Style Is More than Sentences

Style has become a dirty word in many literary circles. To care about style is “pretentious” and “snobbish” and anyway the goal of fiction is to have the prose “get out of the way of the story.” And what is story except a procession of plot points? I’ve always found this view to be, fairly literally, nonsense. A novel is made of prose. How could the prose get out of the way of itself? It’s like saying the paint should get out of the way of the painting. The way a story is written is intricately tied to everything else: the tone, the plot, the characters, etc. The same “story” could be told in infinite ways to different effects depending on the style of the prose, in the same way a portrait can be painted in infinite ways depending on the style of the painter.