The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashback of Style, A Beastly Guide through the Writer's Labyrinth by Karen Elizabeth Gordon
Steve Tomasula

Karen Elizabeth Gordon. Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, A Beastly Guide through the Writer’s Labyrinth. Illustrated by Rikki Ducornet. Pantheon, 1998. 204 pp. $23.00.

Cross the practicality of Strunk and White, the Gothic humor of Charles Adams, and the inventiveness of an author who can write phrases like “unspeakable velocities in parked cars,” and you’ll get a sense of Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s Torn Wings and Faux Pas. Billed as a “flashbook of style,” Torn Wings is cognate with other manuals of style in that it covers the fundamentals of English usage. Readers can use it to undangle modifiers or parse the difference between anybody, any body, anyone and any one. Like most good handbooks, Torn Wings also illuminates the reasoning behind usage, not to tighten the “grammatical chastity belt,” as Gordon puts it, but to emphasize how elastic usage can be, how much room a category like “split infinitives,” for example, contains for individual taste and play.
What distinguishes Torn Wings, though, is its attitude. Instead of drawing illustrative examples from famous texts, the common method, Gordon has approached her task as if she were creating flash fictions. Thus the entry for “anxious / eager” is informed by the consciousness of Zoë Platgut, a “full-time female” in “sensible walking shoes” who brings to the manual a no frills, literal approach. Other characters have a beatnik lineage or prehistoric childhood. Through these and other narrative whimsies, the ancestry of words are brought into contemporary encounters much as they were in Gordon’s earlier works: The New Well-Tempered Sentence, a punctuation handbook, and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, a grammar handbook.
Indeed, together these three works form a reference set, or perhaps more accurately, a minigenre with a lineage that includes Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Neither lean nor exhaustive, Torn Wings and Faux Pas puts its emphasis on teasing out nuance, a demonstration of the double-coding of language, through style, with social commentary, parody, jouissance. [Steve Tomasula]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashback of Style, A Beastly Guide through the Writer's Labyrinth by Karen Elizabeth Gordon Steve Tomasula Karen Elizabeth Gordon. Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, A Beastly Guide through the Writer’s Labyrinth. Illustrated by Rikki Ducornet. Pantheon, 1998. 204 pp. $23.00. Cross the practicality of Strunk and White, the Gothic humor of Charles Adams, and the inventiveness of an author who can write phrases like “unspeakable velocities in parked cars,” and you’ll get a sense of Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s Torn Wings and Faux Pas. Billed as a “flashbook of style,” Torn Wings is cognate with other manuals of style in that it covers the fundamentals of English usage. Readers can use it to undangle modifiers or parse the difference between anybody, any body, anyone and any one. Like most good handbooks, Torn Wings also illuminates the reasoning behind usage, not to tighten the “grammatical chastity belt,” as Gordon puts it, but to emphasize how elastic usage can be, how much room a category like “split infinitives,” for example, contains for individual taste and play. What distinguishes Torn Wings, though, is its attitude. Instead of drawing illustrative examples from famous texts, the common method, Gordon has approached her task as if she were creating flash fictions. Thus the entry for “anxious / eager” is informed by the consciousness of Zoë Platgut, a “full-time female” in “sensible walking shoes” who brings to the manual a no frills, literal approach. Other characters have a beatnik lineage or prehistoric childhood. Through these and other narrative whimsies, the ancestry of words are brought into contemporary encounters much as they were in Gordon’s earlier works: The New Well-Tempered Sentence, a punctuation handbook, and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, a grammar handbook. Indeed, together these three works form a reference set, or perhaps more accurately, a minigenre with a lineage that includes Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Neither lean nor exhaustive, Torn Wings and Faux Pas puts its emphasis on teasing out nuance, a demonstration of the double-coding of language, through style, with social commentary, parody, jouissance. [Steve Tomasula]

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