Holy Grail of chapter-length sentences and even entire books — as did Lucy Ellmann, an American living in Scotland, whose 1,000-page “Ducks, Newburyport” was short-listed for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize in 2019,

a milestone that helped rearrange the current literary landscape, where single-sentence novels are now so common that the book-themed website Goodreads offers a list of 85 recent examples, while another site, “Complete Sentence” started publishing mono-sentence short fiction a half-dozen years ago after its founder, Jason Thayer, was having so much trouble writing a novel that, one day, he tried to sum up that elusive whale in a single sentence,

quickly realizing that such an exercise was not just helpful but could also produce engaging, if concise, literature itself — an idea that dates at least back to Ernest Hemingway, who famously challenged a group of his writing/drinking buddies to tell a story in only six words and, when they couldn’t, he did: “For sale, baby shoes, never worn,”

though scholars now dismiss the event as hokum and note that the phrase had been around since Papa himself was in baby shoes, but the experts do concede that Hemingway deserves credit for one major piece of sentence-related advice, imparted in his 1964 memoir A Moveable Feast, about the problem of writer’s block: “All you have to do is write one true sentence, write the truest sentence that you know,” and, presumably, the rest will follow,

an aphorism that raises the essential question of what, really, is a sentence — to which there is a concise dictionary answer: a group of words conveying a complete thought, whether a statement or a question or an exclamation — and yet, in my experience, a sentence is also a work of art, a crucial piece of information, a life lesson, a building block for larger thought and an exercise that focuses the mind,

that latter role being much-needed in today’s media-soaked, distraction-studded world, where focus is difficult, electronic screens beckon us with addictive sounds and images, and daily existence has become so chaotic that it’s difficult to sort the crucial from the trivial, truth from misinformation, a good sentence from a bad one,

which helps explain how my lifetime romance with sentences finally paid off, years after elementary school, when I met a person who shared that obsession and was herself a master of the art, someone whose favor I’d been courting with indifferent success — until, in a flash of insight, I deployed my one true sentence, the truest I knew, the sentence that has inspired a zillion books and makes life worth living, the sentence we all want to hear: “I love you.”

It worked, as a good sentence does, whatever the length.