Let's say you're slightly to the left of the Bell Curve: you read, on average, a book a week. And let's say you're also slightly leftward-listing in your survival prospects: that, due to the marvels of future medicine (and no thanks to the blunders of contemporary foreign policy) you'll live to the fine old age of 90. Let's furthermore presuppose that you're one of
those people, the precocious ones who were reading Kesey and King and Kingsolver and Kipling at 15. How many great books will you get to read in a lifetime? Assuming you've already answered the adjunct question (why?) for yourself, the prospect of having to choose only three thousand books from among the many Millions may sound daunting. My Merriam-Webster
Encyclopedia of World Literature contains some entries on authors alone, and is hardly comprehensive. Balzac alone could eat up almost one percent of your lifetime reading. On the other hand, as usual, limitation shades into wonder... because in an infinite reading universe, we would be deprived of one of the supreme literary pleasures: discovery. Half of my favorite works of fiction of the year were by authors (women, natch) I'd never read, had barely heard of:
Kathryn Davis' The Thin Place,
Lynne Tillman's American Genius: A Comedy, and
Mary Gaitskill's Veronica.
And if I had gone my whole life without discovering
Deborah Eisenberg, I would have missed something like a literary soulmate. The beguiling, bewildered quality of Eisenberg's
Twilight of the Superheroes - the sentences whose endings seem to surprise even their writer - is so close to the texture of life as I experience it as to be almost hallucinatory. On the other hand, Eisenberg's world is much, much funnier and more profound than mine. She's single-handedly rejuvenated my relationship with the short story... and just in time for the remarkable new
Edward P. Jones collection,
All Aunt Hagar's Children. I've already expressed my
suspicion that Jones has been a positive influence on
Dave Eggers, as evidenced by
What is the What. So I'll just round out my survey of new fiction by mentioning
Marshall N. Klimasewiski's overlooked first novel,
The Cottagers - a dazzlingly written thriller.
In between forays into the contemporary landscape, I've been trying to bone up on the classics. I'm ashamed to say I hadn't read
Pride and Prejudice until this year; it's about the most romantic damn thing I've ever encountered, and I'm a sucker for romance. Pricklier and more ironic, which is to say more Teutonic, was Mann's
The Magic Mountain - a great book for when you've got nothing to do for two months.
Saul Bellow's Herzog completely blew my doors off, suggesting that stream-of-consciousness (and the perfect evocation of a summer day) did not end with
Mrs. Dalloway.
Herzog is such a wonderful book, so sad, so funny, so New York. So real. I can't say the same thing about Kafka's
The Castle, but it is to my mind the most appealing of his novels. As in
The Magic Mountain, futility comes to seem almost charming.
E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate was another wonderful discovery - a rip-roaring read that's written under some kind of divine inspiration: Let there be Comma Splices! Similarly, I was surprised by how well page-turning pacing and peel-slowly sentences worked in Franzen's first novel,
The Twenty-Seventh City. Ultimately, it's sort of a ridiculous story, but it's hard to begrudge something this rich and addictive. Think of it as a dessert. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the rip-roar of that most sweeping of summer beach books,
Lonesome Dove. And if the last three titles make you feel self-indulgent, because you're having too much fun, cleanse the palate the way I did, with the grim and depressing and still somehow beautiful. Namely,
Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing or
W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn. (What is it with those Germans?)
Nonfiction-wise, I managed to slip away from journalism a bit, but did read
James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men while I was in Honduras... sort of like reading Melville at sea. I made it most of the way through
Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (God knows why, half of me adds. The other half insists,
You know why.)
Adorno and
Horkheimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment lightened things up... Not! But I will never read
Cosmo Girl the same way again. Come to think of it, pretty much all the nonfiction I loved this year was a downer, about the impure things we can't get away from:
Susan Sontag's On Photography,
Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces,
David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, and especially the late
George W.S. Trow's astonishing, devastating
Within the Context of No Context. Lit-crit offered a little bit of a silver lining, as
William H. Gass' A Temple of Text and
James Wood's The Irresponsible Self. Wood's essays on Tolstoy and Bellow remind me that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God"... which is, I guess, why I'll keep reading in 2007.
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)