I'd prefer not to

My list includes Toni Morrison, Henry James, Faulkner and Beckett. Why are there some great writers we just cannot read?

By Tom Bissell

May 28, 2002 |

"When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once ..."

-- James Joyce, "Ulysses"

Whether one chooses to admit it or not, every reader has a secret list of writers one is, for whatever reason, incapable of reading. To get it over with, what follows is my own: Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Henry James, Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett ... already embarrassment keeps me from going on.

For a long time, I was careful to keep this information from falling into the wrong hands -- praising Faulkner, comparing work unfavorably with Beckett's, nodding indulgently at mentions of Morrison. But secrets are nothing if not what we carefully choose to share, and thus I would, if pressed, admit that Morrison, excepting her strong early work, struck me as suffering from a terminal case of allegorical bloat; that Faulkner, perhaps the streakiest writer to have ever lived, seemed to me only intermittently good; that, despite his staggering descriptive gifts, even James' shorter work left me feeling as though a very large screw indeed were turning into my brain; that Austen made me certain I would never care this much about my own wedding, much less the weddings of people who do not exist; and that not even Beckett's inarguable brilliance could relieve me of the suspicion that his godless pose was one of effortful heresy.

Shockingly, the truth is that, with the exception of Morrison's "Beloved" (a novel I was assigned to read no fewer than six times in college), I have never actually finished a book by any of these writers. In the case of Faulkner and James, I admit, God help me, to having never read more than a dozen sequential pages of their work. For a literate person to make such an admission is, I imagine, distressing to these writers' many devotees. For a former book editor and fiction writer to make such an admission is, I do not doubt, enough to have me dragged before a literary tribunal and stoned.

Why it is embarrassing to dislike reading writers widely regarded as great is obvious. If the doors of one's perception remain sealed to the bidding of something as elemental as greatness, surely the fault lies not with the caller but with he who is called.

As indentured as I was to this seeming truth, I always found myself furtively hacking at its leg chain. I was, I liked to think, a careful, sensitive reader. By my early 20s I had read "Ulysses" several times, worked my way through the whole of the King James Bible and once spent a summer reading Shakespeare's tragedies. Why, then, no matter the care with which I place my literary belays, do my attempts to conquer "Persuasion," "The Sound and the Fury" or "The Bostonians" invariably send me stumbling back to base camp?

Make no mistake: When I say I cannot read Austen or Faulkner or James or any other writer I recognize as great, this is no plain-brown-wrapper euphemism. I really mean it. I cannot read them. Their work falls through me as though I were a sieve, leaving behind only sodden peculiarities of tone and diction: Austen's conservatism, Faulkner's hysterics, Morrison's hot-gospeling, James' irritating delicacy.

What makes my inability to read these writers so peculiar is the volte-face pleasure I take in other writers whose work greatly resembles theirs. I regard Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" as probably the finest American novel published in my lifetime, and yet McCarthy's prose -- which has never met an unhyphenated compound adjective it did not like or a comma that it did -- seduces me in every way Faulkner's does not. ("I'm all for the complexity of Faulkner," William Styron once said, "but not for the confusion." Mr. Styron, sustained! But how quickly I would object to anyone who palled McCarthy -- who can be awfully tough sledding -- with the same judgment.)

Similarly, how is my love for John Updike possible -- in "Rabbit Is Rich," he expends several precious sentences describing an antimacassar, for crying out loud -- when he is our most Jamesian contemporary writer? Why do Austen's characters provoke in me reptilian indifference when they share the same connubial agitations of the characters in, say, Diane Johnson's "Le Divorce," a novel that seems to me virtually without flaw? (Of course, it could be that I love "Le Divorce" partly because Johnson also co-wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining.")

Some, I am sure, would blame this fundamental short circuit upon my age. (I am 28.) Rather, some would blame it upon the age itself. In "The Gutenberg Elegies," Sven Birkerts recounts a sobering occasion when he assigned James' short story "Brooksmith" to a classroom of students from what he assures us are "relatively advantaged backgrounds." Predictably, these students, in Birkerts words, "didn't get it." Birkerts claims that this "glum illiteracy" has to do with a "conceptual ledge" over which young readers in particular find themselves obliviously peering.

"In place of James," Birkerts says, "we could as easily put Joyce or Woolf or Shakespeare or Ralph Ellison. It would be the same. The point is that the collective experience of these students, most of whom were born in the early 1970s, has rendered a vast part of our cultural heritage utterly alien." I was born in these same amnesiac early 1970s, and while it may be true that a fair number of my coevals' literary engines are clogged with the cognitive gum of MTV and the Internet, I refuse to believe that James is any more difficult to read today than when Birkerts first encountered him. Distraction from the demanding work of reading we will, like Christ's poor, always have with us.

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