Here are the first two sentences of Aimee Bender’s “Bad Return” in One Story #158:
“I met Arlene in college, in the freshman dorm. We were not roommates but suite-mates in the corner section of a squat brick house in the center of a small college campus in the middle of Ohio.”
Pay attention to the prepositions. Even in that first sentence, we have the double repetition of the preposition, “in.” That repetition prepares you for the long string of prepositions in the second sentence, a total of six.
The traditional advice about prepositional clauses is not to string too many together in a row. This is on the whole good advice, the type of advice that beginning writers should obey. Nouns and verbs are the planetary cores of sentences and prepositions are but satellites. Prepositions belong with adverbs, in the category of allowable but only for judicious use.
But Bender doesn’t obey this rule. She doesn’t ignore the rule as much as transcend it, showing the power of a series of prepositions. By playing with a series of alternating prepositional clauses (in, of, in, of, in, of), she nails you down to a certain location. What’s more, the sequence of the locations expands from macro to bird’s eye, starting with the corner of the room and taking you all the way out to the view of the state.
It’s not the most pyrotechnic sentence but it bears the mark of being well crafted, and its cascading rhythms tumble the reader into the short story. Also, the duality of its clauses prepares us for the duality of the story, which alternates between two main characters, the narrator and Arlene.
