This is from a published work. “Her pensive frown drew me like a smell from childhood.”
You know, I’m pretty familiar with childhood smells. I can smell one now, as a matter of fact, a powerful, pervading smell from a cute, little child. But this simile doesn’t work for other reasons. Let’s talk about it.
My first thought is the writer has mixed two senses. Her face or her thoughtful, moody appearance appeals to him. He sees her and remembers … an odor?
What if he saw she was deep in thought, and frowning in an adorable way? Perhaps she frowned over her hands at the floor. I walked up to her and said, “You remind me of a cookie.” Anyway, my good wife, who is not frowning now, said this sentence and the paragraph with it would be improved by focusing on the girl, not the narrator’s emotional reaction to her.
The sentence reminds me of these: “Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.”
“She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.”
That’s good writing.
I don’t know. He isn’t saying the smile is like an odor. He’s saying it exercises the same kind of attraction. I suppose it’s clumsy comparing one sensory sensation to another… but I could have written that, I think.
Maybe I did, come to think of it.
Maybe if he described the type of childhood odor? It’s pretty vague as it stands, and childhood smells run the gamut from abrosial to, well, less-than-pleasant.
Yeah. I’m sure if you were disappointed with the writing until then, this sentence would have more weight. My wife suggested an improved style would have not emphasized the narrator so much and described what he saw. If she appeals to him, he would describe her in appealing terms, and this closing sentence of his description may have said simply that she frowned at the floor.
If I smelt the distinctive, oddly sweet smell of my great aunt’s apartment, which she vacated in the late 1970s when I was in my early teens, I would be instantly taken back to another time & place. I think that’s what he means by “a smell from childhood.”
I love that list of similes, by the way, but I believe it’s sort of an urban legend. I doubt if it actually came from genuine student papers. It has the marks of stuff that’s been purposely made up to be bad. Very well done, though.
Michael, that is what the writer means, but I don’t think it comes across well.
Lars, I thought the same thing and wondered what research had been done to track down the source of the list. It reminds me of Wall Street Journal (I think) reader contests I heard about. I should try to track that down too.
It comes from a Washington Post contest:
http://www.snopes.com/humor/lists/metaphor.asp
Fantastic. Thanks for finding that. I wonder if the contest I’m thinking of as being from the Wall Street Journal is the same Style Invitational from The Washington Post.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
That sounds like something Douglas Adams might have written in the Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Or Terry Pratchat in a Discworld novel.
Sinesthesia? (Which I probably spelled wrong.) It seems to be fairly common among musicians, mostly in the form of color sinesthesia. Anyway, the cross wiring of one sense with another.
I don’t think the writer’s writing it well, though, if that’s what it is, as I understand sinesthesia it should be: “Her pensive frown smelled like the cookies Mom baked when I was a kid.”
Ha! That’s terrible too.