“You do know something,” said James Ellroy when speaking to David Vann at the London Review Bookshop a few months ago. “You are a knowledgeable motherfucker. But you don’t use quotation marks. Which invalidates your career – and your life.”

I suspect these words may chime with a few contributors on last week’s Reading Group thread. One of the very first posts came from MythicalMagpie who asked:

“David Vann seems to be allergic to speech marks. What is it with modern authors and disappearing punctuation?”

A few other people registered that it had been causing them confusion in the early pages – and a few have noted confusion about why the technique should be employed at all. Personally, after stumbling a few times in the opening chapters, I slipped into the rhythm and stopped noticing. Or at least, I stopped noticing at the front of my consciousness, although I’m sure that the lack of speech marks changed the way the novel washed over me. On some level, it makes a difference. You may think it’s a small thing – but then, take it up with James Ellroy. These little marks can change your whole experience of reading a book. The question is: why?

Explaining isn’t easy. It’s one of the strange biproducts of the rhythm and alchemy of prose. Books feel different without inverted commas. They feel, somehow, heavier. Or at least, I think they do. But here I should admit that there may be a little confirmation bias in my thinking. Perhaps I tend to notice the technique more in the deeper, darker books. Certainly, when I think of pages free of speech marks, one of the first writers that springs to mind is Cormac McCarthy. He who also eschews plenty of apostrophes:

“No. We’re not going to kill it.

He looked down at the boy, Shivering in his coats. He bent over and kissed him on his gritty brow. We wont hurt the dog, he said. I promise.”

Here, Ellroy has again come up with the goods: “I tried to read a Cormac McCarthy book,” he told The Paris Review, “and thought, ‘Why doesn’t this cocksucker use quotation marks?’”

Much as I enjoyed that question, I have a page of The Road open in front of me now, and I think the answer is reasonably clear. Without quote marks, the physical pages look almost as stark as the prose, as denuded as the world McCarthy describes. There’s also something about the way you have to slow down over that “wont” that gives it an extra weight. Although, to be honest, I know where Ellroy is coming from. The Road, I can take or leave. The lack of quotation marks may well have been a factor in what I found to be a plodding and unrewarding reading experience.

That said, further reflection reminds me that a few of my favourite writers also avoid those curly sky commas. EL Doctorow, for instance, has declared:

“I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn’t need them, they were fly-specks on the page. If you’re doing it right, the reader will know who’s talking.”

Doctorow, it goes without saying, does it right. I was surprised when I first came across that quote because – in contrast to the ponderous McCarthy prose, I’d barely noticed that Doctorow didn’t use the marks. It was only in his latest novel, Andrew’s Brain, that the technique really struck me, but there he uses it with deliberate intent. He’s still doing it right, and it’s still possible to work out who’s talking, but not without effort, and not without occasionally doubting yourself. Doctorow makes everything uncertain – who is talking, where the conversation is taking place, why we are hearing it, when it is supposed to have happened and above all, what is under discussion. But that’s part of the point of this deliberately tangled and wrong-footing novel.

It’s a neat trick – although it doesn’t answer the wider question of why writers should dispense with speech marks as a whole. I note that in an earlier novel, Waterworks, Doctorow makes full use of them. I also find it hard to envisage how Waterworks might be improved without the punctuation. (In fact, I find it hard to see how Waterworks could be improved unless you plate it in gold and include a cure for cancer on the last page. But that’s another story.)

I thought I’d ask another couple of writers who have effectively used – or not used – this punctuation in recent novels.

Benjamin Myers doesn’t use speech marks in either of his last two novels Pig Iron or Beastings. His reasons are remarkably similar to Doctorow’s:

“I feel that speech marks are like dead flies on the windscreen of the reader’s imagination. They’re messy. Look at them: “ “ “ “ “ ” ” ” ” ”. Literary litter. I’m really against ‘over-writing’ in any way and think that even telling people that a character is speaking now feels like over-writing and maybe even patronising in a way. I’m sure they can work it out. I don’t think novels should be an easy ride for the author or the reader, and a bit of confusion is no bad thing. The fact that someone has gone out and bought a novel automatically puts them in the top 10% intelligence-wise anyway, so there’s really no need to explain everything to them.”

But for Myers it’s more than just a question of taste. It’s about texture, rhythm and power:

“My aim in writing is to physically impact on readers. I like the idea of being able to quicken someone’s heart-rate who is, say, three thousand miles away – and maybe, three years in the future. Or perhaps make them sweat a bit. Or get their adrenaline going. To do that, I think a writer needs to be able to accelerate and decelerate when required, and stripping writing down to the bare bones can help. Taking out a lot of punctuation can make it more poetic too. The entire flow of Beastings changed when I decided to take out speech marks and commas. Instead of creating a stream-of-consciousness effect sentences instead became stubbier, blunter. Chiselled.”

Chiselled is a word that will resonate with anyone who has read Beastings. Meanwhile, Cynan Jones also talks about this same power in the decision to remove quote marks from his award-winning novel The Dig: “It was John Freeman, editor of Granta Magazine at the time, who suggested removing the speech marks,” he says. “I’d sent Granta the central section of the novel for consideration, where a father takes his teenage son on a dig. In his words: ‘I took quotation marks off the dialogue. There’s a muscular power to Cynan’s narration that I think means removing the division between people and what they say and landscape makes sense.’”

Likewise, anyone who has read The Dig will understand about that muscular power – and be able to see how well it makes sense. It’s also worth noting that the rule isn’t always followed in this technically brilliant novel:

“I kept the speech marks in the dialogue between Daniel and his mother. I wanted to drop the sense of muscular, physical communication at this point and emphasise distance and closeness during the conversation.”

So, the technique produces a specific effect, especially where the descriptions of the landscape are presented in just the same way as the conversations of the characters moving around it.

While typing that last sentence, I naturally also thought of the great writer of the wild Alaskan frontier, David Vann. It’s no coincidence that Myers cites Vann as “one of the very best writers around”. Nor is it chance that Myers, Vann and Jones have more in common than an absence of speech marks. They share an atmosphere and intent, as well as similar ideas about lonely men and bitter nature.

But don’t start to think that skipping the quotation marks is an exclusively masculine, outdoorsy technique. Another other great recent exponent is Eimear McBride. In A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, the presence of those fly-specks would feel almost absurd, an imposition on the rhythm, and an interruption of the sense that the world is happening inside the narrator’s head.

Although, of course, Eimear McBride does things with language that no one else can do – or should attempt. It depends on having a special sense of rhythm and timing. The danger comes (and this, I suspect is what worries James Ellroy) if avoiding speech marks becomes as fashionable and meaningless as the historic present tense use that plagues so many modern novels. If everyone starts doing it, and we all stop noticing, it will quickly cease to mean anything. So while it’s an interesting technique, I’d say that don’t really want to see too much of it in future.

On that note, Vann’s response to Ellroy in that bookshop is worth noting: “My novel that comes out in March ... at the last minute I thought that I wanted to add quotation marks, but it was too late as it was already in proofs and each one would have had to be hand-added. But I did repent, in that way perhaps. I’ve always liked no quotations before that, though ...”

Happily, we’ll be able to ask him more about that when he joins us for a webchat in a couple of weeks’ time.