Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
What has changed, I suspect, is the size of the average college student's sense of entitlement. Thirty years ago, a student unresponsive to James may have swallowed "Brooksmith" like spinach, afraid of what a public dislike of James might have revealed. Since many students today regard their role as that of a freely discerning consumer, disliking James is as easy as sending back an overdone fillet. I tried, at any rate, to read "Brooksmith" in preparation for this essay. Two pages were enough to give me over to unbidden thoughts about the necessity of cleaning my clothes dryer's lint trap.
But I know James is a great writer. And Austen and Morrison and Beckett. I know, too, that in Faulkner we have the most able-bodied seaman in American literature. Pathos, humor, naturalism, tragedy -- nothing is beyond him. Ten pages of each of the half-dozen Faulkner novels I have tried to read allowed me that much insight. And even as I fight off the urge to recaulk my windows when he succumbs to the convulsive prose the term "Faulknerian" was concocted to diagnose, I recognize that these passages cannot be written otherwise and mean what they have to mean.
But my readerly inlets, as uniquely complicated as the whorls of my fingerprint, do not open up. Instead, they constrict with a recalcitrance that seems lifted from the pages of "Green Eggs and Ham." Unlike Seuss' dilettante, however, an easily remedied lack of exposure does not explain my dogged inability to enjoy writers that, by every imaginable right, I know I should.
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I first began to ponder how and why one responds to some writers and not to others last year, after rereading "Revolutionary Road," Richard Yates' classic 1961 novel of suburban despair. I had decided to pick up "Revolutionary Road" again because, a few weeks before, I had finished my edit of "The Collected Stories of Richard Yates," which Henry Holt and Company, my former employer, published in May 2001.
My first encounter with "Revolutionary Road" had been as an undergraduate. I was 19 at the time, perhaps 20. I remembered admiring the book very much, yet almost nothing beyond key character names, two or three extended scenes and its shocking dénouement had stayed with me. The book had left so little residue, in fact, that when I finished it for the second time, at home in Brooklyn one Saturday afternoon, I felt as though I'd been hit with a broadax. I set "Revolutionary Road" beside my bed and lay there in a lagoon of thoroughly unfamiliar despair.
Most obviously, "Revolutionary Road" is about the beginning of middle age. Frank and April Wheeler, its protagonists, live in a smotheringly tidy community outside New York City, where Frank works in what he regards as a meaningless job. In a blind and, eventually, tragic overestimation of themselves, the Wheelers decide to pack up and move to Europe, where they might finally live lives that properly suit them. They never get to Europe, of course, and the novel leaves Frank looking "like somebody you could walk up to and take a swing at and knock down, and all he'd do would be to lie there and apologize for getting in your way."
Why, I wondered, had this brilliant, unsparing novel in fact spared me the first time I read it? Why had I recognized only its achievement and none of its transfiguring power? Initially, and with some reluctance, I attributed the newfound effect of "Revolutionary Road" upon me to the fact that I was about to enter my incontestably late 20s, an age shared by the Wheelers.
While I am still a good number of years away from middle age, I am gaining some sleep-depriving familiarity with its memento mori: the things one has not and most likely will not ever do, the chances one did not take, the loves lost and squandered, the low-growing tick of one's suddenly and quite unexpectedly real mortality. As one matures, I reasoned, one's books also age and ripen; broken open, they can give off an entirely new aroma. Perhaps I had finally achieved chronological susceptibility to "Revolutionary Road" and its chilling lessons.
But I reject, in the end, the notion that books improve a priori with age if only because I have noticed that the age at which maximized reading potential is supposed to occur almost always happens to be the age upon which those who make the claim are creeping. More dubiously, this belief implies that as one grows older one necessarily has more interesting thoughts and experiences. What of the 25-year-old who has already lived a life of enviable derring-do? What of the 23-year-old who, having lost her parents early, commands an already formidable sense of justice and circumspection? Would we really think it appropriate to inform either of these souls that "The Brothers Karamazov" is going to improve when they are middle-aged? I happen to believe that, with a few exceptions (most of them female -- which warrants an essay of its own), literature is an arena in which the young are uniquely well-armed: "old enough for a glimpse at meaning," Richard Powers says in "Galatea 2.2," "immature enough to still think meaning pursuable."
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