Hurricane Season is divided into eight sections, each of which consists of a single, very long paragraph. Paragraphing is a form of courtesy to the reader; it creates a rhythm that allows the eye to rest and refreshes our attention. The protocols of courtesy change over time, so that paragraph lengths that once seemed moderate (I’m thinking of early Margaret Drabble novels) now seem surprisingly substantial. Withholding indentation can amount to an assertion of seriousness and ambition, as it does in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction. That novel, written in two enormous paragraphs of equal size, multiplies the rebarbative look of a single unindented page to convey, as if there was any doubt, that mere entertainment is not on the menu. Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, admittedly a short book, also has only two paragraphs, but they’re hardly symmetrical. The second is very short. How short? This short: ‘And then the storm of shit begins.’
The amount of blank space between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, the size of the hole in the ice where the freezing swimmer can snatch a breath, has no bearing on anything but the reader’s experience – without which a book doesn’t exist except as an object. The interval between the second and third sections of Hurricane Season is half the size of the previous gap, which amounts to a full page, and though white space doesn’t represent time in a novel, it strongly implies it.
Conventional paragraphing and chapter breaks could be inserted into Hurricane Season without repercussions on the other elements of the book, but Melchor’s way of constructing sentences, which also overrides the reader’s convenience, isn’t so easily wished away. The book’s third sentence, for instance, covering half a page, leads up to a main verb: a group of boys are described as ‘so ready to give themselves up for the cause that not even the youngest, bringing up the rear, would have dared admit he was scared’, then the sentence continues with an apparently endless succession of qualifying phrases in apposition:
the elastic of his slingshot pulled taut in his hands, the rock snug in the leather pad, primed to strike anything that got in his way at the very first sign of ambush, be that the caw of the bienteveo, perched unseen like a guard in the trees behind them, the rustle of leaves being thrashed aside, or the whoosh of a rock cleaving the air just beyond their noses, the breeze warm and the almost white sky thick with ethereal birds of prey and a terrible smell that hit them harder than a fistful of sand in the face, a stench that made them want to hawk it up before it reached their guts, that made them want to stop and turn round.
The whole latter part of the sentence is grammatically unsupported, cantilevered over empty space.
This is not the long sentence as practised by James, Proust or Mann. Their sentences were magnificently terraced earthworks, but Melchor’s are more like slow-motion mudslides. There’s no question of any surprise, a sting in the tail, the equivalent of Columbo’s ‘One more thing ...’ The refusal of so much of the sentence’s structural, tonal and above all rhythmic potential has a disorienting effect.
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