Read Your Heart Out

I still can’t say whether the act of reading is more exit or entrance. Even as books and criticism concern about half of my professional life – and my professional life concerns about half of my life-life (er, carry the one…) – when I’m reading a novel, assigned or otherwise, I still feel like I’m avoiding something else that’s probably more important.

In "Jumbo Lit," an essay in this week’s NYTBR, Joe Queenan writes about how he lets his house and car and basically his existence deteriorate if he’s in the middle of a book.

I was 1083 pages into Robert Musil’s majestic novel "The Man Without Qualities" when my wife burst into the living room and said that my 1991 Toyota Previa was leaking oil. The Previa is a fantastic vehicle, requiring virtually no upkeep, but "The Man Without Qualities" is even more fantastic…for at least four years I’d been having trouble with the van… but I’d never taken care of these problems because I’d rather lie on the couch reading gargantuan books.

Definitely dishes and laundry have piled up for weeks as I’ve powered through Chris Adrian’s "The Children’s Hospital" or Proust’s "In Remembrance of Things Past." A few times I’ve even tried Musil’s tome, but haven’t yet made it past the first hundred pages or so. (Usually it takes me a few tries – sometimes spread out over a number of years – before making it through an epic, kind of like kick-starting a motorcycle before taking it cross-country.)

What I’m more concerned with than the household avoidances, though, are the emotional ones. Looking back at some of the books that have had the biggest impact on me, I can relate them to some fairly tumultuous experiences. I read "Anna Karenina" during a particularly bad break-up; Eggers’ "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" and Safran Foer’s "Everything is Illuminated" came out around the time of my parents’ divorce. I have to consider that the investment of my external sentiments into these books is the reason from my strong associations with them – not their literary merit. And there’s an element of escapism here. My most vivid memories of reading while growing up are those times that, for whatever reason, my then-ten-year-old sister got into shouting/door slamming matches with my parents. (Family CandyLand matches often ended with a thrown board.) I would close my door and turn out the lights, clip my book lamp onto the back cover, and enter the anthropomorphic world Brian Jacques conjured for his "Redwall" series – and these books definitely constituted the beginning bookwormishness.

I’m reminded of a scene from "High Fidelity" (the movie version) when John Cusack is autobiographically organizing his record collection. "To find Velvet Underground’s ‘White Light/White Heat’ album, you have to know that I bought it just to impress a girl when I was in ninth grade, in 1978." (Okay that was a pretty gross misquotation, but the point is still there.) Our impressions of artworks are probably pretty vastly informed by what’s going on in our lives at the time of encounter. So while everyone may be able to ‘connect’ with a given story, it (a story) can really exist only on an individual level. An unopened book is kind of like a foreign, unvisited country – I know New Zealand exists, and that several million people have had meaningful experiences there, but it doesn’t mean much to me because I haven’t been.

And yet I can’t discount the feelings these crucial books stirred up – and intended to stir up. Scott Turow calls "Anna Karenina" "The fullest rendering I know of the complexity of human motivation." There was a ‘connection,’ and not just the distant observance of a story unfolding before me, as might have happened had I picked up "The Da Vinci Code" instead.

In Papercuts last week, Gregory Cowles asked readers to list off their favorite ‘novels for heartbreak.’ There are thirty or so respondents with fifty or so suggestions, many of them detailed and desperate. Maybe something therapeutic actually takes place when intertwining your emotions with a book. Maybe reading is a healthy way to cope with (not just avoid) one’s problems. Maybe reading isn’t a question of entering or escaping life, but is simply an advisable, vitaminlike supplement to it.


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