New Novel Probably Has Limpid And/Or Lucid Prose

In the latest debut novel by Blandly Disaffected Sad Millennial, a group of interesting twenty-something characters are rendered in astonishing prose that is probably limpid, or lucid, or both.

Featuring a young and brilliant woman with unrealised potential who has an affair with a married man and gets confused about it (what’s going on? Sex?) this is a tale that will have you hooked, much like the inscrutable charms of an unavailable and mysterious but otherwise utterly mediocre man.

Not to be confused with limpet prose (a very different thing) this prose is extremely limpid (see above). It’s notable for the unique quality of its limpidity, unlike any other successful novels in this milieu, which are often something else.

This prose is definitely not flaccid or lame as you might first think when seeing the word limpid. It’s more like lucid, but with more heaviness, like a clean plane of glass freshly installed in a green house that is transparent but nevertheless shimmers with the humidity of trapped air, suggestively. (Life?)

Just what is going on between this uninspiring older man and the fascinating young woman who wants to be with him? Capitalism?

With an almost Cuskian pellucidity, the astute characterisations are rendered in scintillating, pithy dialogue that will have you asking on every page: would I too want to be with this older man by choice but also sort of against my will according to my rich inner world brimming with detail and poetically allusive energy? He is, after all, an older man for whom there is not that much to write home about, except perhaps this novel.

The lucidity of this prose is almost alkaline in its lack of acidic properties, almost crystalline in the way molten magma has cooled and started to harden, and almost invisalign in its formal construction, deftly giving clear structure to the protrusions of bone from the gum. This is prose that simmers with lucid limpidity, and shines with limpid lucidity, like the loose liminality of Lampedusa’s civility.

The simple dimple Cupid arugula prose achieves a sort of translucent Magister Ludi universality, a real achievement for this debut novelist, who in real life is far more corporeal, almost opaque with substance, like a pillow.

By the end of the novel, various relationships have started and ended, much like the book itself. I can only hope that one day we will understand what limpidity really is (long naps?)