someday I'm going to have to try and do an investigation into why so many contemporary prose writers have that extraordinarily irritating style, the one that apparently the Granta people liked so much and can be easily aped by AI
As @aurpiment so concisely put it in the groupchat: "human or machine this prose is ass from a butt". This story, "The Serpent in the Garden", won the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and several people have aired suspicions that it was written by an LLM. But the problem isn't that it's bad and won a prize; it's that this kind of writing is so common. This is just the aesthetic of heightened prose right now. Also of poetry, a lot of poetry. Ocean Vuong writes kind of like this. But where on earth did this trend come from, and why is it so widespread?
i'm of a constitution that makes me want to defend this style (hey it's cool to experiment and so on) but that impulse is compromised by the fact that i don't like it and find the reading experience grating. it's like they're trying to counter my expectations with a witty twist in every single goddamn sentence which seems to construct on their end an annoying attitude of being magnanimous and wise but which also serves to intentionally obstruct my reading experience constantly for no good reason. my immersion comes to a grinding microhalt every sentence as i am forced to explicitly reason out what the hell 'passed like a parcel from kin who were hungry for everything except another mouth' or 'she wore her role without protest and without light' means. that sort of overwrought sentence structure and figures of speech can work if they're used extremely sparingly and intentionally, if they work within the structure. but not every sentence. it's exhausting.
maybe it makes sense that that's the style that becomes popular in accelerationist meritocratic careerist competitive literary environments though... something about how it comes from viewing 'quality' as some sort of measurable quantity that comes from complexity and opacity, and the need to squeeze as much quality-substance into every sentence as possible, to outrun your competition who are doing the same thing. in that mindset, it doesn't matter if the sentence that works, the sentence you really need, is 'She got into the car.' because that's a sentence that could be a vessel for more quality-juice. that's time that could be spent doing backflips and impressing the judges; it could say 'She shrimped her back and sidled into the gas guzzler like a hermit crab into a plastic bottlecap.' make every sentence overwrought and exhausting, and it looks like you're a deep thinker who makes every word count. but who knows, that's just how it appears to me
Oh, I really like this as an explanation. I had sort of an inchoate one, but yours is simpler and makes a lot more sense. If, as a writer, you're trying less to communicate something to a reader and more to impress a judge with dazzling imagistic prose, then of course you're going to write in this very elaborate way. If the thing with the most quality-juice wins awards and gets you published, you're gonna really need to pump in the quality-juice.
