David Malouf has a style that has a strong appeal to me. Just to give you two examples from his autobiography 12 Edmondstone Street (1985):
(1) A ‘secret machinery’ gets to work in us, ‘a hidden industry of the senses and the spirit’ whose busy handling and hearing and overhearing is our second birth into the world—into that peculiar embodiment of it that is a household and a house. (10)
See the sequences “hearing and overhearing” and “a household and a house.” Their constructions are “A and XA” and “BY and B.” By adding and taking away, these phrases work as a sort of chiasm. Such a chiasm doesn’t mean a lot. But it gives the text an extra dose of tightness, the kind I enjoy very much.
(2) Darkness to me was the abode of burglars. They were abroad in every street. (27)
Here the word “abroad” is an expanded and expanding repetition of the preceding “abode.” It risks being an easy automatism, but here the choice is working strongly.
There must be other subtle and forgettable (yet leaving traces on one’s subconscious) characteristics in his style, which I’ll take a note again when I come across one.
