Because of an illegal u-turn en route to this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, I found myself enrolled in online traffic school this summer. The course required that I pass a series of quizzes, all of them simple, before proceeding to the final exam. The whole thing could have taken less than a half-hour, but because this wasn’t solely a rehabilitative affair, I had to watch a timer click down 40 minutes before I could move on to the next quiz, turning 30 minutes of work into seven hours of inconvenience. I had already read the beginning of Zona, Geoff Dyer’s meditation-cum-liveblog of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, but I knew I’d have to see the film before proceeding further. So, pre-loaded with some idea of where Dyer was headed, I watched Stalker in 40-minute chunks on YouTube, while waiting for the next traffic school quiz to appear. Anyone who cares in the least about film, film history, Tarkovsky, artists and their intentions, or high culture in general, probably wants to poke me in both eyes with a sharp stick right now. I might as well have been reading Ulysses while directing traffic. And yet the film worked its magic on me, much as it had worked its magic on Dyer, when he first saw it in his youth (in more traditionally ideal conditions). I devoured Zona soon afterwards, and I can only describe the experience as getting to re-watch a brilliant film in my mind, this time seated next to a highly voluble and intelligent friend. A unique reading experience, and one I’m grateful for.
Other than my traffic school experience, I can divide my reading year into the periods before and after I read Sarah Manguso’s spare and penetrating The Guardians: An Elegy. It floored me. Bracingly smart, moving, and sometimes very funny, this slim volume charts Manguso’s relationship with her friend Harris, who two years earlier escaped from a psych ward and jumped to his death under a Metro-North train. In so doing, it exemplifies how writing can serve as both bulwark against and passage into life’s vicissitudes.
This year I also read The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, a book about which every writer known to man seems to have volumes to say. Not me. It left me inarticulate and emotional, as if I’d been zapped back in time to the broodiest moments of my childhood. I expect to spend the rest of my life staring across vast space at Wallace’s unfinished Death Star, wondering “What if?”
More from A Year in Reading 2012
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
I most enjoyed Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings, which I only just discovered this year. Pym is funny and witty, brilliant at portraying the middle class English of the 1950s, and in particular she does the ‘psychology of femaleness’ very well.
I love the whole “prim but subversive” canon. Claire Messud’s character in “The Woman Upstairs” is a type of “crazy cousin locked up in the attic” to the more well-behaved Pym characters. Their spiritual godmother is Jane Austen.
When I think of the writing of Mailer and Hemingway, I imagine a big noisy, farting guy wrestling, drinking, wenching, and bullfighting his way through the page, with an army of quiet Pym characters bringing up the rear, wiping up the piss, blood and sweat with a sturdy cloth and ammonia cleanser, a silent universe of observation seething in their brains. Their presence is at the periphery of the page and their quietness belies what my be waiting there in the wings.
I have sensed that same peripheral lurking in the corners of paintings of 17th Century manor houses in western County Cork in Ireland, full of dappled sunlight and green meadows. Hunting parties gallop along through the woods, masters of their domain. You might spy a picturesque garden boy in the background, making hay. He might be my great, great great grandfather, who would happily throw a very large rock at any of them within reach if he could get away with it. His descendants would then ultimately successfully oust them all and form a republic.
It’s all in the perspective!
Prim but subversive struck a chord here too. Also comment above re: Austen. And what goes on just beyond the frame….
Interesting, the write up is full of perfect rhetorism that stimulates the reader’s ego to change the reading gear forward, keep it up its a nice piece!
Hi Evelyn Walsh!
Are you the same person who published “Birthday Girl’ in Narratives? Glad to see another “chord” being struck. :)
Moe Murph
(Rough Week At Work — Subversion Unfortunately Limited To Slamming Door To Stall In Ladies Room In Especially Energetic Manner)