I vaaant to suuuck your subjuuunctive

One might say that in terms of readers (and writers), the world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who like (not to mention are capable of) reading grammar and usage books cover to cover, and those who don't. Most people, one can assume, fall into the latter category. If that were not the case, you'd see a lot more copies of Hodges' Harbrace Handbook and The Elements of Style being flipped through on the subway or at airport newsstands.

The obvious reasons for this are that (1) most people don't care enough about the finer points of usage to bother reading an entire book on the subject, and (2) many such books are so heavy and dry that any joy at finding wit within their pages, if it (the wit) exists at all, is soon quashed by the exhaustion that comes from just trying to slog through the damn things.

There are exceptions to the "too dense to stomach" rule. I didn't read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, for all the reasons stated in this New Yorker review*, which declared, "'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' is really a 'decline of print culture' book disguised as a style manual (poorly disguised)." And yet Eats appealed to a fairly large subset of the American book-reading population -- if we are to take the NYer's word, the segment who, like the author, Lynn Truss, fall into this camp: "They are like people who lose control when they hear a cell phone ring in a public place: they just need to vent. Truss is their Jeremiah. They don’t care where her commas are, because her heart is in the right place." There are enough of these people to have made Eats a best seller, even though, as the NYer points out, "Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor."

The hyperpopular Eats, then, ends up being a somewhat shoddy example of how to get people more interested in grammar (that is, in good grammar). But there are superior usage books, packaged in quite palatable form, on the market. Three I've long had on my reference shelf: Lapsing Into a Comma and The Elephants of Style, both by Bill Walsh, an esteemed former colleague; and Woe Is I, by Patricia O'Connor.

This past year I added another, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. And this one is unlike any usage book I've ever read.

Vampire was originally published in 1984 and revised in 1993, so obviously I'm late in discovering its syntactical delights. It's got the clear explanations and the droll humor of the others. But where it distinguishes itself is in its voice and presentation.

Vampire is a grammar book with a wickedly libidinous sensibility, populated with dark, lusty characters, Russian and Victorian, French and Transylvanian, all of whom you might expect to run into at a candlelit picnic in a graveyard adjacent to an enchanted forest, an affair presided over by Vincent Price and immortalized in ink by Edward Gorey. It holds the reader's attention not just in display (it abounds with antique etchings) but with censorious little asides that dare the reader to turn away:

"Singular pronouns take singular verbs. And what might these pronouns be? And must you go riffling off, losing your place here and forgetting what you're after and ending up in a field of cows?"

The sentences Gordon spins out and lines up to illustrate her points are lush and wicked. She describes linking verbs as "copulative," for instance -- and later, as "erotic":

And here they are, caught in the act of copulating in various positions:
I am willing and I'll be ready in a while.
She sounded eager, but he couldn't be sure.

Here she is demonstrating that not all -ly words are adverbs:

When dressed in his most uppity drag, the transvestite vampire appeared a stately damsel all tricked out for tea.

To demonstrate a pronoun in the possessive case, she offers:

They trampled on my nightie, those shortsighted mastodons.

And in explaining a confounding noun that's plural in form yet singular (or is it?) in meaning:

The shade of sadness we call the blues can take a singular or plural verb, since anyone who has them can't be bothered to look it up, or to be consistent about whether it is -- or they are -- in pieces or in a solid hopeless mass.
The blues is hard to lose.
The blues have tracked me down in this upbeat part of town.

Part of the dullness of reading grammar books is their mind-numbing repetition. Not so Gordon's, thanks to its refreshingly inventive explications. Gordon can illustrate a single concept using fifteen sentences in a row, but instead of putting the reader to sleep, they manage to bewitch, bother and bewilder (in a good way), until a person can't help but finally understand the role of, say, the subjunctive complement.

In the end, rather than taking us back to the tedium of childhood grammar school, Gordon immerses us in a world of nefariousness and whimsy -- all in the service of appositives and gerunds, past and future perfect tenses, splices and run-ons. And it's a world the reader will be loath (not loathe) to leave when the final page is turned.

*I'd recommend reading the entire New Yorker article, by the way. It begins as a review but evolves into a beautiful meditation on the mechanics versus the art of writing.