1.
“These aren’t particularly healthy times,” wrote Zadie Smith in her 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel.” Casting Tom McCarthy’s Remainder as a violent, avant-garde rejection of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, she dramatized an “ailing” literary culture where “a breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.”
Now that we’re a couple years into the new decade, it’s revealing to glance over our shoulders at the 2000s and see so much hand wringing about the health of literature. Sure, the State of Writing is an evergreen topic, and with all the political, cultural, and technological disruption at the turn of the millennium, folks had good reason to be nervous. Yet in retrospect, it’s disturbing to read so many famous writers in famous venues anxiously gerrymandering the literary map, roughly along the lines of Traditional Literature versus so-called Experimental Writing.
A quick trip in the Wayback Machine takes us to September 2002. A year after his spat with Oprah made him a household name in well-shod neighborhoods, Jonathan Franzen appraises William Gaddis in The New Yorker, lamenting that novelists have lost their grip on the public consciousness. Are books just too hard-to-read these days? Do writers even care about audience anymore? Franzen sketches two types of novelists: Contract writers who “sustain a sense of connectedness,” and Status writers for whom “difficulty tends to signal excellence.” He wastes no time letting us know which card he carries. “The Status position is undeniably flattering to a writer’s sense of importance. In my bones, though, I’m a Contract kind of person.”
Flash forward to 2005 and witness Ben Marcus slamming Franzen to the asphalt in Harper’s, defending all the “alien artisans, those poorly named experimental writers with no sales, little review coverage, a small readership, and the collective cultural pull of an ant.” Bullies like Franzen reinforce the status-quo when young writers ought to be pushing linguistic barriers and forging new neural pathways. Marcus is especially miffed that Franzen once used a New Yorker column to crap on the tiny avant-garde press Fiction Collective 2. “In Franzen’s world a small press that publishes experimental fiction is a convenient villain as audience-safe as a Muslim terrorist in a movie.”
Jump ahead to 2007, and Cynthia Ozick materializes in Harper’s to chide both Franzen and Marcus for their petty, ahistorical pissing match. “Why must one literary form lust to disposes another?” she asks, likening their argument to a gang fight. “The Bloods and Crips would be right at home in this alley.” Ozick is also keen to diagnose a sickly literary culture, but to her mind, the primary ailment is the dearth of rigorous literary criticism. For writers to discuss literature in such binary terms is ridiculous. “The novels that crop up in any given period are like the individual nerves that make up a distinct but variegated sensation, or act in chorus to catch a face or a tone…the white noise of the era that claims us all.”
Which brings us back to Smith’s “Two Paths” in The New York Review of Books, a thoughtful answer Ozick’s call for more insightful, sensitive criticism. Despite framing the Realist and Avant-Garde traditions as violent opponents, Smith at least gestures toward their points of connection. “At their crossroads we find extraordinary writers claimed by both sides: Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov…”
Yet after lingering a moment to admire these bountiful crossroads, Smith resumes her polarizing discourse: Fictional possibilities have narrowed, and the literary culture has fallen ill.
2.
Meanwhile, as the luminaries raced to diagnose Literature as if they were doctors on the season finale of House, 21st-century Literature was going viral on the Internet and in the little magazines. You lived through it, so I’ll spare you the details, but please tolerate 10 quick bullet points (in no special order) illustrating how vigorously literature and publishing were shaken during the 10 years since Franzen’s essay appeared:
Oprah’s Book Club went supernova.
Entire forests breathed sighs of relief as dozens of print book review sections went the way of the Dodo.
Online venues like this one have replaced or at least supplemented the literary supplements.
Millions of devoted bibliophiles reluctantly began e-reading.
Instead of disappearing, print became more democratized, insofar as anyone with access to word processing software and a few hundred dollars can publish their own book in seven to 10 business days.
Tiny presses and lit mags are sprouting like tulips or dandelions, depending on your worldview.
Those tiny presses are now winning Pulitzers and National Book Awards and National Book Critics Circle Awards, and those tiny lit mags are landing more stories and essays in the Best anthologies.
“Literary” genre novels are A-OK!
The mainstream pop entertainment complex regularly taps literary novelists like Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Richard Price, David Benioff, Jennifer Egan, and others to provide rich source material for big-budget dramas.
A writer like Ben Marcus, whose sublimely weird The Age of Wire and String originally appeared with Dalkey Archive, is now published by Knopf, complete with prominent coverage in major outlets, a swell tour, and a trippy trailer.
Now I’m neither a doctor nor an esteemed literary critic, but it seems that either the literary culture has made a miraculous recovery, or it wasn’t that sick in the first place. Which is to say that when those famous writers were so certain the patient was ailing, perhaps they were looking at the wrong patient. Lately it seems like whether you write unconventional novels or straight-laced novels or novels replete with vampires and weremonkeys, there are more ways than ever before to get your work out to readers. And not just on Lulu, iUniverse or Blogger.
Consider Marcus’ “alien artisans.” Even a quick glance suggests that life ain’t half bad for writers of unconventional prose. The innovative fiction being published today is too multifarious for neatly defined schools, but at least a handful of writers can be unified, if not aesthetically, then by the amount of attention they’ve received. Ryan Call, Blake Butler, and Tao Lin come to mind as three who’ve won fancy awards or scored national reviews or climbed from tiny presses to New York houses. These writers might not be stage diving from MFA programs into a sea of adoring literary agents, but they’re findings readers in their own way on their own time, building audiences that may prove to be more loyal and sustainable than those erected overnight by conglomerate publishers.
Perhaps no young writer is more emblematic of this sea change than Amelia Gray. Her 120-story collection AM/PM was published by Featherproof Books in 2009, and was more likely to be reviewed in The Eugene Weekly than Entertainment Weekly. Powered by a Kickstarter funded book tour, Gray and others traveled to indie stores and bars along the West Coast, earning readers book by book, beer by beer. A year later, her second collection Museum of the Weird won the Innovative Fiction Prize from Fiction Collective 2 — that very same rogue press that Franzen mocked in The New Yorker.
The Sickly Literary Culture narrative imagines Gray “toiling” in obscurity for decades if not her entire career. Yet now with her debut novel Threats, Gray has made the leap to Farrar, Straus and Giroux — the House of Franzen! That’s not to suggest that any publisher is an empirical benchmark for literary merit — and in most cases I couldn’t give a flying fig where or how a book came to be published — but given the pervasive strangeness of Gray’s work, I wonder if her grassroots ascension to a big-time press might be evidence that our literary culture is far more robust than the doctors would have us believe.
3.
Narrated in a precisely controlled 3rd person, Threats is the story of a childless husband and wife in Ohio: David, a disgraced dentist, and Franny, an aesthetician who specializes in chemical peels. On a cold winter morning, Franny stumbles in from the backyard, barefoot and bleeding. She says to forget about calling the fire department. No telling what may have killed her. “David sat next to his wife for three days. They leaned against each other and created a powerful odor. In that way, it was like growing old together.”
With Franny gone, David scarcely leaves his ghostly abode, which is also his former childhood home. Soon Franny’s former boss at the salon sends a group of five girls over to give him a haircut in the kitchen, yet they go about the job without speaking to him. “One of the girls said nothing the entire time, but instead hummed a tune that was familiar to David. He thought of his mother cutting his hair while he sat on a wooden chair wedged into the bathtub.” Unsettling, one-off encounters like this pace the entire book, usually in settings as domestic as the post office, the laundromat, or the bus stop.
In a grief-struck stupor, David bumbles about for days, pissing his pants, growing paranoid, spraying Franny’s perfume in his mouth until it makes him retch. He is convinced that the front doorknob is electrified, which is why soft-boiled Detective Chico and his partner have to climb through the window to ask questions about Franny. As the story proceeds, a series of strange written threats begin appearing in David’s coffee maker, in his bathroom, and other increasingly bizarre places in his home and across town:
YOUR FATE IS SEALED WITH GLUE I HAVE BOILED IN A VAT. I SLOPPED IT ON AN ENVELOPE AND MAILED IT TO YOUR MOTHER’S WOMB.
Over 77 short chapters, this slim book gets weirder and weirder, answering questions with more questions. A few central mysteries propel the skeletal plot forward. What exactly happened to Franny? Who is responsible for these threats? Why is David so haunted by his past? Years ago, Detective Chico responded to a distress call from an old hotel that may hold the key (or a key) to the entire mystery:
The call came in concurrently with an ambulance call for a drowning. No residents came out to greet the siren. The noise set off wails from the two or three children who were heard but not seen in the recesses of the motel. Their noise made it seem as if the building itself was crying, the sound released from multiple points.
In “Two Paths,” Zadie Smith observed that the primary mode of postmodern metafiction was to play with the notion of the first person and the question of where there narrator is coming from. Yet it’s the measured fluctuations of Gray’s third-person narration that make Threats such an interesting read. Crystalline descriptions of domestic life belie passages of uncanny imagery and existential dread, and the result is a generally unreliable atmosphere where emotion and metaphor are askew, and even the laws of time and space are vulnerable to subtle shifts in mood.
Example: A doctor visits David’s kitchen to inquire about his mental health. She’s spoken to a few of Franny’s former co-workers who claimed never to have met him, joking that maybe he didn’t even exist. When David mentions the girls who came to cut his hair, the doctor points out that his hair is down to his ears. Later on, when David visits the salon in search of answers, the reader has to rely on confirmation from another character to be certain that the haircut indeed happened.
“Did you send some women from the salon to my home?”
“Some girls?”
“Some women, some girls. A group of them arrived a few days ago and said they had been sent to cut my hair. They were very kind and helpful. One of them cut my toenails.”
“Some girls,” Aileen said. She took a deep breath in and looked at the door. She was silent for long enough that he thought she hadn’t heard part of the question. “A group of girls. Yes, I sent over a group of girls from the salon. I thought it might make you feel better.”
“Thank you, it did.”
In moments like these throughout the book, Gray calls to mind her literary forebears Kate Bernheimer and Donald Barthelme, but also filmmakers like Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch. As Chris Rodley, editor of the book Lynch on Lynch wrote, this is a borderland between dream and reality, “a badly guarded checkpoint where no one seems to be stamping passports.”
At one point David discovers that, unbeknownst to him, a trance regression therapist has been operating from his own wasp-infested garage, researching volumes of books to determine whether “you” or “love” is linked with more devastating sentences in the English language. Later, visiting his elderly mother at her home for women, David finds their heart-to-heart conversation dissolve into a discussion of quasi-Carmichael integers.
Yet just when you think the story might be veering too far to one side of the dream/reality border, Gray shifts modes. It’s as if she’s internalized FC2 Board Member Brian Evenson’s response to Ben Marcus’s Harper’s essay:
Realism and experimentalism are not alternatives in a binary opposition; instead, each exists on a continuum that runs between abstraction and representation. Great writers, instead of standing at one point on the continuum, chose to lie down along it. All writers can potentially reposition themselves not only from book to book but from sentence to sentence.
The only thing predictable about Threats is that the story will constantly reposition itself. We find lyrically realistic discussions of David’s dental practice: “The patient might wince through the Xylocaine but would hold still as a sleeping dog while the dentin was breached and burred, Dycal installed to obliterate the possibility of a return, a white resin filler approximating the shape and texture of a tooth so closely it made David wish for his patients’ sake that the entire procedure could be performed without their knowledge, that they could come in unknowing and leave unknowingly improved.” Elsewhere, repeated chapters painstakingly transcribe David’s voicemail: “Message erased. Next message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, free four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.” Elsewhere, sudden ruminations on loneliness while sorting socks at the laundromat: “Think about just a pair of people, how they can sit in a room and stare. These are not strangers to each other. They have spent nights sharing their secrets. They see each other and think of those complexities, yet there is nothing that can truly draw them together. It’s a primary flaw of human distance. And what causes it?…Could it be what we eat for breakfast in the morning? Could it be the mechanism of the human eye? Could it be what we eat for breakfast in the morning?” Throughout, David yearns for Franny: “His wife’s scent that night was of a wet stone, as if she had been created from the stream that ran behind his childhood home.” Wherever the narrative stands on the continuum, it simmers with tragicomic dread.
Smith argued that that “the American metafiction that stood in opposition to Realism has been relegated to a safe corner of literary history…dismissed, by our most famous public critics, as a fascinating failure, intellectual brinkmanship that lacked heart.” Threats is too slippery for a safe corner, too haunted to lack heart. Following Gray’s aesthetic leaps, we forego a varnished emotional banister for disquieting cracks of perception and pain. On any given page you might laugh, cringe, or scratch your head. This is a book that operates on numerous planes of reality, that allows you to peer into the many windows of one artist’s imagination.
4.
None of this is to say that Threats is a watershed moment in avant-gardism, nor that it’s even all that avant-garde. As Ozick wrote, “The avant-garde’s overused envelope was pushed long ago…” In many ways, this latest garde of innovative novelists is rekindling the embers of a more surreal period in American fiction, or else smuggling ashore aesthetics that have been prevalent in poetry and international fiction for decades.
You’ll know within 20 pages if this book is right for you. Either way, it’s all good. This book is too daring for universal acclaim. But let’s set aside this notion that our literary culture is too sickly to tolerate innovative prose. Whether you like Threats or not, let’s not define this kind of novel as oppositional to the realist mode. Books like this deserve to be main courses, not side dishes. As Garth Risk Hallberg wrote in response to “Two Paths” here last year, “What we need, as readers and writers, is not to side with some particular ‘team,’ and thus to be liberated from the burden of further thinking. Rather, we need ways of evaluating a novel’s form and language and ideas in light of, for lack of a more precise term, the novelist’s own burning.”
Of course, famous writers aren’t going to stop probing the literary culture for illnesses, so let’s challenge them to diagnose other chronic conditions, starting with the lack of gender and ethnic diversity in our magazines. Insofar as aesthetic diversity is concerned, unconventional prose has a place at the table, or at least the avant-garde has been absorbed into the garde, and the next avant-garde is out there somewhere, reading from a chapbook to three people in a bar.
Threats proves that there are many paths for the novel, for the chapter, for the sentence. It’s an act of what Zadie Smith calls constructive deconstruction — a novel that like Remainder “clears away a little of the dead wood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward.” Writers like Amelia Gray see not one thorny alternative road, but rather a whole open territory where artists use old roadblocks to fuel bonfires.
Image Credit: Flickr/rosmary
I don’t want to put words in Alan Jacobs’s mouth, but I think his suggestion is true inasmuch as my birth—both the circumstances of it and my genetics etc.—had much to do with my making those chance library discoveries that led me to my illustrious career as an MFA candidate and anonymous Harry Potter fanfiction writer.
One of the first things I remember about books is that the mechanics of reading came easily to me, when almost nothing else did; that, I think, more than the accessibility of books, brought me to literature at a young age. “I can read faster than you,” not better but faster, was one of my first weird attempts at positive self-identification as a beaten-up primary schooler.
Of course that doesn’t diminish the affecting personal anecdotes you’ve tied together here—the 13-year-old stranger is particularly sad to follow through into her alternate universes, especially the one where she becomes Harvard’s first professor of Steve Himmer studies. As for the first story, I can’t believe your local library is in the habit of giving four-year-olds the third degree—are we really so flush with would-be library users that we have to turn some away at the door?
Beautiful article. Heartbreaking stories. I want the mental images of your daughter trying so hard to write her name on the card and both the girls’ crestfallen faces when they were disallowed from reading as they wished (sure, your daughter got to read the books because you had a library card, but what about kids who walk to the library themselves – and, anyway, she wanted her own library card! How admirable of her! What kind of library turns that down. Any free speech-loving librarian would find a way around that inane policy!) I remember having moments that remind me of what happened with the 13-year-old girl when I was in elementary school – picking out and then being told that something by Judy Blume or Jack London was “too old for me” (London, I remember specifically, and I was not only furious about having a librarian determine my reading level but also because I was pretty sure it had something to do with my being a girl – I’m in, like, second or third grade here); my response was usually, “But I read [x not-kid’s classic] this summer,” which did not work.
I always thought the librarian was telling me the books were too difficult for someone in my grade to literally read and comprehend. It was only after I started working for American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, which co-sponsors Banned Books Week and co-runs the Kids’ Right to Read Project that it more likely had to do with the books’ contents. I think this article will be my morning ABFFE tweet.
For your daughter and the other children in the area, I might suggest contacting the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and asking them if such a policy is legal or compatible with the Library Bill of Rights, to which I kind of think the library is beholden if it’s an ALA member, and most libraries (or librarians) are. That library is discouraging kids from reading, and if kids who don’t read aren’t getting much help with learning to write anything, even their own names. I guess kids whose parents don’t take them to the library have to wait until they’re 5 or 6 to start reading? Good luck with your standardized test scores, graduation rates, crime rates, and, oh yeah, unemployment rates, state.
I work for a public library and never have I heard of such a backwards policy as this. What is the point of such a rule? At our public library, we even give cards to babies from birth to 4years of age (one made specially for babies, with a cuter design), and at 4 they get a normal adult card just like anyone else. No hoops to jump through.
Great article! I was moved by both your stories about young readers. I also think you’re absolutely right about the fact that readers are made, and not necessarily born. The best is example is that so many people of my generation weren’t readers until they discovered the Harry Potter series, and then moved on to other books, seeking a similar pleasure and eventually learning to appreciate books for more than just the thrill of a good plot. It’s important that kids and teens have access to people and places that stimulate their reading habits and give them that first opportunity to read, which can then develop into a true love of books.
Cheers!
CAFS
Mr. Himmer, this is a really lovely article; very evocative. I have a few quibbles with the examples (although not with your underlying message): Are you saying that the women who called books “tricky” were rarifying them? I’m not so sure I would agree with that–books ARE tricky these days for girls around 13. I’m a passionate book person both personally and professionally, and an equally passionate supporter of free speech, but as a parent I still look at it as my job to limit my kids’ exposure to subject matter that isn’t age-appropriate, whether in a book or a movie or a video game. (When I say “age-appropriate” I don’t mean that in a generic sense; I mean appropriate given what I know about my own kids’ individual readiness to explore some adult topics.) In practice, I can’t remember a single book I’ve said “no” to, but I can appreciate the hesitation. I do think some books for young teens these days are a bit “tricky” for scads of reasons. It is precisely because I so believe in the power of books to influence our thinking as well as open our minds that I wouldn’t jump to judge those women. (Someone in that girl’s household appears to have “made” her into a reader already, right?)
Even the library policy doesn’t strike me as rarifying books; I see it another way. When your daughter does learn to fit her name on the card (or turns five), I bet that trip to the library will be one of the proudest, most memorable of her young life. The folks at that library seem to believe that the card signifies a certain level of maturity and responsibility, and that policy can be seen as a way to increase the value of both the card and the books for young children. Of course there’s a good argument to be made that perhaps it’s not the library’s job to parent, but in this case as well I’m not so sure the policy rarifies books as much as acknowledges their value.
Anyway, thanks for this great piece of writing. I’m inspired to address it at more length myself! I’d love your thoughts on my thoughts.
Beautiful column. Striking images. And a powerful moral.
loved the article – any booklover would be moved by it.
I definitely agree with your premise about reading being an encouraged act. Sure, there are always going to be sensitive souls, linguistic prodigies or just good old fashioned curious minds who become great readers in enviornments where there aren’t a lot books around (which I think would support Alan Jacobs’ argument). But- and this is a huge but- encouragement is all-important. After all, you could have parents whose shelves are filled with stuff and forbid the children to come hear them…
Great piece. “One of the first freedoms I had”- way to put that freedom to use!
Both of my daughters learned to write their names with one thing in mind: to get their library cards. They only needed to sign their first names, I will always cherish their cards (they will always too), on the back their sweet scrawl big round choppy letters, their names, their cards, their keys to the libraries treasures!
I dream of putting books in any/every child’s hand at that moment, that exact moment when their soul is ready for it –whether for a book in general, or in particular.
Oh, how the world can change with a book, with a library, with a word.
My word for you is THANKS. (I am going to use paper and print this article to keep.)
My sympathies to your daughter. When I was a child, my public library required us to be able to sign our name–in cursive–to get a library card. So I made my mother teach me, and got my library card when I was about 5. However, my elementary school teachers spent several years crossing out my name on papers and hand printing it above because I wasn’t supposed to know any cursive yet. Heaven help our children from power-tripping authority figures.
Bravo! And thank you for this article! Your central point is essential in this day and age.
Many of my experiences as a child reader mirror yours. The discoveries I made on my own, and knowing that my parents trusted me to make them, formed much of the foundation on which I built my sense of self.
I also appreciate that you don’t want to judge the guardians of the young teenage girl. It’s always tricky when you’re dealing with materials that may not be age-appropriate. Still, though – I just can’t get behind the idea that the best way to deal with these materials is really to our children’s exposure to it and shelter them from it. Mainly because the world doesn’t actually work that way – our kids see all kinds of things we don’t even know about. Kids are too curious by nature, and far too clever not to find their way to some of these tricky materials despite our best efforts to prevent it. If they’re going to get exposed it, then it seems to me that best thing we can do is to do is to try our very best to make them ready.
That’s what my parents did for me. They knew the risks of letting me explore on my own – and lord knows I got into plenty of stuff that wasn’t age-appropriate by today’s standards! -but they also believed that it was the greatest skill they could teach me regardless of those risks. And I always knew that I could go to them whenever I saw or read things that I didn’t understand or that disturbed me. Any question, any idea, any issue or strange feelings these things engendered in me – no matter what, my parents would help me to find my way through it, to answer my questions and deal with the issues without flinching. Nothing I could ask them was “bad” and I didn’t need to be embarrassed by any of it. And guess what? On those occasions when I wasn’t able to come to grips with something I’d read or seen, I would invariably choose of my own free will not to seek out that material anymore.
I can never thank my parents enough for doing things that way! This strategy did me more good and helped to make me a stronger, more adaptable person than any attempts they might have made to protect or shelter me. I can’t help but think that the impulse to shelter our children has more to do with our own adult squeamishness than with our children’s ability to learn and cope. I think our kids can be stronger than that, if we raise them the best we can.
Sorry, the sentence in the third paragraph is supposed to read, “I just can’t get behind the idea that the best way to deal with these materials is to LIMIT our children’s exposure to it and shelter them from it.”
I hit “Submit Comment” too soon!
Our local library does not have a minimum age. The child can sign their own name on the back or someone can sign for them, but regardless, they get a card!
Wow, as a librarian I find that your daughter could not get a card horrifying. We give cards to babies when they are born http://sclibs.net/Kids/borntoread.aspx. And books to take home and keep forever too.
This article brought back some memories for me of getting my first library card at age four and writing my first name and last name around the wrong way, but getting away with it. The weekly visit to the library became a wonderful time of discovery and freedom of choice.
I had hoped to keep the card, but an overzealous librarian cut it in half ten years later as they were updating their cards. I remember asking tearfully if I could keep the bits.. but no, ‘not our policy’ was the answer… It can’t of damaged me too much though, ‘cos now I’m a librarian! (not the make you cry type ;-)
It’s a very well written piece and agree with the sentiments expressed .. However I like the fine distinction that one commentator Jody Reins makes in her “quibble” as she calls it, that the two examples the author quotes as “acts of rareifying” are wonderful story hooks but not the best illustration of the point.
Not every library / book store is a ‘careful selection’ of books .. trashy material snuggles with ‘classy’ ones. The act of reading is one thing, .. but what happens in the formative years and mind of a child given to the pleasures of reading requires a little active guidance … NOT dictatorial but some mediation and negotiating .. through BOTH the trash and the classy and regular fare.
I truly subscribe to the fact that just as what you eat builds your body, what you read builds your mind, thoughts and person – books ARE POWERFUL .. and one needs to learn how to equip themselves with the tools of judging their value.
Except of course, that’s not *quite* what Alan Jacobs said, is it? In fact, that’s really not at all close to what he said at all. In trying to make your point even more powerful you’ve actually weakened your case quite considerably by incorrectly quoting, making me wonder what else you’ve made up.
Hmmm it’s great that this Dad is so focused on making books available to kids. But I was once a 4-year-old and had to practice long and hard to write my name on the library card. And the main thing I remember is the huge feeling of accomplishment and pride when I finally got that card, my scraggly writing beautifully entombed in official-looking plastic. I was so grown-up, I could write, I had my own card, I could take out BOOKS!
It was one of the many hurdles that come with learning, and I, like other kids, like kids are meant to do, took on the rest of the hurdles too: the toughness of learning to read, figuring out math, learning to share, etc.
During the time it took me to learn to write my name on the card (and during the agonizingly long two-week period I had to wait for the now-signed card to be properly printed up in plastic) my parents took out books for me on their cards. To be perfectly honest, for all practical concerns, I didn’t really need my own card. It was more a symbol of my increasing abilities and independence than anything else (and kids love such symbols!)
As to the girl who was refused a book because it might not be age-appropriate, I sympathize with the authors sentiments–it really annoys me when kids are quarantined into the (age 4-7) groups; I think it’s good to encourage kids to take on stuff that might be a bit above (or a lot above) their current level of understanding. It shows them that there’s lots of room left yet to explore, and they can come back a couple years or months later with a huge sense of pride because what once was barely comprehensible is now so easy.
At the same time, I was refused a lot of books by my parents because of sexual content/violence, etc, and it didn’t seem to hurt me. I generally found a way to smuggle them in under the covers eventually anyway, and it gave me a sense of both proprieties/rules/boundaries–and how to break them.
I do entirely agree that closing libraries is despicable though–just because books are going digital doesn’t mean we still don’t need librarians and places of learning to gather in. How are we going to reopen them/build new ones/make them better complements to the many new ways of accessing information? I think such issues would as worthwhile of discussion as how to protect our kids from the harsh, philistine librarians who think that children can actually learn to write their own names and should, perhaps, not have access to porn.
I’ve worked in and with many public libraries over the years and I’ve never heard of one where the child needs to be able to print their name before getting a card. Most of the time, the parent or guardian just has to fill out the application and sign it so they are responsible for the child’s materials. I hope this library considers changes their policy. Libraries are all about access and especially for children access should be as quick and painless as possible.
I read something age-inappropriate when I was a kid. This was before the Internet of course, and I was curious about what naked people looked like. Well, the only place I could find them was in my dad’s medical library, and they were pretty hideous pictures. Not normal naked people. But you know what? It didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I knew what I was looking at.
My great joy as a child was taking the bus to the next town over where they had a library and spending hours there. Long live the book!
On the article and on the first comment displayed: it’s very hard to grow up a book lover without books around. It reminded me of me and my elder sister: both my parents were eager readers, and my dad used to read Jules Verne to us (instead of “Sesame Street” or “Fluffy Teddy Bear Takes the Bus”) every night. I began reading and writing short stories (about ponies and the like) when I was five, and I loved getting dirty in those used Buenos Aires bookstores I searched with my mother (we were rather poor) looking for something new to read.
My sister, though, wasn’t at first very fond of reading as a kid. The strategy my parents found? They kept an open mind and invited her to explore different kinds of books so that she would find something she considered interesting. They kept the bookshelves open and kept inviting her to the family visits to the used books store, inviting her to pick any book she liked while they got something for themselves. During her early teens, she did find something she liked: first, the quite unsophisticated romantic short novels by Corín Tellado, later good vampire stories… Eventually she developped a literary taste and she keeps reading a lot. If my parents hadn’t done that back then, if they had thought she wasn’t born with it, or that she was meant to read more “appropriate” things, my sister would most likely have given up on books long ago.
Wow! I was really tired when I posted that comment. So many incomplete thoughts and sentences! Sorry for subjecting everyone to that!
Excellent article. You made some good points about reading and readers that I think we need to listen to. I personally would do anything to not disappoint or obstruct that first contact with a potential life-long reader.
It’s lovely how you took the time and effort to help your daughter get a card, and sad she couldn’t get her own. This brings back so many memories of myself as a young reader – being told I wasn’t old enough for To Kill A Mockingbird (and ironic, when you think of Scout being punished by her teacher for knowing how to read, essentially), the one and only time I forged my mum’s signature because I needed it to borrow a book (how weird is that rule?), and the sense of accomplishment when I reads my first book without any pictures at all. (wry smile) Also, staying up late under the covers with a flashlight to read.
I think reading should absolutely be encouraged – readers are made, not born. It helps to have books casually lying around the house, littering counter tops and tables, but a good library really helps. And yes, the younger the better.
So says Steve Himmer but he fails to consider the millions of children born into poverty who cannot become readers because their parents don’t read; because books are not found in their home; because the library is not where you go to get a book, but where you go to use the internet for the assignment that can only be done online and yet you don’t have an internet connection at home. Yes, it’s lovely that Steve’s 4 year old wants to read. But had Steve been born to a poor family and had no access to Tintin would he have been a reader? A writer? Let us not forget that for the 1 in 4 children in the US who live in poverty, an “accident of birth” has a profound effect on not only a love of reading but basic literacy. Statistics show that children who start school already behind in literacy never catch up.
I don’t mean to detract from Steve’s main point here, that all children should be encouraged to read, but it simply is not as easy as that.
I remember as a little girl wanting to borrow something from the adult (as opposed to children’s) section of the library. My mother had to write a note agreeing to let me borrow a book by Charles DIckins. Fortunately, libraries have changed, hardly a shush to be heard these days!
Alan,
Please do not think that all libraries are like that. At my library also, anyone of any age can have his/her own card. We too issue them to babies.
Please tell your daughter that we cherish her (and you!)
Sincerely,
Kathleen F. Lamantia
Canton, Ohio
oh
this is lovely, steve–
thank you–
gary
When my oldest daughter was about eight, and had already been reading a while, I decided to try and subtly influence her taste in authors and classics. As Tom Sawyer and white washing fences, I made a point of her seeing me happily read ‘Of Mice and Men (I thought it was of a level where she could grasp most of the message). It worked and she devoured it. To this day, and she is 29 and a successful architect, we share books and reviews on a regular basis. It is one of the most enduring and rewarding aspects of our relationship.