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the King Size Ice Cream machine, and the turnstiles start whacking away as if the world were breaking up on the reefs. Four steps past the turnstiles everybody is already backed up haunch to paunch for the climb up the ramp and the stairs to the surface, a great funnel of flesh, wool, felt, leather, rubber and steaming alumicron, with the blood squeezing through everybody's old sclerotic arteries in hopped-up spurts from too much coffee and the effort of surfacing from the subway at the rush hour. Yet there on the landing are a boy and a girl, both about eighteen, in one of those utter, My Sin, backbreaking embraces.
    This is classic Wolfe, a world where "sclerotic" serves as antonym for erotic, where exclamation points sprout like wildflowers, where experience and status are defined by brand names. ("My Sin" was a perfume of the day.) But wait! There's more! As the couple canoodles, a cavalcade of commuters passes by:
    All round them, ten, scores, it seems like hundreds, of faces and bodies are perspiring, trooping and bellying up the stairs with arterio-sclerotic grimaces past a showcase full of such novel items as Joy Buzzers, Squirting Nickels, Finger Rats, Scary Tarantulas and spoons with realistic dead flies on them, past Fred's barbershop, which is just off the landing and has glossy photographs of young men with the kind of baroque haircuts one can get in there, and up onto 50th Street into a madhouse of traffic and shops with weird lingerie and gray hair-dyeing displays in the windows, signs for free teacup readings and a pool-playing match between the Playboy Bunnies and Downey's Showgirls, and then everybody pounds on toward the Time-Life Building, the Brill Building or NBC.
    Has any reader ever experienced a more glorious long sentence, a more rollicking evocation of underground New York, a more dazzling 128 words from capital letter to period? If you find one, I'd like to read it.
    A close reading of Wolfe suggests some strategies to achieve mastery of the long sentence:
    • It helps if subject and verb of the main clause come early in the sentence.
    • Use the long sentence to describe something long. Let form follow function.
    • It helps if the long sentence is written in chronological order.
    • Use the long sentence in variation with sentences of short and medium length.
    • Use the long sentence as a list or catalog of products, names, images.
    • Long sentences need more editing than short ones. Make every word count. Even. In. A. Very. Long. Sentence.
    Writing long sentences means going against the grain. But isn't that what the best writers do? In his novel The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald uses the long sentence to explain — and mirror — the antique prose style of English essayist Sir Thomas Browne:
    In common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of his erudition, deploying a vast repertoire of quotations and the names of authorities who had gone before, creating complex metaphors and analogies, and constructing labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortege in their sheer ceremonial lavishness. It is true that, because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, Browne's writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.
    In the 1940s Rudolf Flesch described the effects that made a sentence "easy" or "hard" to read. According to Flesch, an 1893 study illuminated the shrinking English sentence: "The average Elizabethan written sentence ran to about 45 words; the Victorian sentence to 29; ours to 20 and less." Flesch used sentence length and syllable count as factors in his readability studies, an arithmetic once derided by E. B. White in his