Redlining Past Hemingway: A Joyride Through the Wreckage
[Contextual Note , for the Archive or the Tourists Who Wander In]
This piece began as a comment, one loud, flaring middle-finger of a comment, fired beneath an article solemnly praising Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory as the final word on good prose. The article treated restraint like a sacrament. Simplicity as salvation. It cheered for neat sentences and implied pain and taught its readers to value absence over presence, as if emotion were best served chilled, minimalist, and invisible.
And I’d had enough.
So I melted the iceberg. Surfed the flood. Drank the meltwater. Pissed it back as craft beer and flogged it to MFA students at £9 a pint with a straight face and a forged syllabus.
This isn’t a takedown of Hemingway. This is a jailbreak from his worshippers.
Writing doesn’t live under the surface. It lives in the wreckage. In the rambling, ridiculous, glorious sprawl of excess. In voices that sweat and bleed and contradict themselves mid-sentence. The sparse cult forgot that minimalism was a weapon Hemingway forged from trauma, not a lifestyle aesthetic. They swallowed the blade but spat out the blood.
So this is for the maximalists. The ones who write like the cops are behind them. Who write because the alternative is silence, and silence is already trying to eat us all.
Now scroll down.
The Cadillac’s already screaming.
I’m red‑lining a cannonball Cadillac through the neon cortex, Simian Smith riding shotgun with a grin like cracked porcelain, and every roadside billboard screams another half‑priced Hemingway knock‑off. Sally Rooney chin‑deep in minimalism, Taylor Jenkins Reid polishing her commas with baby wipes, Caleb Azumah Nelson chanting subject‑verb‑object like a monk afraid of God’s subordinate clause, Ali Smith paring words to the marrow until even the bones apologise. Zadie Smith leaf‑blowing polite ironies across well‑mown college lawns,elegant enough to charm the faculty, soporific enough to double as ambient drizzle, Will Self lobbing dictionary‑grade Molotovs from a crenellated lexicon,grandiose, yes, but too enamoured of smoke to notice the fire has gone out, Celeste Ng welding IKEA syntax with kid‑safe edges, the whole MFA caravan tailgating each other toward the Pulitzer drive‑thru where nobody orders fries because extra calories mean extra adverbs, and Papa’s ghost sprawls across the hood hooting YOU WANTED A STYLE ICON, YOU GOT A VENDING MACHINE.
I floor it. Simian cackles, pours bourbon on the dash, and flicks a lit cigarette into the back seat where a first‑edition The Sun Also Rises lies in state like a dried‑out saint. Look, he says, it’s not that Hemingway was a pussy, God no, the man bled sentences and fed them to the fish, but his worshippers stuffed the shark and left us chewing fibreglass. Style became hallmark, hallmark became doctrine, doctrine became those tidy workshop commandments nailed to the classroom wall in Comic Sans: thou shalt not exceed ten words, thou shalt fear the semicolon, thou shalt write dialogue like an accountant balancing heaven’s chequebook. Write clean, they bark, as though dirt never grew a single wildflower.
We sideswipe a slot machine, coins explode like manic pollen, and I can almost hear Faulkner in the rear‑view howling bonus reels of delirious syntax, Henry James puffing pipe smoke into labyrinths, Márquez showering petals over the windscreen, Thompson revving a typewriter engine loud enough to drown casino alarms. The car is now a literary clown car,too many ghosts, too much music, and still the freeway signs preach simplicity, clarity, restraint, as if the English language isn’t a swamp full of electric eels begging to bite. Restraint, my ass. Give me sentences with stretch marks, verbs that wake up hungover, and metaphors that sweat tequila.
Somewhere near mile marker delirium, a chorus of workshop voices whines from the trunk: but accessibility, but readability, but the reader will trip! Listen, sweetheart, tripping is half the fun; nobody remembers the pavement; they remember the face full of sky. The reader wants blood on the page and fingerprints in the margin, proof a human being lived here before the copyeditors came with bleach.
Simian is shouting now, wind ripping the words to shreds: WRITE LIKE A STAMPEDE OF MONKEYS WITH TYPEWRITERS SET ON FIRE! Screw the iceberg, melt it, surf the flood, drink the water, piss it back as craft beer and make the tourists pay nine quid a pint. Cut loose the workshop seatbelt, throw punctuation like confetti, and let clauses clamber over each other in ecstatic piggyback because consciousness is messy and beauty is often buried under the mess, and the only sin is to sandblast the miracle smooth until it squeaks politely through the turnstile.
Another billboard flashes a smiling agent: DISTINCT VOICE WANTED. The irony burns my retinas. Distinct? How, when every novice is taught the same ascetic prayer? Break the prayer. Write with a stutter, a swagger, a ruptured lung. Write as if language were a stolen car and the cops are behind you and the only way out is faster, louder, brighter. Write until syntax begs for mercy and meaning screams harder. The reader will catch up or they won’t; that’s on them. We’re in the business of building roller coasters, not railings.
The Cadillac skids to the edge of dawn, neon dying, desert yawning, ghosts in the back seat humming their separate gospel. Simian turns to me, eyes radioactive, and mutters: if Papa’s kids want sparse, let ’em starve; we’ll be over here devouring the banquet of everything they left off the plate. Then he pops the glove compartment and pulls out a flare gun, fires a comet of crimson into the bruised sky. That’s the new manifesto: make it loud, make it reckless, make it taste like teeth and honey. If we’re going to crash, let the wreckage write the epilogue.
And look, I know the joke’s on us as well, because even this joy‑riding rant has its own chassis and torque specs, a contrarian house‑style wearing a leather jacket stitched from recycled Bukowski napkins. Call it formula after the fact: the road‑trip metaphor, the ghostly passenger, the neon confessional, the obligatory cigarette flicked at the rear‑view. We’re slotting language into familiar grooves even while we claim to blow the vinyl apart, but that’s the cosmic gag; patterns creep in like cockroaches, no matter how many Molotovs you lob. The trick is to keep the infestation honest: if you’re going to lean on a trope, admit the lean, show the bruise, let the reader smell the sweat behind the flourish. Because formula isn’t sin, only camouflage; the crime is pretending you’re invisible inside it. So here’s the mirror held up mid‑skid; we’re all tracing blueprints on the smoke; the only question is whether we sign our names in the margins or pretend the sheet was blank.