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.
