Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: A Review by Molly MacRae

 

 

Have you always wondered if novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s favorite word was mauve? Neither have I. But as soon as my son showed me Ben Blatt’s book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, (Simon & Schuster, 2017), I was charmed and wanted to know more.

Blatt’s book is an unexpected pleasure that begins with a mystery: Who wrote twelve of the essays in the Federalist Papers? Long story short, which Blatt makes fascinating, historians argued that authorship question for close to two centuries. The answer came, in 1963, from Frederick Mosteller of Harvard University and David Wallace of the University of Chicago. Were they a couple of highly respected historians? No, they were a couple of renowned statisticians. As Blatt, another statistician, puts it, “they were two of the first statisticians to leverage word frequency and probability.”

Blatt takes Mostellar and Wallace’s leveraging to a whole new level. They counted words by hand. Blatt harnesses the power of his computer. He explains his methodology clearly, at the same time managing to make it interesting (he’s also a journalist), and then sets out to answer questions like: Do the best books use fewer adverbs? What makes a good opening sentence? Is Elmore Leonard’s number one rule of writing—“Never open a book with the weather”—good advice? Did Leonard follow his own advice? Do cliffhangers work as chapter endings? Has there been an across-the-board “dumbification” of popular fiction? Who is the most clichéd author? What are our favorite authors’ favorite words? 

The book is full of informative, fun charts and graphs. The notes section, at the end of the book, lists the bibliographies for all the authors Blatt used in his project.

Blatt writes with a light, deft touch. Although I’d thought this might be the kind of book I’d dip in and out of, I found myself enjoying it from cover to cover. As a writer, the book gave me another way to think about word choice, opening lines, and chapter endings, etc. It also gave me entertaining snapshots of other writers’ methods and quirks.