Wartime Memories Sans Clichés

A friend of mine who earns some considerable portion of his income reviewing and regularly commenting on books speaks of the eight-sentence rule. He maintains that if he had to judge whether a book is good or bad based on nothing more than its first eight sentences, the rule would serve him well.

Certainly, it is my experience that anyone who can put together a good sentence—something sound and graceful and clear—can usually deal with the rest of the difficult business of writing.

Take the first sentence of Lisa Appignanesi’s new novel The Memory Man, for example. “Had Bruno Lind known what awaited him when he returned to the city of his birth, he might not have made the journey.” Were we obliged to judge this novel on nothing more than its first sentence, what would we conclude?

To begin with, that Lisa Appignanesi can write. The sentence has a confident, steady rhythm, rising with some suspense to the comma, and then falling off with...