Infinite louda

I agree with Adam-Mars Jones when he says, in his review of James Wood's The Book Against God, that "[...]it is hard to be engaged by a novelist so awkward with figurative language[...]". He quotes this sentence as one of his (expectedly three) examples: "the air slowly labelled her white cheeks with two pink dots." I have a small theory as to how that sentence may have come about, and it assumes the following causal chain of authorial reasoning:

1) The verb `labeled' is inspired, probably spontaneous. At this point the phrase `The air labeled' is in the author's mind. He's probably asking himself: "What did it label?" to which the immediate answer is "her cheeks, of course".

2) The phrase "The air labeled her cheeks" is already encouraging, and needs only something a little more specific, because as it is it seems only puzzling "How can the air `label' anything?" At this point the author feels a conflict between his desperate need to cling to his beautiful and outre verb `labeled' and his awareness of the fact that the reader may not know what he means if he leaves the phrase untouched. This is usually a dangerous place to find oneself, inasmuch as it could lead to a string of frantic additions and deletions that could in turn lead to an abject abandonment of one's subject at the expense of `honing' a single sentence. More often than not what emerges is not only imprecise but also has the feeling of self-consciousness about it. Here Wood, oddly enough, has tried to qualify his airy metaphor with an absurd numeric attention to detail, "The air labeled her cheeks with two pink dots". Why "two"? The sense of relief that Wood no doubt felt at this happy rescue of his valuable sentence must have at least been qualified by his intense literary consciousness, his knowledge of his forbears and how they would have frowned upon this unseemly display of a figurative skill that is more bluster than brawn; must have at least kept him tossing that night.