`Yes, Because Life is Like That'

Tim Parks has published 14 novels and seven works of nonfiction, and has translated many books from the Italian. I’ve read only his 2003 novel Judge Savage and a handful of his essays and reviews, but I like some things he said in an interview with CBC Radio in 1998:

“The reason why we like a book is because we say, Yes, because life is like that, and the reason why we stop reading certain kinds of childish books is because we say, Good story but life’s not like that. The whole question of recognition is terribly important and that’s why as you get older your reading experience inevitably gets richer because you have more of your own experience to bring to it.”

Parks is not espousing theory or laying down the law. What he’s saying is worthy of our attention because of the way it conforms to common experience. He proscribes nothing. I like the way he echoes, intentionally or not, St. Paul: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” (I Corinthians 13:11) Some readers, as recent events attest, recognize themselves in the Harry Potter series. Some will eventually put those books aside as being “childish things.” Other will remain loyal. Among the childish things I put aside a long time ago are science fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Parks and I now respond with a “Yes, because life is like that,” to stronger, more sustaining stuff. From the same interview:

“Obviously, you’re receptive to this seduction. Henry Green, Samuel Beckett, and more recently the last person who has completely bowled me over, Thomas Bernhard. What’s fascinating to me is the way he sets up these characters who have the impossible task of getting their minds round something, and then breaking into that are all kinds of domestic tragedies which rearrange the mental furniture.”

What’s noteworthy about Parks’ examples is that none is even remotely a conventional realist. All, in fact, have been certified as Modernist or postmodernist, all pose difficulties for lazy readers and none could be confused with soothing beach reading. Yet Parks and I enthusiastically respond, on the level of quotidian humanity, to the works of these writers. As Parks wrote last year in a review of books by and about Beckett in the New York Review of Books:

“Yet for all these aggressive experiments one is struck on rereading Beckett that he did not dispense with traditional realism tout court. Throughout his work we come across passages of haunting descriptive power in which we cannot help feeling the author has a considerable emotional investment.”

Later in the CBC interview, Park says: “One always says one is introduced to Shakespeare too young, but is one ever old enough to read Shakespeare? ….One is never really old enough to read certain things but one is always old enough.”