(Non)fiction

Lately, I have had little taste for reading fiction. Instead, I’ve been reading history (especially books on the Holocaust and World War II), philosophy, travel (Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler) and poetry. I feel impatient with most fiction, and for me this is a new and uncomfortable development. I have always relished the sensation of surrender I experience early in a good novel, sometimes in the first paragraph (see John Berger’s G., Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, J.F. Powers’ Morte d’Urban). I willingly trade my sordid little world for another that may be no less sordid but is never less than compelling. Is this "escapism," the painless promise of genre fiction? I don’t think so. Rather, it is an act of aesthetic, moral and intellectual seduction performed by a first-rate writer, -- that is, a magician – on me, a willing subject. Such writing is authoritative and convincing. It fosters in the reader a profound identification with character. We forget ourselves and become Isabel Archer. Her pain, her nobility, is ours, and this is a capacity, at once sophisticated and primitive, we share with very young children as they listen to stories. A great book induces self-forgetting. It displaces and, on rare occasions, changes us.

The last time I read fiction was in December, when I re-read three novels by Richard Stern – Stitch, Other Men’s Daughters and Natural Shocks. Stern is a writer I have privately coveted for more than 30 years, though my covetousness feels less private since James Marcus over at House of Mirth published an interview with Stern and has generally championed his work. Stern has the braininess and linguistic panache of Saul Bellow and an obsession with the aching politics of family life. He is funny and unafraid of honest sentiment. Natural Shocks ranks among the unacknowledged masterpieces of postwar American fiction.

There was a time in the 1970s when I felt as though I had to read everything worthwhile being published, just as I had to see every good movie. I was an omnivore with fairly indiscriminate taste, and was cursed and blessed with an obsessiveness that compelled me to finish reading every book I started. Add that to a gift for reading quickly, and I was able to plow through acres of print. How else could I have endured James Baldwin and Jerzy Kosinski?

Even before I temporarily (I hope) lost my appetite for fiction, I was mostly reading old favorites, seldom new work. Only a few of contemporary writers compel me to read everything they publish – Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and, until their recent deaths, W.G. Sebald, Guy Davenport and Saul Bellow. That’s about the limit of my loyalty. Otherwise, it’s James, Chekhov, Babel, Waugh and Co. for me, and I suspect this is yet another symptom of middle age. Rereading, I’ve noticed, compounds my pleasure. I’m enjoying not only the work itself but the recollection of my earlier, youthful encounter with the book. The two times I have reread Proust revived my 18-year-old self sitting in the clubhouse of the miniature golf course I managed for three summers in suburban Cleveland, wrestling with the old C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation. I mostly enjoyed meeting the young aesthete I thought I was, and I admired his sweaty perseverance. Wendy Lesser touched on this in Nothing Remains the Same, her collection of pieces on rereading:

“You cannot reread a book from your youth without perceiving it as, among other things, a mirror. Whenever you look in that novel or poem or essay, you will find a little reflected face peering out at you – the face of your own youthful self, the original reader, the person you were when you first read the book.”

But the mirror will always remain one-way, like the mirrors in police interrogation rooms. How I wish my younger self could turn and talk to me and tell me what he thinks of what he is reading. Our selves overlap. There is a tenuous continuity, but we are not identical. Any reading of any substantial text is necessarily incomplete and tentative, but he must have had some spark compounded of innocence, brains and enthusiasm to have remained with Proust to the end. What did he (I) make of Odette? I wish I could remember.

I just had a thought: As an experiment in discipline and hope, I will read a short story tonight, chosen from my shelves, something I have not read in a long time but something I enjoyed enough to buy and keep. The object will be, first, to enjoy myself, then to share my reactions.