Who are some of your favorite novelists that write good dialogue? On a more theoretical level, what makes good literary dialogue? Realism? Contribution to characterization? Pure aesthetics? Ability to move the plot? What do you think?
I’m thinking of writers since 1960, but anyone who stands out. Thanks!
I can read only in English, so I’m limited in my ability to answer, but:
*I don’t look for realism as a goal in dialogue. Most people can’t (at least, don’t) talk as well as they write, much less as well as an accomplished writer writes. I like dialogue that is elegant, precise, imaginative, beautiful…“real” isn’t up there. A good author keeps it in the space of what people might say without digging around in what they actually do say most of the time.
*Using dialogue to define characters is tricky: in the early 20th century and prior, a lot of casual racism got published in the attempt to give characters an authentic patois, and I’m glad that phonetic spelling to reproduce accents, for example, doesn’t show up much anymore. Grammar, word choice, point of view, etc., can help portray a character’s background or circumstances, but they shouldn’t be shorthand for describing her/his mental or moral qualities: that comes from action.
*A quality I do like is using dialogue to differentiate between characters, and that’s a very difficult thing to do: so difficult it’s hard to think of a bright shining example of doing it well. Most characters in books sound a little different from each other but all tend to sound a lot like the author. Language is a personal thing and we tend to be rigid in our preferences, and suppressing subconscious tendencies with respect to sentence length, rhythm, etc., is (I imagine) almost impossible to do over the length of a book, especially if you have to do it in several distinct ways for multiple characters. Twain could do it, and it’s handled well in Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote too, but that’s earlier than the period you’re looking at. For that, the names that come to mind would be Stanley Elkin, John Cheever, Ursula Le Guin (R.I.P.), Zadie Smith, Richard Russo, Colson Whitehead, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and Michael Malone (probably the least-acclaimed of these names, but for this particular thing I think he stands out: his day job for a long time was writing for a soap opera, which may have helped him practice).
*If you like dialogue that is realistic, often funny, and drives the plot, read Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley.
I’m probably quite a bit older than you, which skews the list of writers I know. Anyhow, as a non-scholarly reader, that’s what I’ve got to offer.
I can read a line of Elmore Leonard dialogue and immediately identify the character.
It very much isn’t post-60’s but when I think of sparkling and entertaining dialogue you can’t go far wrong with Dickens.
George V. Higgins
Donald Westlake
George McDonald’s Fletch series. Sometimes it reads like a script, there’s so much dialogue (and it’s good).
Me too. For example, at the end of chapter 8 of The Switch, Leonard writes:
"Louis had looked at it and said, ‘That’s a grand view all right. Of Chrysler’s Mound Road assembly plant.’…
‘Aw, right,’ Ordell said…
‘Richard found all that out?’ Louis sounded surprised…
‘Richard’ll fool you,’ Ordell said…
Louis said, ‘So you’re thinking about tonight? Right now?’…
‘No, I want to call Mr. Walker first, see if he ain’t drunk and his shoes are dry. Make sure of everything,’ Ordell said."
Freakin’ amazing how he did that.
The best dialogue is where the reader doesn’t think to himself, “This is good dialogue.”
It’s dialogue so effortless and natural that you don’t even notice it.
Ideally it advances the plot, but not in a stilted way, where a character is obviously saying something only for the purpose of informing the reader of a fact.
I started to disagree with this, since I often like stylistically interesting prose, but then realized I was having a very hard time thinking of authors who wrote noticeably good dialog, so maybe there’s something to it.
The one that comes to mind is likely gonna be controversial: Cormac McCarthy’s unpunctuated dialog is like nails on chalkboards to a lot of readers, but I really like it. It goes between minimalist bleak mood-setting to soaring, hauntingly lyrical baring of (often diabolical) souls, and back again, in the same scene.
For funny dialog, Nick Harkaway is pretty fun, especially in The Gone-Away World. It’s snappy in the way that a good Humphrey Bogart movie is snappy.
When he’s “on” I actually think dialogue is one of Stephen King’s greatest strengths as a writer.
If someone wants to pay the shipping costs, I’ll give them the book so they can see for themselves. Hell, if the shipping is cheap, I’ll pay for it myself.
Haven’t read enough myself to verify, but his name is one that always comes up when “writes good dialogue” is the topic.
Nitpick: Gregory McDonald. It’s easy to get confused among the various writers with similar names:
[ul]
[li]Gregory McDonald: Author of the Fletch series[/li][li] John D. MacDonald: Author of the Travis McGee novels, among others (including Cape Fear)[/li][li] Ross Macdonald: Author of the Lew Archer mystery novels[/li][li] George MacDonald: 18th century Scottish writer best known for his fantasies/fairy tales and for influencing C.S. Lewis[/li][li] George MacDonald Fraser: Author of the Flashman novels[/li][/ul]
Huge Elmore Leonard fan. I remember seeing the first Tarantino movies and thinking “man he’s a Dutch Leonard fan” and then he optioned Rum Punch and made it into Jackie Brown.