I recently wrote about the “perfect sentence” after a reader of my novel Still Life told me this sentence struck him as the perfect sentence:
“I imagine the lake, too, through the leafless gap in the trees that winter opened like a cathedral door.”
I analyzed the syntax and imagery of the sentence above, and waxed poetic or plainly about what entails a perfect sentence, never fully sure what I was saying, and finally settling on this: “Maybe the truest definition of a perfect sentence is one that creates exactly the experience it intends to create in the reader—no more, no less.”
I’m not satisfied with that definition, but it’s in the right direction. Since then, I’ve been on the lookout for other perfect sentences. I found one yesterday.
It’s written by J.D. Salinger, of The Catcher in the Rye fame. You’ve heard of that novel. You’ve probably read it. You might have identified with Holden Caulfield or not. But this perfect sentence appears in a short story titled “A Girl I Knew,” published in the magazine Good Housekeeping in 1948, a few years before Holden’s manifesto, and in a previous century when print magazines existed and some of them published fiction.
The story is a first-person narrative written in Salinger’s distinctive voice, about a young American student failing out of school in Vienna, Austria, where he’d been sent by his father in 1936 to get himself straightened out. He befriends a beautiful Jewish girl who lives in his building. She enthralls him, and they spend a lot of time together, but he has to return to the U.S. a few months later.
On the night the narrator meets her for the first time, Salinger writes, “The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight.”
And then the perfect sentence:
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
Holding the universe together! That four-word clause at the end of the sentence reveals everything about the narrator’s state of mind and what this girl is doing to him.
That Salinger could pull off such depth and meaning in those few words is what makes this a perfect sentence for me, and it aligns with my definition of creating “exactly the experience it intends to create in the reader—no more, no less.”
With a perfect sentence, the reader sees what cannot be seen, experiences what does not exist. Who knew someone casually leaning on a balcony railing could actually be “holding the universe together.” She can, in the eyes of the beholder.
Read the full story “A Girl I Knew” right here. I recommend it. The ending is a punch and I don’t want to give it away.
P.S. Be on the lookout for perfect sentences, and when you find one, take a moment.
