For the third-person limited thing, blame Henry James! I was taught at least that his more and more austere avoidance of "head-hopping" over the course of his career (up to the full third-person limited of something like The Ambassadors in 1903) loomed over the first generations of twentieth-century authors as much as Hemingway does over us, and that a dogmatic commitment to his writing advice (which was based on various weird theories of his like the superiority of theater) basically killed off the Victorian omniscient narrator. Which I guess also goes to show how arbitrary these things can be, since James's long, convoluted sentences, especially in his later career, make Peake and Tolkien look like telegraph operators.
Also, I think it's kind of sad how Hemingway's minimalism has become synonymous with Being A Real Man and a sort of populist blue-collar aesthetic (which he himself did a lot to encourage of course). His literary mentor was Gertrude Stein, who did incredibly challenging, experimental minimalist prose-poetry, and Hemingway's writing kind of has one foot in that queer, experimental modernist moment he came out of and one foot in the gritty, masculinist later twentieth century stuff that grew out of him, so that you can kind of read something like The Sun Also Rises "from either direction" and come away with very different ideas about what he's doing. I find Gertrude Stein more interesting than Raymond Chandler so I guess I'm a little defensive of Hemingway when people come at him "from the other end", but that just goes to show even more how contingent and historically embedded Hemingway's advice was and how little it's a timeless gospel of how to "write well" in general.
I personally quite like third-person limited, in its place, for the way it draws attention to perspective. To use the ridiculously obvious example, it can be interesting to turn to the next chapter in A Song of Ice and Fire and see how suddenly you have, not just a different opinion, but a completely different way of looking at the world.
But there are loads of good writing styles, and I think the mistake is always to assuming there must be One True Method of Good Writing. Journalistic style works well for Nineteen Eighty-Four; it would ruin Midnight's Children.
I'm not a lover of purple prose or melodrama, but both those words imply *too much* of a thing that is, in normal amounts, just fine. Writing fanfic has taught me to have a lot less anxiety about the line between lush and purple, or drama and melodrama, because the line is further out than you think. Readers love the richer stuff.
Shyness, fear of being Cringe, causes people to edge way back of that line, convinced the readers will judge it harshly. It's like wearing jeans all the time for fear that any kind of "fancy" style will get you laughed at.
A lot of it is just a matter of practice, and discovering what *you* like, without the thought of a merciless audience picking apart your adverbs. You get a better sense of the line then. But you can't get a sense of it if you're always so afraid of it you cower 20 yards back writing like Asimov. (No shade to Asimov, but his dictate that no one should notice your writing held me back far too long.) You gotta dance around the line a bit, take risks, edit stuff out only when you know you've gone over.
Counterpoint: I actually *could not stand* the writing style of the first example to the point I thought it was intended to be a parody of bad writing.
LOTR I have read cover to cover, but it's not my favorite book, and a large part of that is the writing style.
Which leads me to take the opposite point from this: I had never been anti-adverb before, and in general think writing advice focused on particular parts of speech is dumb, but now I'm seriously wondering if adverbs are Bad Actually.
Oh man when I encounter a Gormenghast quote in the wild it makes me so happy that I start bouncing up and down and happyflapping. It's so good. I devoured a thousand pages of Mervyn Peake's prose style.
No, there's actually exactly one correct perspective. We need to find out who has it, probably through some form of gladiatorial combat.
But seriously, insofar as there's such a thing as objective quality in art, Gormenghast's prose is objectively excellent. The series is very respected and surprisingly culturally influential, largely thanks to that prose. A knife that cuts well is a good knife, you know?
The Gormenghast quote was so bad I thought this was some bad Hemingway passage to make the point that Hemingway was a bad writer until I got to the end.
Ah, a fellow fan of Space Opera! The opening is an obvious homage to Douglas Adams, of course. But Cat Valente just never lets up throughout the whole book. And in the end, the style is part of her message. It's a book about glam, and why it matters.
On the other hand, there are a number of excellent plays in which Nothing Happens. I wouldn't want it as a steady diet, but I've seen it done very well. Pointless futility is part of the human condition, too. And I will never apologize for my love of "Rosenkranz and Guildenstern are Dead".
And there is the rare set of books like "A Prayer for the Wild-Built", where the principal conflict seems to be "Will we all be nice to each other in a generic way, or will our efforts bring us to some greater level of inspired kindness?"
I've discussed this with one of my kids, and my argument is a writer can make almost anything work if they do it with sufficient style and charm.
I've heard Waiting for Godot called the most influential 20th-century play. I think this might have been a bad development, not because it's a bad play, but because the thing it's doing quickly wears out its welcome when imitated. (Though I'll give a pass to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.)
Isn't Tolkien one of the major trope codifiers for "only use Anglo-Saxon words?" It's one of the main strengths of the Silmarillion; he keeps dragging out wild words out of a desire to avoid anything that sounds too Latin and it gives the book a flavor both alien and homey. Do you think there's any other reason he repeatedly refers to the Siege of Angband as a "leaguer?"
Tolkien did it intentionally, to evoke an atmosphere!
Occasionally, he does choose to break into more Romance words. I flipped open just now the first chapter of "Return of the King," when Pippin and Gandalf are entering the more classically-modeled Minas Tirith: the guards wear "livery"; the door is "polished"; the throne room is decorated with "monoliths".
But even there, the grass in the Court of the Fountain is a good Anglo-Saxon "sward."
I usually associate "only use Anglo-Saxon words" with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". The thing Orwell is advising writers to do seems pretty different in character from what Tolkien (or, less seriously, Poul Anderson's "Uncleftish Beholding") is doing. And I think Ozy is talking here about the Orwell thing.
Being forced to read A Farewell to Arms in high school over my summer break is what helped me realize that no, reading is not as fun as I had spent my life up to that point believing. I never understood why Hemingway is held up as an example of anything positive, I have hated everything of his that I have read
The funny thing about this is that Hemingway himself, especially in his early years, was a much more eccentric and artistic writer than people seem to believe. The Sun Also Rises is minimal in some ways, but it's also got capacious and hilarious dialogue, a structure that makes more emotional sense than plot sense, and some almost post-modern weirdness at points. It has the line "“The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals.” I'd love if that were the kind of minimalism people engaged in.
Orwell gives the same advice. But he is talking about non-fiction (mainly political) writing. I don't recall his novels as being Hemingwayesque.
An amusing effect of Hemingway's use of short words and sentences is that (at least when I was young) his books get set as texts for readers who are too young to get the point. I was made to read The Old Man and the Sea at about 13, and thought it was utterly pointless - he didn't even get to eat the fish at the end. (I see Testname below had the same experience with Farewell to Arms).
Doesn't even need to be set! I read TOMatS out of my own initiative in my teens (modern classic etc etc) and thought it boring, stupid and simplistic. I read it again (actually listened to) at 54 and loved it, and iirc I might have even cried.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. There are a lot of reasons to read something. It might have an exciting plot, it might be erotic, it might contain information you need to know, it might have characters you love to hear about. But some books are, for me at least, more about reading itself. You don't get as lost in the characters or as caught up in the plot. You're always tangled in words and more words. The sentences are not invisible delivery mechanisms for ideas or information - they constantly make you aware of themselves. I don't think that makes them (or the people who want to read them) better or worse, just different.
when I write reviews of books, i have four main categories - world, characters, plot, and flow/style. it's look like you call the enjoying the style "reading"? that's pretty confusing. also, while there are some books that I enjoy for the style, most of my "I can read that forever, who need plot?" experiences were experiences of good inferiority, and so are under the "characters" category in my reviewing.
You're overinterpreting what I said. I could continue to try to explain but it's really not worth it. I call everything "reading." You can enjoy the style without it being Gormenghast-like in your face. I enjoy Hemingway's style! I didn't mean my original comment to constitute a grand thesis about "what is reading."
well, see, your first comment look to me like the claim that only enjoying style is READING and other things are not real reading. and as not-real-reader by your category, I fell the need to defend myself.
"overthinking" seem to me like.. categorization error or something? I find allowing such claims remain unaddressed a little dangerous, as they are signal that people from $group are allowed target - you can say bad things about them unchallenged.
I don't like Hemingway. that not the point. the point is that I prefer it to not be fine to imply other people are not real readers, and so i make sure that at least people who already write this (in my ideal world, people can't write it without feeling it's Wrong) can't write it uncontested.
it's not the "rand thesis", and honestly, it's look to me like you are the one who don't understand. which, in post about the bad results of one opinion about literature getting to define other as "bad art" is a little ironic.
I already apologized for my unintentional implication that people who enjoy reading other things are not "real readers." That's not something that I believe and I regret suggesting otherwise.
While I think your basic thesis has some truth to it, the use of that Gormenghast excerpt is odd because that genuinely is bad writing! (Though floweriness is far from the worst sin of the Gormenghast books).
Citing Mark Twain and Terry Pratchett is also odd, because those are two people who are strong proponents of the KISS style of writing. Terry Pratchett said you should "use adjectives as if they cost you a toenail."
"Who can fail to appreciate Jane Austen’s narrator’s wry irony?"
Lots of people! There are plenty of people who find Austen unreadable for precisely that reason!
Extremely important to note, re: the final "Hemingwayism smacks of gender" bit, that Hemingway was 1) probably bisexual and 2) maybe, maybe, MAYBE secretly trans (but the source for this is his transgender daughter, who was not exactly a neutral observer).
I'm not sure if this is something everyone here knows or something nobody knows because it's been forgotten, but for a long time, at least here in the USA, even when most published writers were male, writing and the arts in general were seen as unmanly and at least some of the boozing and fighting and sleeping around was an attempt to prove they were still masculine.
So...yeah, definitely gender performance in some sense.
All the examples of good rich prose make me want to snap at the writer to shut up. I don't dislike the _Gormenghast_ one as much as some of the other commenters, because here the ornate prose is the main point. The _Lord of the Rings_ one is unpleasantly overwrought.
But the _Space Opera_ one is unreadable: I'm trying to read about the Fermi paradox, but the author is in the way, doing tricks and shouting "look at me!". Piss off! The boring workmanlike explanation isn't the best prose ever, but it's not actively bad.
I don't like _Les Miserables_ and never finished it, but the lecture about sewers is one of the few parts I like.
That said, I agree that omniscient narrators are fun. But then, I also love the dreaded head-hopping: it's so nice to see the same scene described as stifling heat in one character's view and immediately after as a lovely summer day in another's.
Why is it that people who dislike plain writing generally do it without heat, while people who prefer it are often moved to anger or even (joking) threats of violence?
I've seen this a number of times, and it always puzzles me.
idk, makes sense to me. People who dislike plain writing are wanting something that it doesn't deliver, but not being delivered it is basically inoffensive, you just need to go somewhere else to get that thing. People who like plain writing are being force-delivered something they don't want, which is actively unpleasant for them.
I guess that goes to say it depends on the reader!
I loved the Space Opera excerpt: I already know about the Fermi Paradox, so I'm not reading for the facts but for how this author's going to frame them and what they're going to do with them.
I enjoyed Les Miserables, and I loved some of Hugo's digressions, like the long history of Monsignor Myriel. But other times - like the digression on Parisian street slang - I was impatient because I didn't care about the subject enough for such long lectures and I wanted to get back to the main storyline.
One big thing that comes to mind is that flowery descriptions of landscape and houses and facial features and so on were a much bigger selling point before movies and TV existed. Now if you want to look at pretty pictures you'll watch a movie or TV.
I don't know how much you can blame Hemingway for this whole problem, though. He's way out of fashion and I'd guess if it was anything modern writers were reacting against it would be David Foster Wallace and his tomes. Seems like literary fiction swings between 'verbose' and 'spare' every so often and we're definitely going through a 'spare' phase.
Amusingly, back when I was still trying to write I fed my novel-in-progress to ChatGPT and it kept accusing me of head-hopping. Interesting to note not everyone thinks it's bad. It also accused me of writing excessively long paragraphs (unless I was trying to lean into the 'nineteenth-century voice'), so I think you are definitely onto something here.
This is everything I've always wanted to say about writing but never was brave enough. I've always found Hemingway boring and loved the more ornate style of the nineteenth century, but felt that this opinion was not allowed. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
For the third-person limited thing, blame Henry James! I was taught at least that his more and more austere avoidance of "head-hopping" over the course of his career (up to the full third-person limited of something like The Ambassadors in 1903) loomed over the first generations of twentieth-century authors as much as Hemingway does over us, and that a dogmatic commitment to his writing advice (which was based on various weird theories of his like the superiority of theater) basically killed off the Victorian omniscient narrator. Which I guess also goes to show how arbitrary these things can be, since James's long, convoluted sentences, especially in his later career, make Peake and Tolkien look like telegraph operators.
Also, I think it's kind of sad how Hemingway's minimalism has become synonymous with Being A Real Man and a sort of populist blue-collar aesthetic (which he himself did a lot to encourage of course). His literary mentor was Gertrude Stein, who did incredibly challenging, experimental minimalist prose-poetry, and Hemingway's writing kind of has one foot in that queer, experimental modernist moment he came out of and one foot in the gritty, masculinist later twentieth century stuff that grew out of him, so that you can kind of read something like The Sun Also Rises "from either direction" and come away with very different ideas about what he's doing. I find Gertrude Stein more interesting than Raymond Chandler so I guess I'm a little defensive of Hemingway when people come at him "from the other end", but that just goes to show even more how contingent and historically embedded Hemingway's advice was and how little it's a timeless gospel of how to "write well" in general.
I personally quite like third-person limited, in its place, for the way it draws attention to perspective. To use the ridiculously obvious example, it can be interesting to turn to the next chapter in A Song of Ice and Fire and see how suddenly you have, not just a different opinion, but a completely different way of looking at the world.
But there are loads of good writing styles, and I think the mistake is always to assuming there must be One True Method of Good Writing. Journalistic style works well for Nineteen Eighty-Four; it would ruin Midnight's Children.
I'm not a lover of purple prose or melodrama, but both those words imply *too much* of a thing that is, in normal amounts, just fine. Writing fanfic has taught me to have a lot less anxiety about the line between lush and purple, or drama and melodrama, because the line is further out than you think. Readers love the richer stuff.
Shyness, fear of being Cringe, causes people to edge way back of that line, convinced the readers will judge it harshly. It's like wearing jeans all the time for fear that any kind of "fancy" style will get you laughed at.
A lot of it is just a matter of practice, and discovering what *you* like, without the thought of a merciless audience picking apart your adverbs. You get a better sense of the line then. But you can't get a sense of it if you're always so afraid of it you cower 20 yards back writing like Asimov. (No shade to Asimov, but his dictate that no one should notice your writing held me back far too long.) You gotta dance around the line a bit, take risks, edit stuff out only when you know you've gone over.
Counterpoint: I actually *could not stand* the writing style of the first example to the point I thought it was intended to be a parody of bad writing.
LOTR I have read cover to cover, but it's not my favorite book, and a large part of that is the writing style.
Which leads me to take the opposite point from this: I had never been anti-adverb before, and in general think writing advice focused on particular parts of speech is dumb, but now I'm seriously wondering if adverbs are Bad Actually.
Oh man when I encounter a Gormenghast quote in the wild it makes me so happy that I start bouncing up and down and happyflapping. It's so good. I devoured a thousand pages of Mervyn Peake's prose style.
Turns out Art is Subjective, huh? :P
No, there's actually exactly one correct perspective. We need to find out who has it, probably through some form of gladiatorial combat.
But seriously, insofar as there's such a thing as objective quality in art, Gormenghast's prose is objectively excellent. The series is very respected and surprisingly culturally influential, largely thanks to that prose. A knife that cuts well is a good knife, you know?
Agreed! I found the Gormenghast quote unreadable. When I read Hemingway it was like "oh, this is where good fiction started."
The Gormenghast quote was so bad I thought this was some bad Hemingway passage to make the point that Hemingway was a bad writer until I got to the end.
Ah, a fellow fan of Space Opera! The opening is an obvious homage to Douglas Adams, of course. But Cat Valente just never lets up throughout the whole book. And in the end, the style is part of her message. It's a book about glam, and why it matters.
On the other hand, there are a number of excellent plays in which Nothing Happens. I wouldn't want it as a steady diet, but I've seen it done very well. Pointless futility is part of the human condition, too. And I will never apologize for my love of "Rosenkranz and Guildenstern are Dead".
And there is the rare set of books like "A Prayer for the Wild-Built", where the principal conflict seems to be "Will we all be nice to each other in a generic way, or will our efforts bring us to some greater level of inspired kindness?"
I've discussed this with one of my kids, and my argument is a writer can make almost anything work if they do it with sufficient style and charm.
I was thinking of Waiting for Godot. No one changes and nothing happens, and yet, it's a classic.
This doesn't mean I'd want it to be the only kind of art.
I suggest that one kind of bad writing advice is against being too willing to please the audience, or at least the wrong kind of audience.
I've heard Waiting for Godot called the most influential 20th-century play. I think this might have been a bad development, not because it's a bad play, but because the thing it's doing quickly wears out its welcome when imitated. (Though I'll give a pass to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.)
"the thing it's doing quickly wears out its welcome when imitated"
Such as in most of the other plays by the same author.
Let's go.
(They do not move.)
Isn't Tolkien one of the major trope codifiers for "only use Anglo-Saxon words?" It's one of the main strengths of the Silmarillion; he keeps dragging out wild words out of a desire to avoid anything that sounds too Latin and it gives the book a flavor both alien and homey. Do you think there's any other reason he repeatedly refers to the Siege of Angband as a "leaguer?"
Tolkien did it intentionally, to evoke an atmosphere!
Occasionally, he does choose to break into more Romance words. I flipped open just now the first chapter of "Return of the King," when Pippin and Gandalf are entering the more classically-modeled Minas Tirith: the guards wear "livery"; the door is "polished"; the throne room is decorated with "monoliths".
But even there, the grass in the Court of the Fountain is a good Anglo-Saxon "sward."
I usually associate "only use Anglo-Saxon words" with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". The thing Orwell is advising writers to do seems pretty different in character from what Tolkien (or, less seriously, Poul Anderson's "Uncleftish Beholding") is doing. And I think Ozy is talking here about the Orwell thing.
Being forced to read A Farewell to Arms in high school over my summer break is what helped me realize that no, reading is not as fun as I had spent my life up to that point believing. I never understood why Hemingway is held up as an example of anything positive, I have hated everything of his that I have read
For me it was Wuthering Heights.
The funny thing about this is that Hemingway himself, especially in his early years, was a much more eccentric and artistic writer than people seem to believe. The Sun Also Rises is minimal in some ways, but it's also got capacious and hilarious dialogue, a structure that makes more emotional sense than plot sense, and some almost post-modern weirdness at points. It has the line "“The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals.” I'd love if that were the kind of minimalism people engaged in.
I agree about the main point, and also think Hemingway is actually chock full of hidden/inner melodrama.
That's despite Mervyn Peake being most definitely an acquired taste (one that I've never managed to acquire and I tried hard!).
Orwell gives the same advice. But he is talking about non-fiction (mainly political) writing. I don't recall his novels as being Hemingwayesque.
An amusing effect of Hemingway's use of short words and sentences is that (at least when I was young) his books get set as texts for readers who are too young to get the point. I was made to read The Old Man and the Sea at about 13, and thought it was utterly pointless - he didn't even get to eat the fish at the end. (I see Testname below had the same experience with Farewell to Arms).
Doesn't even need to be set! I read TOMatS out of my own initiative in my teens (modern classic etc etc) and thought it boring, stupid and simplistic. I read it again (actually listened to) at 54 and loved it, and iirc I might have even cried.
Gormenghast was such a good example here. Those books (and Les Miserables) are books for READERS who want to READ.
because readers who want to read BUT NOT THAT are not REAL READERS? come on!
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. There are a lot of reasons to read something. It might have an exciting plot, it might be erotic, it might contain information you need to know, it might have characters you love to hear about. But some books are, for me at least, more about reading itself. You don't get as lost in the characters or as caught up in the plot. You're always tangled in words and more words. The sentences are not invisible delivery mechanisms for ideas or information - they constantly make you aware of themselves. I don't think that makes them (or the people who want to read them) better or worse, just different.
when I write reviews of books, i have four main categories - world, characters, plot, and flow/style. it's look like you call the enjoying the style "reading"? that's pretty confusing. also, while there are some books that I enjoy for the style, most of my "I can read that forever, who need plot?" experiences were experiences of good inferiority, and so are under the "characters" category in my reviewing.
You're overinterpreting what I said. I could continue to try to explain but it's really not worth it. I call everything "reading." You can enjoy the style without it being Gormenghast-like in your face. I enjoy Hemingway's style! I didn't mean my original comment to constitute a grand thesis about "what is reading."
well, see, your first comment look to me like the claim that only enjoying style is READING and other things are not real reading. and as not-real-reader by your category, I fell the need to defend myself.
"overthinking" seem to me like.. categorization error or something? I find allowing such claims remain unaddressed a little dangerous, as they are signal that people from $group are allowed target - you can say bad things about them unchallenged.
I don't like Hemingway. that not the point. the point is that I prefer it to not be fine to imply other people are not real readers, and so i make sure that at least people who already write this (in my ideal world, people can't write it without feeling it's Wrong) can't write it uncontested.
it's not the "rand thesis", and honestly, it's look to me like you are the one who don't understand. which, in post about the bad results of one opinion about literature getting to define other as "bad art" is a little ironic.
I already apologized for my unintentional implication that people who enjoy reading other things are not "real readers." That's not something that I believe and I regret suggesting otherwise.
Some of those examples do seem bad, though? The Gormenghast quote is a mess, and the book is full of ugly prose like it.
While I think your basic thesis has some truth to it, the use of that Gormenghast excerpt is odd because that genuinely is bad writing! (Though floweriness is far from the worst sin of the Gormenghast books).
Citing Mark Twain and Terry Pratchett is also odd, because those are two people who are strong proponents of the KISS style of writing. Terry Pratchett said you should "use adjectives as if they cost you a toenail."
"Who can fail to appreciate Jane Austen’s narrator’s wry irony?"
Lots of people! There are plenty of people who find Austen unreadable for precisely that reason!
Half the comments are either agreeing with your first paragraph or raving about how wonderful Gormenghast is.
Extremely important to note, re: the final "Hemingwayism smacks of gender" bit, that Hemingway was 1) probably bisexual and 2) maybe, maybe, MAYBE secretly trans (but the source for this is his transgender daughter, who was not exactly a neutral observer).
I'm not sure if this is something everyone here knows or something nobody knows because it's been forgotten, but for a long time, at least here in the USA, even when most published writers were male, writing and the arts in general were seen as unmanly and at least some of the boozing and fighting and sleeping around was an attempt to prove they were still masculine.
So...yeah, definitely gender performance in some sense.
I'm amazed how much I disagree with this post.
All the examples of good rich prose make me want to snap at the writer to shut up. I don't dislike the _Gormenghast_ one as much as some of the other commenters, because here the ornate prose is the main point. The _Lord of the Rings_ one is unpleasantly overwrought.
But the _Space Opera_ one is unreadable: I'm trying to read about the Fermi paradox, but the author is in the way, doing tricks and shouting "look at me!". Piss off! The boring workmanlike explanation isn't the best prose ever, but it's not actively bad.
I don't like _Les Miserables_ and never finished it, but the lecture about sewers is one of the few parts I like.
That said, I agree that omniscient narrators are fun. But then, I also love the dreaded head-hopping: it's so nice to see the same scene described as stifling heat in one character's view and immediately after as a lovely summer day in another's.
Why is it that people who dislike plain writing generally do it without heat, while people who prefer it are often moved to anger or even (joking) threats of violence?
I've seen this a number of times, and it always puzzles me.
idk, makes sense to me. People who dislike plain writing are wanting something that it doesn't deliver, but not being delivered it is basically inoffensive, you just need to go somewhere else to get that thing. People who like plain writing are being force-delivered something they don't want, which is actively unpleasant for them.
Plain writing is also a thing that is being delivered to the reader; it's not like the page is blank.
I guess that goes to say it depends on the reader!
I loved the Space Opera excerpt: I already know about the Fermi Paradox, so I'm not reading for the facts but for how this author's going to frame them and what they're going to do with them.
I enjoyed Les Miserables, and I loved some of Hugo's digressions, like the long history of Monsignor Myriel. But other times - like the digression on Parisian street slang - I was impatient because I didn't care about the subject enough for such long lectures and I wanted to get back to the main storyline.
One big thing that comes to mind is that flowery descriptions of landscape and houses and facial features and so on were a much bigger selling point before movies and TV existed. Now if you want to look at pretty pictures you'll watch a movie or TV.
I don't know how much you can blame Hemingway for this whole problem, though. He's way out of fashion and I'd guess if it was anything modern writers were reacting against it would be David Foster Wallace and his tomes. Seems like literary fiction swings between 'verbose' and 'spare' every so often and we're definitely going through a 'spare' phase.
Amusingly, back when I was still trying to write I fed my novel-in-progress to ChatGPT and it kept accusing me of head-hopping. Interesting to note not everyone thinks it's bad. It also accused me of writing excessively long paragraphs (unless I was trying to lean into the 'nineteenth-century voice'), so I think you are definitely onto something here.
This is everything I've always wanted to say about writing but never was brave enough. I've always found Hemingway boring and loved the more ornate style of the nineteenth century, but felt that this opinion was not allowed. Thank you, thank you, thank you.