/lit/ - Literature

>>20806227
It's helpful to see them in action. I checked three books.
Pnin is full of parentheses, most pages have multiple.
Slaughterhouse-Five has just a single pair of parentheses at the start of chapter 1.
Piranesi uses them densely in some places and barely in others.

Nabokov's sentences are dense, rich, showy.
>Pnin, then a rising young scholar and she, a more limpid mermaid than now but practically the same person, had met around 1925, in Paris. He wore a sparse auburn beard (today only white bristles would sprout if he did not shave—poor Pnin, poor albino porcupine!), and this divided monastic growth, topped by a fat glossy nose and innocent eyes, nicely epitomized the physique of old-fashioned intellectual Russia.
I wouldn't write this. But if I did write it I couldn't organize it any better. He wants to mention Pnin's white bristles, but they're best quarantined from the rest of the passage that happens in the past, and worse, it applies to a part in the middle. He could leave the parenthetical out entirely, but that's not what we're here for, that's not why people read Nabokov.
There are also smaller parentheticals:
>How Pnin came to the Soedinyonnïe Shtatï (the United States).
>In the Fall Semester of that particular year (1950),
>an inconspicuous reference mark against a still more convenient train (Lv. Waindell 2:19 P.M., Ar. Cremona 4:32 P.M.);
I have a gut feeling that you're better able to get away with this if you have those long justified parentheticals from before. The reader is already expecting them, knows how to read them, and that lowers the bar. They won't come as a surprise.

Vonnegut of course has a kind of anemic style, minimalist prose.
>He was sentenced to six months in prison. He died there of pneumonia. So it goes.

In Piranesi most of the parentheticals add a pompous anxious tone. The narrator often feels the need to explain himself. He rarely talks to people, keeps notebooks, invented a lot of his terminology himself, and there's much he knows he doesn't know.
>I am (as I have previously stated) approximately thirty-five years of age.
>Perhaps I extrapolated the idea of a ‘university’ (a place where scholars congregate) from these?
>The scratching out had not been done perfectly (gel ink is difficult to remove) and I could still make out the ghostly form of the ‘2’.
>I do not know where he went. (I never really know.)

I tried to sketch something, I hope it makes sense.
The first sentence is multi-tiered. It uses parentheses to add an extra layer for organization, like a footnote or a basement.
The second sentence is simple. Consistency matters: if all your sentences are simple without exceptions then the reader can let their guard down.
The third sentence only uses parentheses to change tone (color). Most of the parentheticals in Piranesi aren't like this but some are. I bet it works best if those other parentheticals establish it first.

So they can be justified, but use with care? I dunno.