Gertrude Stein’s “Paris France” is a book about Paris that tells many true things about the French but also gives a picture of Gertrude and her times that is about who Americans are and what Americans think when they are not in Paris at all. It is a picture of Paris by an American who thinks as Americans think, and we see America in the picture when she thinks she is showing us France. Yet because she is a fine and true writer she knows that she is showing us both things, and many truths about the French come out even though they are written the way an American must write them. This is because the writing is clear and the ideas are based on things seen rather than on what she has read about in books about Paris written by an old aunt or a magazine writer who has lived there for a few years and is excited to think he now understands it all.

And there—if I did that little pastiche with any aplomb—is a demonstration not just of how infectious Gertrude Stein’s style is but also of how much it runs into Ernest Hemingway’s slightly more self-consciously crooning and acidic one. It isn’t the least of Stein’s virtues, or importance, that Hemingway was in many ways the popularizer of a style that she had invented. One could even say, to borrow Picasso’s famous disparaging remark about his imitators, that Stein did it first and Hemingway did it pretty. But, prettified or not, Hemingway’s style was the most influential in American prose for more than fifty years, and this makes Stein’s style less an outcropping than a bedrock of modern American writing.

I hope, too, it suggests the kinds of truths that Stein’s peculiar style supports. All marked styles—and any style that isn’t marked isn’t a style; what we call a “mannered” style is simply a marked style on a bad morning—hold their authors hostage just a bit. Stein’s style makes subtle thoughts sound flat and straightforward, and it also lets straightforward, flat thoughts sound subtle. Above all, its lack of the ordinary half-tints and protective shadings of adjectives and semicolons—the Jamesian fog of implication—lends itself to generalizations, sometimes profound, often idiosyncratic, always startling. It is the most deliberately naïve style in which any good writer has ever worked, and it is also the most “faux-naïf,” the most willed instance of simplicity rising from someone in no way simple. (E. B. White and Robert Frost were neither of them the simple Yankees their styles liked to intimate, but both were more like simple Yankees than Stein was ever like a simple San Franciscan, or a simple anything.) Stein’s style is to writing what sushi is to cooking—not so much an example as a repudiation of the whole idea that still manages to serve the original function.

In truth, though, her style is more coherent and “ordinary” than it can seem, in part because a lot of its effect is achieved by the ridiculously straightforward device of removing normal punctuation. In writing, our sensitivity to small sounds is such that a minute alteration in decorum can have a very big effect on tone. The New Yorker reporter-poet Joseph Mitchell, for instance, searching for a plain style, often eliminated the normal contractions we use in English, so that every “It’s” became an “It is” and every “He’s” a “He is,” and suddenly a note of somber gravity exuded from his most basic declarative sentences. Stein achieves a similarly large and uncanny effect just by omitting commas—there are maybe a dozen in the whole of “Paris France.” As a result, any sentence, no matter how many qualifications it contains, is almost always written by Stein in commaless, undivided form. This makes her thoughts seem plain even when they are very fancy. Reading Stein is a bit like reading Emily Dickinson before punctuation got imposed on her: both claim, in every sense, our undivided attention. Many of Stein’s sentences can even be made to look normal just by punctuating them normally. “It is nice in France they adapt themselves to everything slowly they change completely but all the time they know that they are as they were.” Simply inserting a period after the first five words and a dash after the next six makes the writing seem much less eccentric: “It is nice in France. They adapt themselves to everything slowly—they change completely but, all the time, they know that they are as they were.” And then there is also the monosyllabic vocabulary—“I like words of one syllable,” she tells us, but has no need to tell us—and the lovable weakness for ordinary American idioms, as in her famous assignment of Paris as her “home town.”

The style, even this devout Steinian must admit, can be trying; there are moments when the studied simplicity seems disingenuous or morally obtuse—as when she complacently remarks, “Well war does make one realize the march of centuries and the succession of generations.” (It would be nice to think that this is meant ironically, but that isn’t her way.) And, like a rush job on an eighth-grade essay, there are other moments when facts seem piled upon facts in a breathless “Oh, and also I almost forgot to mention!” sequence, even down to the “thank you” with which the book concludes. There are also some Stein generalizations that have less the force of original thinking than of deliberate perversity; when she tells us that French is a spoken language and English a written one, you may feel in the presence of excess, or what used to be called a “leg-pull.”

But, far more often, we are convinced by the truth of her observations, and are still astonished by the beautiful bluntness with which they’re stated. Explaining perfectly why plain-as-pudding French politicians often had daring youths on the extreme left or right, Stein tells us that all Frenchmen have to be revolutionary: “How could you be civilized if you had not passed through a period of revolt, and then you had to return to your pre-revolt state and there you were you were civilized.” There is also her shrewd observation on the surrealists that “they missed their moment of becoming civilized, they used their revolt as a public not a private thing, they wanted publicity not civilization.” (And she’s right; publicity is the opposite of civilization.) Or her lovely riff on dogs: “One has a great deal of pleasure out of dogs because one can spoil them as one cannot spoil one’s children. If the children are spoiled, one’s future is spoilt but dogs one can spoil without any thought of the future and that is a great pleasure.” Or her comment on how naming a thing defuses it in French: “Now the word une guerre des nerfs [a war of nerves] has entered their language it no longer has any effect upon their nerves.”

Throughout, Stein has a certain idea of France as clear as General de Gaulle’s, if more detached. Her idea of France, offered after thirty-odd years of residence and salon-keeping in that country, is that it is an ahistorical and amoral country, where time stands still and acts are judged by what she calls “logic” and “fashion”—what we might call, on the one hand, “inner aplomb,” and, on the other, “high style.” She means this, I should add quickly, as dispassionate praise. Both America and Britain are countries ruled by a belief in progress, forward movement. France, despite its even more dramatic upheavals, or perhaps because of them, has evolved to believe that civilization flows through and around and within history rather than being pushed backward or forward by it. While America and England share a myth of progress, and with it a clear sense of a remote past, very few people in France are persuaded that the country is better now than it was back then—or any worse either: “The background of tradition of profound conviction that men and women and children do not change, that science is interesting but does not change anything, that democracy is real but that governments unless they tax you too much or get you defeated by the enemy are of no importance.” The French may play at the game of progress, but they only play at it, and seem amoral to Americans because they don’t submit everything to a puritanical-sentimental inquiry. They see things as they are, and accept life as it is.

What matters in a block universe of this kind, where change is an illusion, is logic—the principles of reasoning that are assumed to be unchanging and unchanged—and its seeming opposite, fashion, which is a kind of artificial form of progress that works its way round through changes that constantly cycle. Fashion, as Stein remarks perceptively, is linked to the cycle of the seasons, not to the march of time: we talk of spring and autumn collections more than we do of this decade’s needs. The New Look will always be followed by another, Newer one. Fashion, a crucial word for her, means in Steinese something more like ritual, the elements of surface excitements that give life novelty without pretending to finality. “It was in Paris that the fashions were made, and it is always in the great moments when everything changes that fashions are important, because they make something go up in the air or go down or go around that has nothing to do with anything.” Fashion is a way for men and women to make up seasons of their own.