The First Sentence of a Book

Recently I visited our local bookstore--Dog Ear Books in Madison, Georgia, an actual independent bookseller--and asked the sales clerk to suggest a good book to me. She recommended one, by a major author of military fiction and nonfiction, so I gave it the test I always apply to every new book: I read the first sentence.

If the first sentence of a book is no good, forget it. That's like going on a first date with someone and observing that person engaging in one variety or another of unattractive activity: you gotta figure that if he or she puts that kind of foot forward, it's only going to get worse from there. In the case of this particular novel, I found the first sentence bland and wordy. The author even used the phrase "rather vague," or something similar. If his first sentence--which he presumably worked on longer than any other in the book (or at least should have)--was that dull, I could just imagine how much more boring it would get as I went along.

So I said no thanks to that one, whereupon she showed me The Amber Room by Steve Berry. Now that was a good opening sentence (to the prologue, not chapter 1, which is what Amazon features): "The prisoners called him ears because he was the only Russian in Hut 8 who understood German." Good, simple language, with a minimum of window dressing, only being the "only" adjective I can pick out of the entire statement. No adverbs, no passive verbs, and though there's a verb of being in there, I think it works just fine; in fact, in some situations it actually sounds more flat to substitute an action verb for a verb of being. More important than the actual phrasing of the sentence, though, is what it achieves: It makes the reader want to know more.

When critics discuss strong first sentences, they often cite the opening lines of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees."

No doubt about it, this is great stuff, a veritable model for the literature of the next century and beyond: lean, muscular prose, virtually bereft of unnecessary detail. Hemingway is famous for stating that nouns and verbs should do the work that writers usually assign to adjectives and adverbs, and few passages better exemplify his adherence to this aesthetic. However, for best single opening sentences, my two personal favorites are these:

Fiction: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

Nonfiction: Paul Johnson, Modern Times: "The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe."

Copies of both books were given to me, the first in high school and the second in college, and in both cases I had no real intention of reading the entire book. I would read the first sentence, I told myself, and if it didn't interest me--as I was certain it wouldn't--then I would set the book aside and forget all about it. But that's not how it happened; in both cases, the first sentence acted as a lure to pull me headlong into the book, and these rank among my favorite books of all time.

As a partner in, and occasional first reader for, a literary agency, one of the things I look for in a manuscript sample--or, for that matter, even a query letter--is a strong first sentence. Again, I figure that if the writer hasn't worked hard on that one, the rest of the book will be weak as well. Obviously people can get away with a lousy first sentence: the writer to whom I referred above certainly did, but he's also well-established. For the rest of us, it's better to hedge our bets by putting our best foot forward--and by the way, I just used two cliches, either one of which would be a virtual death knell (oop--there's another!) in an opening sentence.

(And then of course there's the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, for which the objective is to write the worst possible opening sentence--an act that requires at least as much talent as a good opener.)