'The Pure Astonishment of Life'

A reader expresses surprise at my admission that I once read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. “I thought you hated science fiction,” he writes. “You always seemed like a snob about it.” Guilty as charged, I guess. I read science fiction and related genres from roughly ages ten to fourteen. At some point I just lost interest. The arrival of puberty may have been an unrelated factor. A serious reader is forever culling aspects of his past, discarding previous favorites. Call it maturation or honing one’s critical gifts. The genre was no longer satisfying to read. I’ve never had a grand theoretical explanation for the change, though I retain a general lack of interest in any thesis-driven fiction -- 1984, for instance. 

I don’t recall why I read Gibson’s novel. I remember it getting a lot of attention when it was published in 1984, even in non-sci-fi circles. Perhaps a friend recommended it. Neuromancer is not the only novel I’ve read about which I remember nothing or almost nothing. The same can be said of books by such non-genre writers as Conrad Aiken, James Baldwin, Thomas Wolfe and others. In fiction I look for an ineffable but recognizable quality called by William Maxwell, in a note to his collection of reviews and essays The Outermost Dream (1989), “the breath of life.” He writes:

 

“Reading is rapture (or if it isn’t, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact.”

 

No binding theory there, but I intuitively understand what Maxwell is getting at. In 1997, in the new introduction to The Outermost Dream, reissued by Graywolf Press, Maxwell writes: “[W]hen I read for my own enjoyment I cannot—or mostly do not—read authors whose way of writing doesn’t give me pleasure. But of course style is not in itself enough. One wants blowing through it at all times the breath, the pure astonishment of life.”

 

It’s a quality difficult to articulate and simple to perceive. Henry James’ fiction has it, as does Tolstoy’s and George Eliot’s. They convince us. We forget them and ourselves while reading. Science fiction no longer does that for me.