Language lovers, grammar geeks, and students of story structure will glean added satisfaction from the tale Roland Merullo spins in his most recent novel, The Talk-Funny Girl , in which Merullo uses language itself as a barometer of character change. His protagonist may bring to mind flower girl Eliza Doolittle, whose stumbling block in George Bernard Shaw ’s play Pygmalion was the way her Cockney accent revealed her working class roots. But Merullo’s Marjorie has even worse problems: she knowingly mangles syntax. It’s page seven before this seventeen-year-old girl, raised in rural New Hampshire, speaks a sentence at all: “I come for a try for paying work,” she says, keeping it short and simple so as not to expose her quirks of speech. But we have already picked up the problem. By the time we hear her speak to her parents at home, an excerpted exchange includes sentences like: “Mister Warner told he might have a work to give.” “Look on me in my eyes, you Majie you….Might?” “Probly wi...

Novelist and memoirist Roland Merullo confesses, in print and online interviews, to being a “pantser.” “I write by the seat of my pants, almost always without an outline,” he says. “I just start, and that seems like opening the floodgates, or drilling a well. All kinds of stuff comes out, and usually very quickly.” What’s that I hear? Ah yes, the collective sigh of all you pantsers out there, underscored by the shredding of those confounded outlines that were the result of last year’s resolutions. But Merullo does not surrender the structure of his books to whimsy. He builds from what he calls “a very clear sense of an opening moment.” And in more than one case, he has had the smarts to include an early metaphor that suggests the scope of the book’s conflicts. Meaning that he either a) wrote the metaphor, listened carefully for what his subconscious was saying, then wrote the book without ever deviating from that vision, or—and much more likely for a pantser—b) he went back and...