This engaging and intelligent book turns on two foundational insights. First, Wall observes a shift in landscape architecture during the eighteenth century, from the manicured and domineering avenue to the more intricate approach, “a carefully designed series of changing perspectives from the entrance of the estate, winding ‘through the most interesting part of the grounds,’ to the entrance of the house itself.” Concomitantly, the grammatical register of the word “approach” expands from verb to noun. In a way, these observations exemplify the work of the book: at every turn, it weaves together words and world, exploring links between spaces—real and imagined—and language. Wall is especially attentive to “the in-between,” beginning with the space of the approach stretching between entrance and house, and ultimately including all the details of the prose page: prepositions, punctuation marks, typography. In the author’s account, the book began with an interest in the park gate lodge, “that odd little dwelling that introduces the visitor to the estate, that marks the beginning of the approach.” An interest in the history of such buildings leads to broader curiosity about “things culturally prominent but critically invisible.”Grammars of Approach reads into several disciplines, often simultaneously blending language from landscape design, print culture, linguistics, and novel theory. The park gate lodge becomes a “prepositional building,” and Jane Austen’s free indirect discourse arrives in paragraphs with a “syntactic topography” characterized by “an approach of winding, perspectival change, circling from a bird’s-eye view overhead, swooping down through a mind, and popping out into direct discourse.” An early anecdote grounds this mode of reading and is repeated a few times to remind us of how we are being asked to think. Wall offers the words of Lancelot “Capability” Brown, a landscape architect with a preference for the “winding line” so important for this book: “‘Now there, said he, pointing his finger, I make a comma, and there pointing to another spot where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon: at another part (where an interruption is desirable to break the view) a parenthesis—now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.’” Although this passage becomes a touchstone for the cross-pollinating of terms that characterizes the chapters to follow, I would also have been interested in having greater access to the intellectual justifications for so often reading a given arena in terms of another. That is, the terms of landscape, grammar, and narrative can certainly be made to agree with each other, but why circumscribe the book in this particular way? Why not extend into other cultural materials? The book often suggests that connections can be made but might have offered a clearer picture of why those specific connections are most valuable.The chapters are expansive, and their copiousness is made manageable by a general pattern of working outward, moving from a highly specific object or example to a rich network of ideas that make possible a diverse array of close readings. Chapter 1 begins by focusing on the grammatical shift of “approach” from verb to noun as it gained its new architectural meaning. This discussion, like the book generally, is intensively researched, deftly presenting a wealth of archival material without losing argumentative momentum. From here the chapter broadens, contrasting the approach with the avenue and examining various forms of landscape design, including the picturesque, that generally rejected the harder lines of the previous centuries. With these pieces in place, Wall turns to syntax in works on landscape by Henry Repton, Uvedale Price, and others, demonstrating parallels between grammatical structures and the topographies they articulate; the chapter culminates in readings of travel narratives by Defoe, Powys, and Byng, and prose fiction by Richardson, Smith, Radcliffe, and Austen.Chapter 2 extends the study of eighteenth-century landscape design by introducing the park gate lodge, moving from real buildings to fictional representations. Wall makes a convincing case for the “narrative and psychological” significance of the park gate lodge in the novel, through readings of Burney’s Camilla and Austen’s Mansfield Park. Moving on, the chapter takes up shifts in topographical views, noting the increasing diversity of perspective in visual representations of houses. It concludes by treating the alterations made to London Bridge, examining how its “‘Village’ on the river was summarily scraped off, and the bridge across was rebuilt, straight, uniform, unencumbered,” resulting in a new way of seeing the path across the Thames. From here the book moves more directly onto what Wall calls “the topographical page,” bringing the architectural terms of the first two chapters to bear on print culture.Chapter 3 suggests that the eighteenth-century page underwent a “relandscaping that was a sort of mirrored obverse of the picturesque movement,” that is, much of its texture was smoothed over and standardized. Yet for Wall, these changes allow an “underground picturesque” to emerge, shifting readerly attention to those aspects previously overshadowed by capitalized nouns. This chapter, like the next, moves briskly—in an agreeable way—across matters of font, capitalization and italicization, catchwords, and punctuation. Chapter 4 turns to grammar, with special attention to “the fantastic roots and winding paths of the preposition and ‘lesser parts of speech.’” It concludes with a dynamic, extended reading of Richardson’s Clarissa; here Wall claims that we might read Clarissa as a prepositional figure, in the sense that she “governs” the parts around her. Moments like this, when Wall reads in multiple ways at once—here, she is interested in the prepositions in the prose itself, and the prepositional function of a character—make clearer the stakes of reading topographically. Like an approach, the book often makes twists and turns that can threaten to disorient, but we are always liberated into a culminating reading such as this, suddenly aware of how the various aspects of the landscape work as one.Chapter 5 knits the preceding chapters together, drawing on the accumulated terms and ways of reading to survey shifts in literary landscaping (syntactic patterns; typographical features; narrative perspective) from Bunyan to Austen. This sweeping chapter makes a clear case for reading in the topographical ways Wall has been suggesting to this point, but it also made me to curious about what the approaches laid out in this book might do for the study of poetry, which tends to demand the kind of attention to syntactic detail so celebrated in these pages.By the time I finished reading, I found myself thinking frequently in Wall’s translational terms, and writing this review, began to wonder: is a book review a kind of “approach”? I think so. Like the winding paths that fill Grammars of Approach, the review must move prepositionally: toward, but also around, within, and through, before arriving at an end. And, like an approach, a review opens possibilities, rather than determining answers: the reviewer can offer various perspectives, but your own traversing of the grounds is likely to turn up further ways of seeing.