By Nina Schuyler

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

The opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is one of the most memorable in literature, made so by many stylistic techniques, the most prominent being balance or extended parallelism. With the first part of the sentence using nearly the same diction as the second, it’s easy to remember. But more than that, it lulls the reader into its rhythm. As Richard D. Altrick says in his book Preface to Critical Reading, “The matching of phrase against phrase, clause against clause, lends an unmistakable eloquence to prose. That, indeed, is one of the principal glories of the King James Bible.”

While many sentence-lovers argue that balance and parallelism are synonymous, I think of balance as a subset of parallelism. Balance focuses on the pairing of any two things: sound, words of the same length or syllable count, phrases or clauses of the same construction—any use of language that brings together a pair. Sometimes the pairing is made with a semicolon; sometimes it’s done with a coordinate conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so). Dickens used a comma. Regardless, balanced sentences strut on the page, drawing attention to themselves. They exert power because of their rhythm and the tension set up between repetition and variation.

In her new novel, Late in the Day, Tessa Hadley takes a well-known story (middle-class couples, adultery) and turns it into something brilliant using many style techniques, including balance, which elevates her prose to an unmistakable eloquence. With her omniscient point of view, balance accentuates the sense of mastery and control of the voice. In its review, The Guardian raves about her prose. The Washington Post reviewer says, “With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she’s one of the great stylists alive.” Her novel is a testimonial to the adage that every story has been told; it’s how the writer chooses to tell it that makes it come alive on the page.

In the novel, Christine, a moderately successful artist, is married to Alex, a poet turned primary school teacher. Zachary, a generous, big-hearted art dealer, is the husband to beautiful, lazy Lydia. The book alternates between present and past chapters, conveying the 30-year landscape between the two couples. When Zachary dies of a heart attack, the group is thrown into turmoil.

Zachary had used to sing along to it in his enormous, tuneless voice, so delighted with himself and so stirred, his eyes and his heart full, big beard wagging, waving his arms around, conducting encouragingly towards his imaginary accompanist, missing every note.

Like Dickens, Hadley repeats the first word in the pairing, “so delighted with himself and so stirred.” The repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive lines is called anaphora, and it creates a unique rhythm along with heightened emotional effect. It elevates the sentence from workhorse prose. In addition, Hadley uses the pairing of “his eyes and his heart,” and ends with parallelism: the string of present participles of his beard wagging, waving his arms around, conducting encouragingly towards his imaginary accompanist, missing every note.

Here’s Alex, who was Lydia’s French literature professor, looking at Lydia in class.

While he spoke about nineteenth-century French novels he allowed himself to notice Lydia’s blonde hair picking up glints in the electric light, and the fineness of her jaw when she lit a cigarette.

Hadley includes not one but two things that Alex notices about Lydia: her hair and the fineness of her jaw. Smartly, she varies the rhythm of her pairing with the first one, “blonde hair picking up glints in the electric light,” including twelve syllables and the second one fourteen. It’s enough to soften the pairing so it doesn’t sound overdetermined and stagy.

By elongating the sentence through balance, Hadley has the opportunity to weave in consonance, the repetition of the sound “t,”-glints, electric, light, lit, cigarette; and assonance with the short “i”—picking, glint, electric, lit; and the long “i”—light/fineness. These schemes of repetition form patterns, and patterns and variations of the patterns are the essence of music.

Here are more examples, found by opening to random pages:

Isobel was stocky and earnest, with a shy sense of decorum and a woman’s developed features, too expressive for her soft face.

In company he was surprised if the women made too much noise, too insistently—he retreated then into his privacy, his irony.

She desired this real, mind-changing attention from him, for her thoughts, for her work.

Yet this late ripeness was attractive in itself, she could see that too, softening Lydia’s haughty beauty, filling it out with character and experience. Lydia must be so afraid, now she was left alone, of wasting this late flare of her power on no one, on emptiness.

In the last example, Haley again turns to the pairing of present participles, “softening” and “filling.” And she ends with the pairing of “on no one, on emptiness.” The sentence that follows this one dramatically diverges from this rhythm, providing necessary variation: “In a few years they would be old women: sixty! There wasn’t much time.”        

For prose writers interested in elevating a story, a story told countless times, Hadley in Late in the Day reminds us that balance is an essential technique for eloquent prose.