Chapter 14: In Which I Blend my Love of Reading with my Role as An Incredibly Minor Public Figure in Order to Discuss The Stark Reality

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The midterm elections are now a few weeks behind us and, with enough showers having washed away the stink of it all, I can reflect with perhaps a little less anger than I had when the results were more immediate.

I know the conventional thinking is that the Democrats lost this election and the Republicans won it; I’m here to tell you that the conventional thinking is wrong. The real losers of this election were the Republicans.

You remember the Republicans, right? The party that used to be, right up until the extreme right wing—those people too cowardly to form their own party—took it over? Yep: that party. The one that originally defined progressivism, that understood that a “free” market and a “fair” market would never be the same thing, and so took careful steps to insure a free/fair market for all. The one that deplored the military/industrial complex. The one that fostered science and education and charity and spirit.  Yeah.  I remember ‘em, too. Now the only thing left of them is the elephant logo. Oh, wait. That’s not the only thing left of them.  Everything (and everyone) is left of them. And these people—these representatives—of this unnamed new party keep getting elected.

 

More and more I’m wondering if the battles we’re fighting over our political system are the right battles to wage. Our form of governance seems condemned to end up even more corrupt, more purchased, than it already is yet, like the pulped, second-rate prize fighter who doesn’t know that his career is already over, we keep fighting against the count of ten only to take one more devastating punch.

Perhaps it’s time we took a lesson from Willie Stark, the anti-hero of Robert Penn Warren’s brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men. Based (loosely, according to Warren), on Huey Long’s Louisiana dynasty, the novel portrays a politician who fundamentally wants to do good things—build safe schools, a fantastic research hospital, better roads—but is also fundamentally corrupt because he knows that the system is corrupt, and the only way to do good things is to do them corruptly.

In our political system the corruption seems endemic. (Actually, “seems” is a word that belongs to a less cynical time. It is endemic—let’s just admit it.) Perhaps the real problem isn’t that we have a system so prone to corruption, but that we’ve stopped electing fundamentally good people. Our perspective, if we focus less on the system and more on the individuals we elect into it, might just shift.

I recognize that this is a form of giving up, of giving in, of saying that “we can’t change things.” And that’s true: I do believe the battle is basically over. But the battle has been largely about changing the game when maybe it should be about changing the players. Perhaps less time should be spent on where dark money comes from and more time on who that money supports. Perhaps less time should be spent on whether the Democrat or Republican Party wins, and more time on the individuals who choose either mantle.

We are supposed to be a nation of individuals, but we elect by group. We are supposed to be a nation of individual achievement, but we worry about system and process. Let’s focus, one at a time, on the quality of the individuals we choose, selecting those that can breathe the inevitably corrupt air yet still exhale safe schools, fantastic research hospitals, and better roads.

Maybe it’s time for us to look at this Stark reality. Good people can do good things even as they embrace a bad system. So, between now and the next election, let’s look more at who than we have in the past, worrying more about the quality of the people we vote for and less about the system they engage in.

When I began this essay I pointed out that the real losers in the election were the Republicans. I have to correct myself, though. We are the real losers, and it’s probably because we’ve stopped electing winners, regardless of party.

Read since last post:

·         Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie (1985)

·         A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler (1993)

·         The Keepers of the House, Shirley Ann Grau (1965)

·         All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren (1947)

·         The Late George Apley, John Phillips Marquand (1938)

·         The Good Earth,  Pearl S. Buck (1932)

Currently reading:

·         The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)

·         Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

·         Collected Stories, Jean Stafford (1970)

Count: 59 read, 28 to go

Chapter 13: In which I Remember a Barely Amusing Joke, and then go off on a Semi-Political Rant (which Includes Variously Flavored Jams)

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I’ve recently finished reading The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel. I’d call it a reasonably decent 300-page novel. Not anything to win a prize for; nothing like that at all. But serviceable, with some entertaining bits and a pace that whips right along, fast enough so that you don’t have to pay any really serious attention to the plot holes.

Unfortunately, it’s nearly 800 pages long, and those other nearly 500 pages are rather bloated, filled with one-dimensional characters from all over the globe, mostly driven by stilted dialogue with accents artificially implanted into the text through the tritest of methods: missing words here or there, awkward phrasings, laughter at the wrong things and at the wrong times. The plot is layered like a European elevator which, for no reason I’ve ever been able to ascertain, always seem to have both a ground floor and a first floor; that seems to me one too many. When the plot attempts cohesion it’s only for brief moments; most of the key plot elements turn on Dickensian coincidence, a phrase I always hate to see associated with any book not written by Dickens. He was the best at it, after all, and I’ve never understood why others would aspire to his heights when they are so clearly unattainable. There’s a ton of overblown description in the book as well, including a longish section on how to fake antiques which reads like the whale-killing sections of Moby Dick, only less fun.

In sum: it’s something of a bloated mess.

Ironically (or sadly—I’m not sure which), I waited weeks and weeks and weeks for a copy, one of two stocked, to come available at my local library. Initially the book was only available in the newer-than-even-the-NEW-BOOKS section, a category that meant you had one week to read it, and only that one week, no renewals and double the normal late fees. Not sure I’d finish in just one week (and facing a waiting list with a dozen or so names on it anyway (not to mention the fact that I still had the previous pile of books to wade through), people apparently more anxious than I was to read it), I decided to wait until it hit just the regular NEW BOOKS heading. When it finally did, there I was.

(In the meantime I’d finished those other books, the ones that I hadn’t really enjoyed all that much, except I have to admit that Porter’s work grows on you, particularly her later stuff.)

The Goldfinch was one I was really waiting for, really looking forward to. I’d heard so many good things, and the author photo on the back jacket had an eerie, dark (almost gothic) sense to it that gave me a bit of a chill. I was very, very hopeful, which made the whole experience that much more disappointing.

*****

I’m reminded of a time, perhaps thirty years ago now, when I went with my father and our family to a mid-priced steakhouse for a celebration of some kind. It might have been an anniversary or someone’s birthday, perhaps even a post-performance feast after one of the local community theater events in which my father sometimes performed. (His King Pellinore, from Camelot, drew more than a few friendly notices.) My father was particularly excited about this particular restaurant, since he had a love of red meat and the place was famously known for its oversized slabs of steer. 

Unfortunately that was all they really had going for them. They were a bit tough (even medium-rare, the way I liked them), and not all that flavorful. On the plate in accompaniment was a baked potato large enough to wonder whether or not it had a thyroid condition, and what seemed like a bushel of green beans. The former had about a cupful of butter and an equal amount of sour cream loaded into its crevassed topline, while the latter appeared as much gray as green and floated in the tiniest amount of an opaque, watery liquid which I can only assume resulted from inadequate straining after overmuch boiling.  Sitting next to the plate was a Pepsi in a red plastic glass—the kind with the textured nibs all over its surface—almost too large to hold in one hand.

The meal was awful. But at least—as the old joke goes—the portions were generous.

*****

Our culture seems to require size, things bigger, more important, more substantial. Think of something as simple as a car. Pick any model you like and each new generation emerges a little wider, a little longer, a little more powerful. We need IMAX movies and multi-state lotteries, double and triple cheeseburgers and bottomless plates of pasta. We need multi-year television stories with layer upon layer of plots and machinations, so complex that we aren’t even sure if we’re enjoying it because the effort needed to follow is practically headache-inducing. We long for a larger television, a bigger house, more land. We have handheld “devices” and “laptops” nearly as large as the thirteen-inch television I had in my bedroom growing up. We want more choice in more sizes, whether it’s toothpaste or ravioli or soup or channels. We don’t merely trade quality for quantity, we surrender to the quantity gods. Size, as we all know, matters.

It’s to our detriment that we continue this push for more, bigger, faster, better. While we scream for the freedom to want whatever we want, when it actually becomes available to us we end up paralyzed, unable (or unwilling) to choose at all. One famous study—the “Jam” study as it’s colloquially known—documented this phenomenon. Conducted by Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia, the study involved providing people with choices of different flavored jams, and then followed up to see who bought a jar. In one group people were offered six jams, in another, twenty-four. Regardless of the number of choices available to them, people were about equally willing to stop by for a sample taste, but when it came to actual purchases things were different: 30% of the people who stopped by the six-flavor sample bought something, whereas only 3% of those faced with twenty-four choices put down the cash for a jar or two.

It’s true: there can be too much of a good thing. Yet ask anyone if they would be willing to forego choice for efficiency, for even, possibly, peace of mind, and here in America I’m guessing the bulk would say “No.” They want the freedom, the choice, the very bigness of it all.

*****

I just recently finished another book on my list, The Way West, by A.B. Guthrie. It tells the story of a wagon train traveling the Oregon Trail in 1843, the characters weaving their way along the perilous route that ran from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City in the (then) British-run Oregon Territory. What drives them all—shopkeepers, outlaws, politicians, farmers, cattlemen—is the desire for something bigger, wider, newer. Perhaps these are the origins of our compulsion: before us spread a vast continent filled with potential, with opportunity. The difference, though, is that those trekkers were invested in their journey; they understood the risks ahead, the work required, and the pain they would have to endure. Sacrifice in the name of opportunity was the trade they were willing to make.

Not so today. There is no more “way west” for us. We don’t like a challenge; we don’t want to work. We just want what we want. As one movie title has it, we’re “bigger, faster, out of control.” We want a fake freedom wrapped up in too much of too many things. And we sadly believe we’re better off because of it.

Read since last post:

• House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday (1969)
• Dragon's Teeth, Upton Sinclair (1943)
• Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
• The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt (2014)
• Rabbit is Rich, John Updike (1982)
• Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1991)
• The Way West, A. B. Guthrie (1950)

Currently reading:

• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
• Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie (1985)

Count: 53 Read, 34 to go.

Chapter 12: In Which I Admit that it’s Me and not the Books, and Further Realize that Wallowing Has Very Few Benefits

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I’m currently reading five different books and all of them are boring me to tears.

Okay, maybe not to tears. Maybe I just wrote that for effect, an intentional cliché, meant more to emphasize that I just don’t care all that much, that nothing seems all that interesting right now, so much so that I don’t even care if I slip into cliché, ending up with banal writing that just stands there, wallflower-like, waiting for someone to request a dance but knowing that no one will. Or perhaps it wasn’t for effect at all, but mere laziness, cliché not for cliché’s sake, but just to get through the paragraph.

It all just seems so….so…pointless….

In any case, if you’ve read this far and aren’t yet bored yourself, here’s the quick rundown:

Dragon’s Teeth is an Upton Sinclair novel that throws a few rich but basically two-dimensional characters into the early days of the Nazi era, apparently as a device to let us know how terribly awful it all was. Written before the end of the war, it has a hint of tension, the kind you might expect from a writer who isn’t really sure how it all turns out; but looking at it now, through the rear-view mirror—especially after so much has been written and documented—leaves one merely reading a not-very-engaging history text, only with yachts.

House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday is a breakthrough novel from a Native American writer, a Kiowa, written back when he was still an Indian, and well before his nation put up the website which prominently displays the “gushers of cash” available at their very modern casino, right alongside the picture of a nine-dollar quesadilla burger (with taco fries). Written in a style that combines thickly layered poetic prose with a fractured narrative, it’s one of those books with lots and lots of beautiful phrases, all insisting I read them over and over again in the hopes I’ll stumble upon just a hint of captured meaning. It reminds me of the first time I read Wallace Stevens’ Anecdote of a Jar. And the second time. And the third time.

Two short-story collections also contribute to my literary lethargy, the first by Katherine Anne Porter and the second by John Cheever. Neither author thrills me; the prose (though staying well right of purple) feels overtly weighty, as if it’s longing to slap me across the face to insure I pay it the proper attention. (I haven’t yet run across any yachts, but expect to, sooner or later.) Adding to my disinterest are the facts that both collections are quite long and that, at least in the case of the Cheever, the print is very very small and the pages very very large, something my middle-aged eyes rebel against.

And then, of course, there’s still Honey in the Horn, Gillian Flynn’s bane and the book that started all of this. I have to say that Honey isn’t bothering me quite so much these days. It still serves as a splendid soporific, but maybe—just maybe—it’s not the worst on the list….

All of these books reluctantly encourage a wandering mind; I’ll be right in the middle of some long passage about rich people arguing over fascism, or about how an albino’s hair looks when the albino dies, or about something a family member said to another family member in some story about family members, and I’ll realize that, while I’ve been intending to read, what I’ve in fact been doing is mentally balancing my checkbook, or wondering whether I remembered to check the date on the Greek yogurt I just bought at Hannafords, or wondering if I want to take a trip to Toadstool Books in Milford, perhaps to buy something interesting.

We’ve all had moments like this, of course, moments when our minds drift and we realize we’ve read a couple of paragraphs (or even a page or two), and don’t quite remember the gist. But this is different, deeper, and it’s happening with five books, all at the same time. This degree of random inattention has never happened to me before; I’ve certainly run across books that dull my brain, that make me wish I were doing anything else but reading them, but I’m a book lover, a bibliophile with online accounts at a dozen different used-book sites. If I don’t like a book I’ll put it down; there are many more to choose from, dozens and dozens of wonderful volumes I’ve picked up over the years but have yet to get around to. So this can’t be the books. It has to be me. It has to be.

So then: time for mirror-glancing, for reflection.

Things haven’t been all that great lately; recovery from my recent hand surgery has been slower than expected, and while I can type nearly as rapidly as ever (and play lead guitar about as poorly as ever), such activity requires periodic respites else the throbbing in my fingers sets me searching for medication. On top of that my back has decided to act up, and this only days before house guests are due to arrive, which has me wondering about when the vacuuming will get done. And on top of that, business has chosen just now to slow down, leaving me regularly (perhaps even obsessively) worrying about money, and reacting in patently absurd ways, like deciding to skip breakfast.

All of this is bringing me down a bit, or so I’ve been told. (At least one person has suggested that perhaps I should go off by myself for a few days, but I think that’s more for her benefit than mine.) The down, though, doesn’t seem all that extreme—and is certainly well short of clinical. My mood can lift easily, often by something as simple as hearing Katrina and the Waves doing Walking on Sunshine, or running across the “tiara” clip from Big Bang Theory.

Unfortunately, I’m forced to admit that I might secretly enjoy the now-and-again wallowing. It gives me a chance to pretend that I’ve got a very good reason for not doing anything productive like, say, writing. Or doing my physical therapy. Or marketing my business.  But then there’s the guilt that comes from wallowing myself into unproductivity, and that makes me wallow even more, which makes the desire to avoid doing anything meaningful even stronger, which makes me wallow more, and… well, you get the picture.

It’s difficult having a Mobius strip for a brain.

And sooner or later, since reading has always been my favorite escape, I find myself back in that leather armchair, next to that cherry end table with the stack of books on it. Except that I don’t particularly like that stack of books right now, mostly because I’ve been wallowing.

It will shift, though, and must, because I am, after all, obsessive. At some point the mental wanderings become too discordant for my little-o, little-c, little-d personality, and I’m forced to restore order. That means plans and schedules and checklists. It means small but real successes as those checklists fill out. And, of course, finishing those books and writing about them simply must be on those checklists. That’s who I am, after all. But maybe not just yet. I think, first, I’ll head to the bookstore. That always clears my head.

Read since last post:

• None 

Currently reading:

• House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday (1969)
• Dragon’s Teeth, Upton Sinclair (1943)
• Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: Still 46 read, 41 to go.

Chapter 11: In Which I Feel Overwhelmed and Impotent, and Wonder at the Falsity of Glory

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Our fascination with war is downright exhausting.  

I’ve now read roughly half of all the books on the list of Pulitzer fiction awardees and the number that deal with war—whether directly or indirectly—betrays our fascination. Just recently I’ve read Tales of the South Pacific (WWII), The Caine Mutiny (WWII), The Killer Angels (Civil), The Confessions of Nat Turner (Pre-Civil, but clearly connected), A Bell for Adano (WWII), A Fable (WWI, though I thought it was WWII until I checked Wikipedia), and the half-million-word Gone With the Wind (Civil). Still to come is the equally lengthy Andersonville (Civil), along with probably a few others which hide their subject matter behind more cryptic titles. 

A thread that runs through them all, a thread that tapestries a mythical history, is the one that weaves the idea that there is glory in war, that there is always a cause, The Cause, worth fighting for. In the stories of the Civil War there are endless numbers of characters that act as the Tarletons, Stuart and Brent, did, childishly eager to don the grey in the hopes of participating in the adrenalin-filled adventures of fife and drum, bayonet and rifle. Never once did they think that flesh bleeds, that horses scream. 

Neither came home: that was the result of their quests for glory. 

There has always been this myth: it crosses religious, geo-political, cultural, and racial boundaries. There is always someone, somewhere who trots out the Idea of glory, the idea that this time it’s different, that this time there is a greater, more glorious, purpose. It is a devil’s whisper in the ear of those easily persuaded, those whose egoism and nationalistic tendencies need only the slightest push. 

But don’t misunderstand me: there are reasons for war, true justifications. There is genocide. Self-defense. Truly evil individuals creating truly evil states. But never—never—is there glory in it. And never—never—is glory a reason. 

And yet it is. Look to the ancient Greeks and Spartans, the Visigoths, the Mongols, the Crusaders, the Samurai. Look to the English and the Scottish and the Welsh. Look to the French and the Germans and the Russians. 

Look to the Iranians and the Israelis and the Iraqis and the Syrians. Look to Al-Qaeda and to ISIS.

Everywhere you look: the myth of glory. And we write about it and propel the myth ever forward; even within those corners of art where the horrors of war are so well displayed—Guernica, Catch—22, Platoon—still there is that misguided, subtle sense that somewhere, beneath the blood and the limbs and the hunger and the agony there is, just a bit, just a touch, of heroism, of righteousness, of glory. 

Reality begets fiction begets belief begets a new reality, and as long as war parades this myth of glory, there will be an ample supply of soldiers willing to be blown to bits. 

But who are these storytellers? Who convinces the thousands upon thousands upon thousands that the myth is true? It isn’t just history unwinding, self-propelled, that takes so many there—it is a technique, a strategy—of those who benefit (and there are always those who benefit) from war.

They are those who long not for glory, but for other, more material goods. For control. For wealth. Look to those who promise and see what they do, where they are. Look to the recent leaders of theocratic states (including, it often seems these days, our own). Look to the military-industrial complex. It’s not hard to find…. 

And why is it so easy? Why are so many led so fervently down such suicidal paths in that eternal quest for glory? The answer to this question, sadly, remains more stubbornly elusive. Perhaps it’s because we avoid hard truths and swallow easy lies. Perhaps it’s because we behave commonly and consistently without thought to the unintended consequences that come from the ways we treat the conquered—think Treaty of Versailles and Reconstruction. And perhaps it’s because we think in the short-term, about ourselves and (maybe) our children, but never their children, or their children’s children.

And we are fragile souls; glory feeds both our sense of self-worth and our need to connect. When we are faced with the ails of our world—with poverty and anomie and a vision of others that are superficially different than we are—our sense of self becomes supremely important (as does our need to connect with others who share that same sense), a way for us to value our time on earth. And so we are led to a place where that can happen, a place of seeming nobility where we can partake in fellowship and perhaps rise heroically or, if not, at least attempt our own place in history by creating a reason for remembrance. And we are led by those who don’t partake of any of that, who use others for those baser purposes: money, or power, or money and power. 

The calls now are as loud as ever. The Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and more all require new (or renewed) intervention (according to some), and the call for such intervention relies on the need for pride, the call for glory, the myth of the American Savior. There are voices enough shouting that message. And they will continue to do so until we stop believing what they tell us, stop needing so aggressively, until we take just a moment to look at them and ask: Why? 

This is no conspiracy theory, no poorly plotted warning against an ethereal them. This is a request that we question, ponder, analyze—and then question again—anyone who propels the myth forward, who rides it, steed-like, across our apocryphal plain of emotional resonance. Because as long as we don’t, they will. 

Read since last post: 

• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2005)
• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell (1937)
• Years of Grace, Margaret Ayer Barnes (1931)

 

Currently reading: 

• Dragon’s Teeth, Upton Sinclair (1943)
• Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: 46 read, 41 to go.

Chapter 10: In Which I Ponder Time Travel and Discuss the Impact of a Minor Surgical Procedure

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I love a good time travel story, particularly one that loops back on itself in ways that make the mind spin. It can be a movie—like Star Trek IV (the one with the whales) or Looper; it can be a television show—like Quantum Leap (seriously underrated, by the way) or The Time Tunnel;  or it can be written words—like Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, or Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I even like clever references to time travel, as when the nerd quartet populating apartment 4A on The Big Bang Theory jointly purchase a replica of the time machine used in, well, The Time Machine.

As it turns out, though, you don’t need to read a time-travel story to find yourself reading a time-travel story. In a somewhat sudden epiphany I’ve realized that most books—if not all—are, in their own way, time-travel stories. I say “somewhat sudden” since part of said epiphany actually emerged while I was writing about Laughing Boy and The Color Purple; I just didn’t realize it at the time as I’d been so unilaterally focused on the more resonant themes of race and privilege. The epiphany shouted aloud, however, during a recent sprint during which I hurtled through eight books in ten days.

A bit of explanation is required here, lest you think that I’ve either recently completed an Evelyn Wood speed-reading course, or that I’ve suddenly become the world’s foremost erudite slacker. In fact what happened was a bit of minor surgery—again. This time my right hand went under the knife—specifically the thumb and middle finger (which doctors apparently prefer to call the “long finger,” supposedly, I can only assume, to avoid numerous instances of crude adolescent humor). I had developed a couple of odd-shaped growths, one on each of the aforementioned digits, and basic flexing called forth rivulets of decidedly unpleasant pain. Since I have a fondness for most of the tasks allowed an opposable thumb (and since I still had occasional need for my middle finger), removal beckoned. And, in case I hadn’t mentioned it, I’m right-handed.

And so it goes.

Facing two weeks or so of nearly non-existent right-handedness meant that I couldn’t write or type. That seems somewhat minor until you realize that even a business conference call requires a bit of note-taking—and I couldn’t do even that. (Nor could I cook or clean or weed-whack or write checks, all to my wife’s chagrin.) Television beckoned, but having recently marathoned all five seasons of The Wire (not to mention the previous surgery’s Doctor Who immersion), I thought I would try to minimize hours spent before the big screen. That left books.

I don’t know how many of you have ever read so many literary examples so quickly, but it is an entirely different experience than the more conventional and casual approach, particularly when your selections are predetermined—as they are with me during this Pulitzerian experience. I had certain books at hand—so to speak—and those were the ones awaiting.

Here’s where the time traveling comes in: When you quickly pass through numerous books written at numerous times about numerous times, it all gets rather jumbled. The mind comes unstuck now and then as you try to remember what you’re reading, when it was written, and  how that compares to another book you’ve just finished that was written about the time you’re now reading about, though it’s about another time altogether.

Whenever we read a book, we enter into a world with three types of prejudice. The first of these is the prejudice of narrative, necessary because it represents, accurately one hopes, the time in which the story is set. Martin Dressler, the 1997 winner written by Steven Millhauser, offers a solid example. While written in the last twenty years, the book’s tale exists in the early days of the 20th century and reflects those times: women have their assigned roles, as do blacks; the attitude towards immigrants is largely unflattering; and the separate attitudes and ethics of those with wealth and those without are nearly two-dimensional. And yet, as I read the book, the writing inadvertently brought me back out of those times, largely through the second form of prejudice: the prejudice of author.

Authors bring their own values and voices to everything they write; the concept of a neutral writer is no more than impossible phantasm: no writer can leave his or her own time behind no matter the eras they travel into with their pens. Millhauser, try as he might to maintain the proper aura of a New York City unused to buildings more than six stories high, gives us a too-independent woman, and judges her well, and a too-dependent woman, and judges her harshly. Immigrant roots are ennobled, then ignored, and those who exhibit cautious conservatism are painted as backward while those with vision are those who forge forward, seeing progress much as the author must have when he wrote the book: as inevitable.

And then there is the prejudice of reader. My prejudices. Everything I’ve written about Martin Dressler betrays them. Here I am, in the 21^st century—a time of global warming and global strife, of terrorism and cataclysm, a place from which I can look back and worry that progress may be nothing more than a one-word oxymoron, something from which we would do well to recover. And from this perspective I read the words of an author some twenty years distant writing about a time some one hundred years distant. I feel both stuck and unstuck in all three times, a Billy-Pilgrimage of the oddest sort.

This is both a strength and weakness of the best books: I’ve come to find that we can never completely free ourselves to enter them, never thoroughly encounter the worlds they contrive and, yet, at the same time we are offered a deeper look at ourselves and our own worlds, our own times, our own travels.

Read Since Last Post:

• Tinkers, Paul Harding (2010)
• Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser (1997)
• The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1995)
• The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
• A Summons to Memphis, Peter Taylor (1987)
• Ironweed, William Kennedy (1984)
• In This Our Life, Ellen Glasgow (1942)
• Now in November, Josephine Winslow Johnson (1935)

  

Currently Reading:

• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2005)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: 43 read, 44 to go.

Chapter 9: In Which I rue my Own Dearth of Curiosity and Tell the Reader Entirely too much about my Shower Habits.

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest.

Inspiration for these essays arrives conventionally. Shortly after turning a book’s final page, my emotional center checks itself, measuring my autonomic response on a purely binary scale: Did I like it, or not? (such triviality being both unimportant and universal). I then unwillingly fall to mental meanderings, loosely coupled but largely incoherent thoughts that go nowhere and give nothing. It’s rather akin to drinking a Bud Lite and then wondering why.

Then, usually a day or two later, comes the coalition of sense, idea, and semantics: I begin to compose. Unfortunately this nearly always occurs while I’m in the shower, where the only real option would be to write with my finger in the foggy residue that clings to the tiled enclosure, an obvious exercise in futility. I’m forced, instead, to repeat certain key phrases over and over again in my head, hoping (despite history) that I can shift one or two word-strings from short- to long-term memory. It rarely happens. Yet I know that when I write like that—completely in my head—I’m at my most brilliant. At least I think so. Needless to say, the words I imagine are always more crisply wrought than anything that finally ends up on the page. (A good example, for example, is the unneeded “needless to say” which, as any good editor will tell you, simply doesn’t require saying, needlessly or otherwise. It’s something I never do when composing while wet.)

So it was with an odd sort of quivering that I realized I wanted to write something about the book I’ve just begun rather than the books I’ve recently finished. Unasked, composition began too early and wouldn’t quite let me be. Why this should be so seemed at first unclear, but that fog now wordlessly lifts, and since I’m not so foolish as to fight inspiration, I’m going with it.
 

The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields’ 1995 contribution to the list, gives us the story of Daisy, told by Daisy from shortly before her Birth through to (and possibly beyond, if symmetry is to hold) Death. Throughout Shields provides, in words not always perfect but nearly always lyrical, the histories of two families across generations, across oceans, across cultures. From the naïve and rural to the sophisticated and urban (and onward, somehow, one assumes), the book reminds me of how rich and rewarding family history can be.

And how little I know of my own.

The family story I shared earlier is rich and custardy. But then, it’s fiction. There was no shadowed flight from coming pogroms, nor any surreptitious falsity of name and religion. But if asked how things really went, why and when my uprooted ancestors left their homes for America, I couldn’t tell you.  In fact, if I go back just a couple of generations, I can only provide a few hints here and there of anything true. I know, for example, that my patrilineal great-grandfather owned a sweets shop in Jersey City, and that he made his own chocolate. At one point he was offered partnership from another local chocolatier, but my great-grandfather opted to decline Mr. Hershey’s offer.

It’s a great story (if bittersweet), but it’s the only one I know. The only one. I could not even tell you my great-grandfather’s name. Nor if he had any siblings. Nor when he arrived or exactly where he came from. Whom he married. I do know he had at least three children—my grandfather, Harry, my Uncle Bill, and my Aunt Elsie, but I know nothing else. Not a single tale.
 

Perhaps knowing so little three generations back can be excused. But moving forward in time helps me very little. Of my grandfather I know little before I was born, except that he was a musician during the Big Band era, and spent time in Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra when the vocalist out front was a young crooner named Frank. I know that he and my grandmother stayed close with the Sinatras right up until the Blue Eyes closed. 

But I don’t know how my grandfather met my grandmother, nor how they courted. I don’t know if he was in the military. I don’t know if he graduated high school (though he was inarguably intelligent—scarily so), and I know less of my grandmother (though she tended toward the intentionally mysterious; none of us were even sure of her age.)

My father started high school in New Jersey and finished in California, so I know roughly when they abandoned the east for a snowless lifestyle, though I’ve not a clue as to why they made that decision. Neither do I know how my mother and father met, nor what they found so attractive in each other. I know why they divorced, but not why they remarried. I know why they divorced again, this second time when I was five. That is the point where a family history first feels like my family history, something that informs me. But there is a place of emptiness behind that feeling, an almost-consciousness telling me that earlier, much earlier, is where the true information lies, the mortar between the building blocks; for me, mostly, that is mere space.

One of the reasons I find myself so taken with The Stone Diaries lies in the way that Shields often echoes my own sense of the missing, moving from one deftly drawn memory to another through gaps archeologically wide, just the way our real memories travel. In the following two paragraphs, note how the narrative jumps from her getting off the train to visit an older man, a friend she hasn’t seen in many years, to the inevitability of the chapter’s title, “Love”:

Her knees are shaky after so many hours on the train. The sudden light of the station unbalances her, and she can think of nothing to say.

“Daisy?” he murmurs across the combed crown of her hair, making a question of it. Almost a sob. He forgets what he said next.

And then there’s a break, whitespace on the page, followed by this:

At his age he could not face the fret and fuss and jitters of a full-scale wedding, and so they were married quickly, quietly, in a judge’s chambers.

How many of us remember our own histories in just that way: the preface, the dénouement, yet little in between? Shields tell us that “biography, even autobiography, is full of systemic error, of holes that connect like a tangle of underground streams.”  And with waters too quickly displaced, yet filled with currents on which we continually float.

It’s too late for me to find out much of what I wish to know, and I’ve resigned myself to that fact. Family history has always seemed to me irrelevantly important, something that should be known, yet without purpose. But then the things that touch us most are often seemingly without purpose; we don’t really know for sure until that touch comes. Or doesn’t.

Read since last post:

• American Pastoral, Phillip Roth (1998)
• Elbow Room, James Alan McPherson (1978)

Currently reading:

• The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1995)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: 35 read, 52 to go.