My Name is Asher Lev: Style 1 key example

This style choice shows the seriousness and precision with which Asher views his art and the world—he is incredibly single-minded about pursuing life as an artist, and the book is singularly focused on this, too. My Name is Asher Lev is both a bildungsroman and kunstlerroman—a coming-of-age novel and a novel about an artist coming into his own—so it's unsurprising that the book's style lends itself to conveying both the passage of time and the quiet intensity of a rising artistic genius.

Potok pointedly breaks away from this style only when he is writing about Asher's art. Art is described in stunning detail in My Name is Asher Lev that is not afforded to other topics in the same way. It's as if time stops when Asher enters his artistic flow, and Potok's choice of language magnifies the grandiosity of Asher's artwork and genius, further underscoring just how little time is devoted to discussing anything else in the novel.