Dedicated readers have to be optimists. When we return to a book already read and enjoyed, often decades later, we’re acting on faith, trusting that we and it remain compatible. That’s not always the case, of course. My younger self is not a reliable critic. For too long I was an omnivore, reading books I wouldn’t open on a bet today and plowing through them, sometimes without a lick of pleasure. I think of that as guilt reading, something I no longer do, just as I no longer feel obligated to finish every book I start.
As a kid I loved Studs Lonigan. Farrell’s trilogy seemed like “real life” when I was thirteen, and that was something I looked for in novels. I knew guys like Studs and his buddies. I tried reading it again last year in the Library of America edition and gave up after twenty or thirty pages. Farrell didn’t write a “bad” novel. The failing is mine. There was no sense of rediscovery or even nostalgia. We had grown apart.
Our leap of
faith must be even more strenuous when it comes to reading new books. If the
writer is previously unfamiliar to us, it’s a crap shoot, though even a familiar author
can disappoint us. New books must compete with the old ones for our attention.
I’m jealous of my time devoted to reading, and don’t like to squander it on the
mediocre or just plain lousy. Knowing I can always read Joseph Conrad again is
reassuring.
In his essay “The Bowl of Diogenes” (Our Savage Art:
Poetry and the Civil Tongue, 2009), William Logan writes:
“A critic
is, nonetheless, the most optimistic man alive, living in perpetual hope, like
a Latter-day Saint. No matter how many times he is disappointed, he opens each
new book with an untarnished sense of possibility. If, amid the dust heaps of
mediocrity, he does find a few books rich and strange, such is the essential
generosity of this peculiar craft that his first impulse is to call everyone he
knows and to buttonhole strangers on the street.”
That goes
for for civilians -- that is, common readers -- as well as critics.
1 comment:
I was powerfully impressed by the Studs trilogy. I was in my mid 30's when I read it and I haven't revisited it since (except to reread a passage or two - the New Year's Eve Party where Weary Reilly commits his rape and Studs winds up in the gutter still seems to me to be brilliantly done). The work as a whole might indeed not hold up well now, but it still seems a shame to me that Farrell and writers like him (I'm thinking of Dreiser here) are mostly forgotten today. Their work at its best had a cumulative impact that took a patience and a commitment from readers that's not easily found today.
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