Despite the don’t-mention-the-war quality of this practice, when I solicited opinions on the matter from a few dozen agents, editors, critics, and writers on both sides of the Atlantic, a torrent of vociferous, conflicting views poured in. Apparently quoteless dialogue is not only my private pet peeve.

  Though typing quotation marks when my characters speak aloud is now a conscious choice, I have always opted to use them. The principal reason is simple: fiction without quotation marks is harder to read.

  Petty? Perhaps more small than petty, and indicative of a larger attitude problem among fiction’s elite. For by putting the onus on the reader to determine which lines are spoken and which are not, the quoteless fad feeds the widespread conviction that popular fiction is fun while literature is arduous. A reputation for being “difficult” is as off-putting for a book as for a person. Surely what should distinguish literature isn’t that it’s hard but that it’s good. Optimally, then, the text should be as easy to process as possible, saving the readers’ effort for exercising imagination and keeping track of the plot—assuming that there is one.

  As a rule, readers are suspicious of formatting gimmicks, and they quickly tire of special effects (as special effects go, too, ditching quotation marks is pretty lame). They don’t fancy window dressing; they want to know what’s in the store. Sure, you can write without quotes. And without periods or capital letters. In JPod (2006), Douglas Coupland can publish page upon page of prime numbers—but that and a host of other stunts help to explain why I recently threw the book away. W. G. Sebald wrote Austerlitz (2001) with no paragraphs, but the result is so daunting that I’ve never been able to start it. (Austerlitz is like a sixteen-ounce steak without a knife.) This summer’s rerelease of B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) is beautifully packaged—a “book in a box” with twenty-seven separately bound chapters that can be read in any order the reader likes—but after a bemused shuffle most consumers are bound to slip it back onto the shelf. The impotent razzmatazz in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)—single-line pages, photographs of mating turtles, text marked up with hand-written red pen—simply helps illustrate that the sad little graphic tricks available to fiction cannot compete with the pyrotechnic tools of cinema.

  What effect is the quoteless format meant to achieve? Ideally, a seamlessness, a smoothness, a minimalism that lends text a subtlety and sophistication. Given that Cormac McCarthy may be most responsible for popularizing the custom, let’s examine a passage from No Country for Old Men (2005):

  You could head south to the river.

  Yeah. You could.

  Less open ground.

  Less aint none.

  He turned, still holding the handkerchief to his forehead. No cloud cover in sight.

  To be generous: The absence of quotation marks may intensify the gruffness of the exchange. Punctuation errors may also imply the lack of formal education typical of his characters. Perhaps the dialogue is all the more swallowed by a vast western expanse, in which human utterances amount to mere tufts of sagebrush. As the novelist Tracy Chevalier observes, McCarthy’s technique “blends his characters’ thoughts and words with the landscape—which is what his books are about.”

  Yet take the same passage with quotes added:

  “You could head south to the river.”

  “Yeah. You could.”

  “Less open ground.”

  “Less ain’t none.”

  He turned, still holding the handkerchief to his forehead. “No cloud cover in sight.”

  Is that landscape any less vast? Honestly, what do we lose when we insert those quotes? To McCarthy’s credit, he has at least carved out his own style, which other writers have aped. Yet it is hard to imagine that his often riveting, atmospheric novels would be of any lower literary quality with proper punctuation.

  Proponents of quotelessness argue that the practice pays aesthetic dividends. Eschewing quotes herself, the British novelist Julie Myerson fancies “the cleanness of these letters and words without any little black marks flying around above them.” The book critic John Freeman believes that no-quote dialogue “lends everyday speech a formal elegance. . . . With McCarthy and [Peter] Carey, the lack of quotation marks gives the story a forward momentum and elemental fury—it’s as if their voices are rising out of something so instinctual it can’t be put between quotation marks.” Having chucked the quotes in his 2008 novel, Willing, Scott Spencer declares with the zeal of the convert, “Once you do without them, they look ridiculous. I wonder if I will ever use them in my serious writing again.”

  Scott is a friend of mine, so I say this in all affection: when it is employed traditionally, the prospect of any punctuation mark looking “ridiculous” is itself ridiculous. One might as well find the comma ridiculous, the semicolon, or page numbers.

  Besides, is the style always “elegant”? From Susan Minot’s Evening (1998):

  But you see I’ve just been at dinner—he glanced over his shoulder, then lurched forward—in Boston with my great old friends—the Beegins—and I’ve only just heard of your mother’s—he pressed his chin into his chest—misfortune and wanted to pay my respects.

  All those dashes simply replace one form of clutter with another. In kind, Roddy Doyle (like James Joyce) employs the French convention of denoting speech with em dashes; the style is at least clear, though seems less superior than merely different. Kate Grenville and Jonathan Safran Foer have sometimes opted for italics. (In Child 44 [2008], Tom Rob Smith distinguishes dialogue with both dashes and italics, in a disconcerting overkill of alternativeness.) The italics convention lends dialogue a curiously forceful, emphatic sensation while still keeping speech pent up, inside, barely audible.

  For that is the overwhelming effect of the no-quote style: quietness. The novelist Laura Lippman complains, “I can’t help feeling everyone is muttering.” Fair enough, when lines are murmured, the emotions expressed seem soft. But lines like these from Susanna Moore’s The Big Girls (2007) look peculiar:

  Just what is it that you’re not getting? he shouted. Your son has been molested. [and]

  Is this what you’re like with LizAnn? I heard myself scream.

  We don’t hear any shouting; no one screams. Reading heated dialogue without quotes is like watching chase scenes in The Bourne Supremacy with the sound off. It’s a tad perplexing why fiction writers would gag their own characters for the sake of typographical cleanliness. The effect is not only quiet but muffled. Speech does not quite happen.

  The refusal to make a firm distinction between speech and interior reflection can also evoke a hermetic worldview—sealed up and sealed off. Explaining why she writes without quotes, Ms. Myerson asserts, “In my experience of the world, there are no marks separating out what I think and what I say, or what other people do.” (With all due respect, there is indeed a sharp dividing line between thinking and saying something, and whenever I forget that crucial social distinction I get myself into trouble.) Yet when the exterior is put on a par with the interior, everything becomes interior. What is conveyed is an insidious solipsism. Characters grow less particular, seeming mere variant extensions of a dominant central consciousness. When thinking, speaking, and describing all blend together, the textual tone levels to a drone. The drama seems to be melting.

  Why does this impression matter? The appearance of authorial self-involvement in much modern literary fiction puts off what might otherwise constitute a larger audience. By stifling the action of speech, by burying characters’ verbal conflicts within a blurred, all-encompassing übervoice, the author does not seem to believe in action—and many readers are already frustrated with literary fiction’s paucity of plot. When dialogue makes no sound, the only character who really gets to talk is the writer.

  The new tidiness also produces nuts-and-bolts problems. Stage direction is often put on hold, lest it be confused with chat. To designate conversation, speaker identification can grow incessant. In quotation-marked dialogue, “he said” and “she said” are picked up almost subconsciously, and so rarely grow trying. Absent quotes, one is more apt to read-read the IDs, which therefore become monotonous, as in Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005):

  What person? her mother says.

  In the house, Astrid says.

  No idea, her mother says. Is Michael still here?

  Uh huh, Astrid says.

  Is Magnus up? her mother says.

  Don’t think so, Astrid says.

  Yet it is the issue of clarity on which the enemies of quoteless dialogue universally round. Even no-quote convert Scott Spencer specifically conditions the choice on there being no confusion over what is spoken and who is speaking. Skillful writers like Spencer or Tim Winton can pull off the “look, Mom—no hands!” Others are less adept. From Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007):

  I was actually just standing there in love. I was not even really standing, if she had walked away suddenly, I would have fallen.

  I wouldn’t do it, never mind.

  You sound disappointed.

  On examination, those last two lines are dialogue. On first reading, “I wouldn’t do it, never mind” is easily confused with reflection, an assurance that the narrator wouldn’t literally fall.

  Reading dialogue without quotation marks is like driving without signposts. A tired or impatient reader will easily get lost. For that reason HarperCollins editor Gail Winston assured me that “any ‘impossible for the reader to figure out’ situation leaves me cold.” London’s Portobello Books publisher Philip Gwyn Jones is currently making an offer for a demanding novel that he described as doubly laborious to comprehend because the author has eschewed quotation marks. Thus the offer is conditional on their restoration—“It rarely being the case that confusion by grammar is a meaningful or legitimate purpose. It is very rare, in my experience, that their absence improves a book or enhances its literary value.”

  So a word of warning for aspirant writers. Certainly my queries turned up plenty of open-mindedness on this issue in publishing—from Ecco editor Dan Halpern, for example, or Gary Fisketjon at Random House. Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi comments liberally, “I have no prejudices about it, but I do notice, and try to make sense of why this is happening. Usually there is a reason.” But those who give the quoteless author the benefit of the doubt are in the minority.

  Two-to-one in my unscientific poll, editors, agents, critics, and established authors bristled at no-quote dialogue as affected, confusing, imitative, and gratuitous. Their most recurrent adjective was “annoying.” Bloomsbury editor Helen Garnons-Williams explained, “Dialogue without speech marks crops up an awful lot in novels I turn down at the moment. Young, aspiring writers seem to believe they are making a statement with their choice of punctuation and ‘trying to shake things up,’ and this can elicit something of a weary sigh.” For critic Carlin Romano, “Dropping the quotation marks is the prose equivalent of declaring, ‘My car has no windows, but I can drive it anyway.’ Yes, dummy, you can, but there’s a reason they invented windows.”

  Signally, not one interviewee asserted anything along the lines of, “When I see quotation marks in a manuscript, I assume the author is a fuddy-duddy, and I immediately pitch it in the bin.” Playing with mechanical conventions can appear diversionary and risks seeming insecure—as if the author is worried that written in standard form the dialogue might not scan. At least writers who use quotation marks take responsibility for crafting lines that a given character might plausibly say, and in this sense the conventional, not the experimental, is brave. Besides, quotelessness is no longer experimental. It’s old hat. Want your first novel published? It’s safer to keep those quotes.

  More crucially for the commercial viability of literary fiction, in my casual vox-popping the responses of ordinary readers to the quote-free fashion were, without prompting, fierce, immediate, and hostile. A sampling: “I fluctuate between being irritated and enraged.” “It’s like hearing someone speak through plexiglass.” Half a dozen times I no sooner raised the issue than a friend or neighbor exploded, “Oh, I hate that!” By contrast, I’ve yet to hear any reader despair, “This would have been a great book, if it weren’t for all those pesky quotation marks!”

  Surely most readers would happily forgo “elegance” for demarcation that makes it easier to figure out who’s saying what when their eyelids are drooping during the last few pages before lights-out. Commercial and genre fiction writers almost always use quotes. It’s not because they’re crass. They want to sell books. Big on action, they would never adopt a convention that promotes the impression that when their characters talk no one is quite saying anything. To the degree that this device contributes to the broader popular perception that “literature” is pretentious, faddish, vague, eventless, effortful, and suffocatingly interior, quotation marks may not be quite as tiny as they appear on the page.

  “Lionel Shriver Is Grateful for Pandemic Quarantine (No She Isn’t)”

  Los Angeles Times, 2020

  [During the first pandemic lockdowns of 2020, newspapers were bloated with filler features in which artists delineated how they were spending their suddenly copious free time. Almost universally, these accounts of reading The Tin Drum in the original German came across as not only pompous but suspect. So when the Los Angeles Times approached me to submit a lockdown diary, I filed the following, which is not quite what the paper bargained for. In the editor’s defense, however, he was delighted.]

  Tuesday, 14 April 2020

  Jeff and I arise at dawn, so we can sit out back and watch the sunrise. London is so much more peaceful when no one is doing anything unnecessarily productive in it. The clear sky is undisturbed by planes full of folks who didn’t need to go places after all. Now that our neighbors believe that COVID-19 lives on fur, they keep their cats inside. So our garden is full of birds, and I can skip my daily ritual of retrieving all the corpses.

  “You know, I’m glad for the lockdown,” I say reflectively. “All this opportunity for contemplation and solitude. And the social solidarity is so uplifting.”

  “Yes,” Jeff says. “Social solidarity is a lot easier when you don’t see anybody.”

  I return to Remembrance of Things Past, because during this becalming stasis it makes sense to read a book in which nothing happens. Jeff picks thoughtfully at the sitar he ordered on Amazon. I’ve always wanted to read Proust, Jeff has always wanted to learn the sitar, and thanks to the British government we can fulfill our dreams.

  I head to the Tesco Metro covered in “PPE” (gotta dig all our hip new lingo). Thanks to silent, wary social-distance queuing with the fellow Londoners whom I’ve learned to spurn as leaky vessels of lethal contagion, a fifteen-minute trip now takes two hours. Again I relish the extended meditation and chance for inner wisdom. Lately I really know myself, right? So it hardly matters that I don’t know anyone else.

  Jeff and I take a lingering online tour of the British Museum, gawking at big chunks of rock that have endured, stoic and implacable, for thousands of years. Their defiant inertia seems to be telling us something. They’re not going anywhere. So what’s our problem?

  At dinner I remark beamingly, “I’m pleased we agreed not to drink during this period of enlightenment and cultural enrichment. The mental clarity is so refreshing.”

  This evening, I read Pushkin aloud in Russian. Jeff doesn’t speak Russian, but he gets so caught up in the rolling rhythms of the poems that he is moved to tears. I am so moved that he is moved that I cry, too. Then Jeff is moved that I am moved that he is moved, and the sofa gets terribly wet. We have tender tantric sex, because we’ve never been this close. Cheers, Boris Johnson.

  (I lied. We got up at noon. I read the Telegraph, The New York Times, and The Spectator, then maniacally worked on my new manuscript, the only fiction I can stand to read. We watched the Channel 4 News, Newsnight, Sky News, PBS NewsHour, and one more car-crash presidential press briefing on CNN. We killed a second bottle of wine. We made a fumbling stab at sex, but Jeff was too drunk.)

  Wednesday

  We stream Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House and a host of improving documentaries. We take turns singing karaoke to Madame Butterfly. Jeff starts Moby-Dick, because the whole human race is also engaged in a noble, death-defying battle with Mother Nature. Disinclined to despoil his enjoyment, I neglect to point out which of these parties usually wins.

  “I confess,” I ruminate at dinner, “I was peevish at first that my new novel will be released into a black hole, with no bookstores or promotional events. But maybe next month’s publication date is another lucky break. Isn’t selling one’s work a little grubby?”

  “It’s a defilement,” Jeff agrees readily, with a sense of excitement.

  “An audience for any true work of art,” I say with a returning excitement, “is also a defilement. Surely there’s a purity to a novel that no one reads. Reading is a kind of contamination—or appropriation.”

  “I feel the same way about jazz,” Jeff says vigorously. “When anyone listens to me drum, they interfere with the music. If clubbers pay a cover charge, the relationship is transactional. The music becomes about money—in a way, it becomes money. I’m so relieved that, on the other side of this, all the venues will be bankrupt and replaced with pawnshops and off-track betting. That way I can play all by myself, like a real pro.”

  I pat my husband’s thigh with a touch of condescension. “Oh, honey. You’re right about how fortunate you are to be shed of a viable occupation. But ‘on the other side of this’? Who said anything about another side?”

  I take my 2020 appointments diary to bed and put big, joyous black Xs through “Reviewers’ Dinner,” “Book Launch,” “Solo Spectator event at Emmanuel Centre,” “Swiss Festival,” “Ely Festival,” “Bath Festival,” “Dublin Festival,” and “Hay Festival,” and then let Jeff do the honors on his own account. He strikes through “JW tour of Portugal” and “JW tour for ‘Bloom’ with Carmen Staaf and Michael Formanek” with a zestful flourish.