Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes from Vinson Cunningham…
Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker and is currently a teacher in the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.
His debut novel, released earlier this year, Great Expectations, is a coming-of-age story about a young political campaign worker. The story is clearly modelled on the Obama presidential election, not just because the unnamed candidate is Black and shares many of Obama’s qualities, but also because, in real life, Cuningham is a former White House staffer from the Obama regime.
Still, I found the book disappointing in that the plot is so vastly inferior to Cunningham’s absolutely superb writing. Here are my favourite bits of figurative writing:
- As he talked, he held the microphone loosely but securely, like how good tennis players hold the racket.
- The doorman’s big close-set eyes funneled into a straight, sharp wedge of a nose and, below, a mustache that looked like the fur lining of a coat.
- When I told her about this job that had arrived from nowhere, she tucked her small mouth in to a pretty purse and worked her eyebrows into glyphs,
- In the picture, Beverly stood with her arms crossed,with the skyline — the old skyline, the one with both towers, still lively and pert like a pair of Dobermans — behind her, river water sparkling at the bottom of the photograph.
- Past a short gate, painted black in chapped impasto, was an immediate drop; thin trees grew from below and shadowed the sidewalk like an awning.
- The fair was a procession of white tents, waving like sails over a lake of grass.
- Her eyebrows descended from the center of her face, and so did the outline of her lips — her features were like the echoing f-holes of a cello.
- He had a bad beard — scrubby patches on the cheeks — that wouldn’t connect with his rainless cloud of a mustache.
- This [preacher] had skin like a sun-scorched penny, and his left eye rolled indiscriminately around his head, liberate from the harsh focus of its twin, searching like a satellite for the heretofore hidden will of God.
- I’d stopped singing classical after leaving college and my deeper upbringing had reclaimed my voice like moss overgrowing the sides of an old house, slowly mulching it into consonance with nature. I had a wiring vibrato and a weakness for downward riffs.
- Her reddish freckles were correspondingly hypervisible. Each looked like the marker for a capital on a map.
