Sometimes a sentence is so potent, so jam-packed with meaning and images and music, you have to stop reading and look up from the page. You glance nervously around, searching for a way to unleash this sudden rush of giddiness into the world. You regret not having a loaded machine gun to fire into the sky. The fourth page of Helen Weinzweig’s slim first novel, Passing Ceremony, from 1973, contains one of these sentences: “Leon’s face with the heavy nose keeps getting mixed in with the minister’s features.” After I read those words, having picked the novel up at random in the back of Balfour Books, in Toronto, I closed the covers, feeling like I’d been doing something illegal. I knew that I had to read every sentence she wrote.
Why did this particular sentence have such a strong effect? “Heavy” is not an exceptionally original or profound description of somebody’s nose. But a man named Leon — with a “heavy nose” and standing next to a minister — what strange...
Jules Lewis is the author of Waiting for Ricky Tantrum, a novel, and Tomasso’s Party, a play.
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