Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes from Jennifer Haigh…
Jennifer Haigh is an American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Mrs. Kimble — telling the story of a mysterious con man named Ken Kimble through the eyes of his three wives – won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction for 2003.
Haigh’s most recent work, Rabbit Moon, explores the topic of family estrangement, and while the plot is sometimes a bit weak and predictable, she displays consistently powerful figurative language. Here are my favourite examples:
- His head and shoulders are covered with white dust, as though he’s been dipped in flour.
- The horizon is invisible, the sky and sea the same color, like watered-down root beer.
- The hotel looks like the buildings on either side of it — a shimmering tower of mirror glass tinted salmon pink, the hue of a thousand vacation sunsets.
- The money looks fake to him. The crisp paper hundred-yuan notes lack the grubby authority of US dollars — the dusty green color of bread mold, soft as an old T-shirt run many times through the wash.
- She resisted the urge to apologize for the English language, invading foreign countries like some aggressive cancer.
- Now it was flush with foreign money. Factories had popped up like cases of croup.
- Since the divorce they’ve become strangers to each other. It’s as though the wreckage of their marriage has been swept into a pile in the middle of the breakfast table.
- [They are] headed for the terminal, pulling wheeled suitcases behind them like large, well-behaved dogs.
[Photo credit: 2016 Larry D. Moore. Cropped. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.]
