Read Things You Don't Like

Trying a click-bait title today—did it work? I didn’t mean it really-really, or not for all the time—just a little bit. What I mean is, I think it’s good to occasionally pick up a book that doesn’t look like the type of book I like, and TRY it. Read 50 pages, 100 pages, and see—maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s worth another 50 pages. Maybe it’s not good, but it gives a little guidance on how to find something else in the genre that could work better for my personal tastes. Or not. Worth a shot.

I realize no one needs to do this. Enough people read NO books that those whowish to read one type of book forever ought to do so unharrassed. So maybe I’m speaking only for myself or maybe just anyone like me who attempts to occasionally edit or teach or do other things that address a wider audience. I do think if we are doing something that requires a real literary intelligence, we ought be able to distinguish between “bad” and “not for me,” which is the sort of Venn diagram that looks like a butterfly. And that requires wide reading, a wide sampling of eras and languages and authors and styles. It’s bracing and exciting to find kindred spirits where I least expect them. Even in books I don’t like, I can see much to admire and know that I am learning, and that’s really great.

It is also exhausting.

Sometimes I read exactly the kinds of books I always like, and then…I like them. The best of these are truly thrilling because they are actually brilliant literature but some of them aren’t even that good and still I enjoy them, because we all have our pet niches. It is very comfortable because in a niche we fit exactly, and there is room just for our old bones to sink in, but no further.

What is your niche?

Mine is books about authors or just vaguely literary people wandering around getting into scrapes and troubles but mainly just…thinking about things. The best of these are huge on interiority and a little bit…low on event. I myself am not big on events. Events are not my jam but thinking is. My favourite sorts of authors are the ones that can really dramatize thinking very well.

Older versions of this type of book, or this type of character—for they are sometimes serieses of books, and sometimes just short stories, but always entirely character dependent—are John Updike’s Henry Bech books, John Metcalf’s Forde and Mavis Gallant’s Grippes. There are many others of course, some more self-indulgent than others. But they are all delightful reading, at least to me. I can see how a different sensibility would find these types of novels extremely annoying, both because little ever seems to happen and because many of the protagonists are themselves quite annoying. I do not, in general, mind reading about annoying people in books (though occasionally I do in specific)—I find books are a better way to encounter annoying people than in real life, always being able to shut the book if need be, which you cannot do at dinner. Annoying people are also much funnier and more charming in novels than in real life, as are most kinds of people.

In the modern era, I have read more widely and found further variants on my favourite sort of fiction, including one of my favourite books of recent years, The Idiot by Elif Batuman about a kid starting university who is immersed in books and absorbing the world for the first time, very very much like a young Rebecca starting university. Nothing much happens, or rather tiny events take on seismic proportions. There’s a sequel, called Either/Or, which I didn’t like nearly as much, mainly because too many things happened and didn’t leave enough space for just wandering around, vibing with the character while she chatted with her friends and thought about books (although honestly, even the second book was pretty good).

I had thought Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This was going to fit into this genre when I started reading it, and the first chunk kind of does, though the main character wanders on the internet as much as in real life, and has a lot more erudite thoughts about digital things than books. The novel changes in the middle and becomes about something else entirely and a different kind of book from then on—I think the structure is part of its brilliance. That book too is one of my recent favourties—it utterly destroyed me, there’s no coming back from that one for a while. And it just goes to show what a real writer can do with even a simple concept like “self-absorbed person thinking about stuff.”

Anyway. This all came up because someone mentioned a bunch of books for me to read recently and the one that came in first at the library was Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner and I hadn’t looked anything up or asked about it (the older I get, the more I prefer to read in this way) but it turned out to be exactly the type of book I find most comfortable to read. What a nice surprise for me, since I was committed to the full reading list even if they were all about dragons or the history of submarines or whatever. As I got into the meat of the book and realized how comfortable and happy it made me, I started thinking about what exactly that was about, and hence this post. I don’t know what the other books on the list are like, the library has not yet produced them, we shall see. Perhaps more posts forthcoming.

Leaving the Atocha Station is about a young American poet named Adam who has a fellowship to write and study in Madrid. A lot of the book is just him walking around and observing Madrid and sometimes other parts of Spain, somewhat poetically. There’s also quite a bit of the book devoted to the fact that he doesn’t really speak Spanish very well (at the beginning, barely at all) so there are huge communication issues with nearly everyone he meets and he’s often making up what he imagines other people might be saying and basically having conversations by himself. It’s whimsical and sort of maddening and also wild. What if you lived that way, is a question this novel—every novel?—seems to be asking.

Adam is a maddening character, wildly self-involved and actually at least somewhat mentally ill. He is suffused with anxiety in what seemed (to this reader) like fairly neutral situations, and he lies often for no reason to almost everyone he meets, and then either regrets it immediately or loses track of the story and tries to revert back to the truth to everyone’s confusion. He is a wild, and fairly unpleasant character—definitely someone I prefer in a book to real life. But his chaotic solipsism allows him a kind of desperate focus on his art, and language, and—most importantly for this book, or at least this reader—failures of language. The central beauty of Leaving the Atocha Station of what happens when you live in a language you don’t fully comprehend—life becomes elliptical, and you have to imagine more. And that is a kind of poetry, and somehow (in Lerner’s version) very beautiful and funny and wistful. Loved this book though, to the myriad people on Goodreads who said they hated it, I understand completely. But maybe reading it still…was useful somehow? Hmm, I don’t know if I have successfully incorporated the title of this post.

***

This is a Facebook memory from 2016, possibly our revered linguist-in-chief Anne-Michelle Tessier’s favourite ever, so in her honour…

Mark Sampson: (picking up belt from top of bureau) I need to throw this belt away.

RR: Hmm, ok.

MS: Because it melted right into my pants.

RR: What?

MS: And those were brand new pants too.

RR: WHAT?

MS: I'm definitely not throwing them away. I have to just figure out how to clean the melted black stuff out of them.

RR: (hysterical laughter)

MS: Or maybe if I just wear them with the shirt untucked no one will see...

(there may have been more here, but RR was facedown on the bed hyperventilating, so she missed it)

MS: It's belt melt, it happens. You know what I mean.

RR: No.