Erin O’Connor has a thread going at Critical Mass about memorable first paragraphs. One of my all-time favorites is from an utterly unknown book, Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me. I’ve posted it on the blog before, and do you know what? I’m going to post it again:
There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone’s nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again–leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.
I sort of can’t get over this paragraph. I think it is just about perfect. I hope Ms. Dundy wrote it after she wrote the rest of the novel, because if I were her I would have stopped dead after writing those two sentences, thinking “My work is done here.” (But the rest of the novel is very good too.)