The New York Times has called the author Jess Walter "ridiculously talented." "His sentences nearly sing," says the Los Angeles Review of Books. "One of my favorite young American writers," says fellow novelist Nick Hornby.

We agree with the critics. Walter's 2012 best-seller Beautiful Ruins is a masterpiece. But today we'll do a different kind of book review.

Our job at GrammarBook.com is to preserve and promote standard English. This sometimes puts us at cross-purposes with Walter, who chooses to speak to his readers in an easy, accessible voice—the people's English, not the scholars' English. If his writing is where the language is headed, we traditionalists must accept that we are fighting numerous losing battles.

In Walter's short story We Live in Water one finds this line: "The resort was comprised of three newer buildings." Word nerds will question why he didn't use composed instead of comprised. In 1926, in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H.W. Fowler hissed, "This lamentably common use of comprise as a synonym of compose or constitute is a wanton and indefensible weakening of our vocabulary." Seventy-six years later, in 2002, Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words was no less emphatic: "Comprised of is a common expression, but it is always wrong."

So it seems clear that Walter used the phrase because he either did not know or did not care that "the experts" say it's wrong. By writing "comprised of," Walter is legitimizing this "common expression" over the adamant objections of a dwindling cadre of fuddy-duddies.

From Walter's 2003 novel Land of the Blind: "I don't know who liked this new world less, him or Mr. Leggett." Walter, who could have used the correct he in this sentence without sounding stilted or affected, opted instead for the colloquial him. Apparently, neither he nor his target audience loses any sleep over such erudite technicalities.

In another short story, The New Frontier, the author writes, "He convinced her to model." But technically, he persuaded her to model. "Convince may be followed by an of phrase or a that clause, but not by a to infinitive," counsels Theodore M. Bernstein in The Careful Writer (1983). That rule is upheld to this day by the Associated Press Stylebook: "You may [only] be convinced that something or of something." Walter isn't buying. He's trusting his own ear, as writers will do. The fine distinction between convince and persuade, he is saying, has become a quaint bit of trivia.

He introduces sentences with danglers. He repeatedly writes "different than" rather than "different from." He says "snuck" even though sneaked is still considered the correct option. At least once, he uses strata—the plural of stratum—as a singular. He writes "close proximity," long dismissed by sticklers as a windy redundancy.

Walter is too busy spinning his wondrous tales to be distracted by such minutiae—his instincts tell him: Why bother?

Why, indeed? That question gives all language watchdogs nightmares.