Six years ago, on October 14, 2018, the New York Times published an essay of mine called “All Those Books You’ve Bought But Haven’t Read? There’s a Word For That.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/books/review/personal-libraries.html
The word was a Japanese term, “tsundoku,” which means what the headline says it means: books you’ve purchased but haven’t read. Mine was not the first essay ever written about this phenomenon. In fact, I had seen enough references to tsundoku that I found myself thinking about an altogether different category of books, a category that makes up a huge chunk of my own personal library: partially read books. Originally this was the focus of my essay. I argued that every personal library consisted of three types of books: books that the owner has read, books that the owner hasn’t read (tsundoku), and books that have been partially read. I noted, of course, that some books – such as dictionaries, thesauri, and other reference tomes are pretty much meant to be only partially read. Almost no one has ever read an entire thesaurus. What interested me most were the fairly large number of books in my library – mostly novels – that I had begun reading, was enjoying, but then put aside for some reason with the intention of returning to them later on. These books are sort of like Schrödinger’s cat, which, if you’ll recall, is neither actually alive nor dead. These partially read books were books that I couldn’t honestly claim to have read but also could not accurately be described as tsundoku. The books I was most interested in writing about were not books that I had permanently abandoned due to a lack of interest, but books that I still hoped to finish someday. Most of these books are massive. I love fat historical romances, but often I find myself overwhelmed by their length and I put them aside for anywhere from a month to…indefinitely. The classic example of this is Valerie Fitzgerald’s 800-page historical novel Zemindar, which is set around the time of the famous Sepoy uprising/Indian mutiny, and was published way back in 1981. I began reading the book in the late 1990s and found myself enjoying it. I drifted away from it after a couple of hundred pages but I found myself returning to it every few years and reading another hundred pages or so and enjoying the experience. Usually when I pick up the book now I start reading it about fifty pages before where my bookmark is situated, so that I can get a bit of a refresher on the plot and the characters before moving into new uncharted territory. To this day, I still have not finished Zemindar. It has become my ultimate partially read book, and thus I am somewhat reluctant to finish it. But it is by no means the only partially read novel in my house that I hope to finish someday. Others include James Michener’s Centennial, M.M. Kaye’s Shadow of the Moon, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, Barbara Woods’s Green City in the Sun, Sarah Harrison’s The Flowers of the Field, Janice Young Brooks’s Cinnamon Wharf, Gay Courter’s Flowers in the Blood, and Rebecca Ryman’s Olivia & Jai. These are not books that I abandoned because they were bad or I got bored with them. I am enjoying all of them, and I return to them every few years for another one-hundred-page stretch or so. Just as there are plenty of TV series that I really like – Justified, The Americans, Breaking Bad, etc. – but have not yet finished, there are plenty of novels that I am greatly enjoying but simply haven’t mustered the strength to finish yet. In some ways, I think that I enjoy knowing that these old friends are available to me anytime I want to drop in on them.
At any rate, that was the original topic of my essay – not tsundoku, which had been written about many times before, but partially read novels one still intends to finish someday, a topic I couldn’t ever remember reading about before (although it almost certainly has been). I sent my essay to the New York Times Book Review and received a fairly rapid response from Pamela Paul, who was editing the Review at the time (she’s now an editorial columnist at the Times). She liked the essay but she wanted me to focus not on partially read books but on tsundoku, a subject dealt with in my piece but not the focus of the piece. This disappointed me a bit, but I was nonetheless delighted to have had a piece accepted by the Times. I could have pointed out to Ms. Paul that tsundoku had been written about in many other publications. But the Times had never published an essay on tsundoku, and I got the feeling that people at the Times don’t really consider a topic to have been explored at all until it has been explored by the Times. And my essay was going to be the Times’s first examination of the phenomenon known as tsundoku. So I agreed to change the focus of my piece. I figured I could sell an essay about partially read books to some other venue later on. My piece was accepted in January of 2018. Ms. Paul assigned me to a very kind and helpful editor, Emily Eakin. Over the next few months, she and I tinkered with the piece on and off until it finally satisfied both of us. By about March, the piece was ready to publish but, for whatever reason, the Times sat on it. And sat on it. And sat on it. This was frustrating to me for a couple of obvious reasons. For one thing, I wouldn’t get paid for the work until it was published, and I needed the money (I believe I was paid $500 for it, a princely sum for me). It was also frustrating because I feared that some rival publication – the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, etc. – might publish some big attention-getting essay about tsundoku and thereby render my piece redundant. But mostly I was worried because I had been writing a column for a local monthly magazine in Sacramento called Inside the City. I had been writing it regularly since 2007. It paid only $200 a month, but I needed that money. What’s more, the column seemed fairly popular. I regularly heard from people who enjoyed it. And, occasionally, when I mentioned my name to some stranger, they would smile and say that they liked my column. Alas, by 2018, small local newspapers were in perilous financial straits. Inside the City had been restructuring a bit and I feared that my column might soon fall victim to additional budget cuts. The editor who had brought me on board years earlier had recently been let go and the new editor seemed to have no great fondness for me or my column. I knew, however, that an essay in the New York Times would seriously bolster my local reputation and might even save my column. This wasn’t idle speculation. I had begun writing the column in January of 2007. At that point I hadn’t been made a regular contributor. I just sent in pieces and, with luck, one of them would be published each month. But, in May of 2007, the New York Times published one of my essays in its Modern Love column, something that boosted my local reputation as a freelancer tremendously. My Modern Love essay drew attention from Hollywood producers, book publishers, and others. It generated a lot of fan mail and emails. It also seemed to raise my profile at Inside the City because shortly after my Modern Love essay appeared in print, I was offered a regularly monthly column. Now, eleven years later, in 2018, I was concerned that my column might soon be discontinued. But I also knew that a splashy essay in the pages of the New York Times Book Review could probably spare me from that fate. Alas, April passed, and still my tsundoku piece didn’t run in the Times. Then came May and June and August, and still my piece didn’t run. In September, as I had feared, I was notified by my new editor at Inside the City that my column was being cancelled. The publication would no longer require any contributions from me. After eleven years and 132 columns, I was through. One month later, my tsundoku piece appeared in the New York Times Book Review and created a minor sensation. Alas, it was too late to save my column at Inside the City.
As often happens with the Times, people read my piece and congratulated the Times for introducing this previously unknown topic to American readers. My piece was reprinted in a bunch of other publications, including newspapers in France and Spain and other countries. Shortly after the piece appeared in print, “tsundoku” became the answer to a question on Jeopardy (although, given the format of the show, “tsundoku” was actually the question). Thousands of people commented on the piece, not just on the website of the NYTBR, but also on Facebook and Twitter and a variety of other venues. The essay was listed as one of the ten most-read articles on the Times for a few days. Several smaller publications brought out essays on the phenomenon, all of which mentioned my essay. I actually got snail mail fan letters from people who enjoyed my piece. I remain in regular contact with one of those fan-mail writers. She and I have become pen pals. In short I was treated as though I had discovered the phenomenon of tsundoku, even though it had been written about numerous times before. In America, nothing is real until it has been written up in the Times.
Shortly after my piece appeared, I was contacted by a top literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit and Associates, the country’s premier literary agency. She had read my piece and wanted to know if I might be interested in expanding it into a book. This was thrilling. Alas, the book she wanted me to write was, to say the least, an odd one. In 2014, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, a 2011 book by Japanese organizing expert Marie Kondo, was published in the United States and became a cultural phenomenon. It eventually sold more than 13 million copies worldwide. I was working at a Sacramento bookstore called The Avid Reader back then, so I was well aware of the Kondo phenomenon, having personally sold dozens of copies of her books to our customers. The agent who contacted me, like everyone else in the American commercial publishing industry, was hoping to capitalize on the Kondo phenomenon. On the vary thinnest of pretexts – the fact that my subject, tsundoku, was, like Kondo, Japanese and somewhat connected to household organization – she wanted me to write a book that would be in conversation with The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. She wanted me to set myself up as a sort of anti-Kondo. She wanted me to celebrate the life-changing magic of having too many books, more than one could possibly read in a lifetime. Naturally, this was intended to be a sort of novelty book, something to set on bookstore checkout counters alongside a stack of Kondo’s books.
I wasn’t exactly thrilled by this proposal but, having just lost my only regular writing gig, I certainly wasn’t going to turn down what could potentially be a very lucrative job offer. So I agreed that I was just the man to write an anti-Kondo book. I spoke with this agent several times by phone in order to clarify the concept of “our” book. We also exchanged a few emails. We were still just in the discussion stage of the project when, on January 1, 2019, Netflix released a limited TV series called Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, which quickly became a phenomenon in its own right and one of the most popular streaming series in both the U.S. and Great Britain. The popularity of the show seemed to light a fire under the agent and she sent me a contract officially making me a client of Janklow & Nesbit and commissioning me to write a book tentatively called Tsundoku. This agent had many famous clients, so she put one of her young assistants at my avail, a woman called Emily. The agent said that, if I needed anything and couldn’t reach her, I should deal directly with Emily instead. (Emily published her first novel, a queer sci-fi adventure, in June of this year).
I wasn’t much worried about producing a publishable book. I had written many essays about books through the years. I figured that many of them could be tinkered with a bit in order to make them fit the brief of the tsundoku assignment. What’s more, I am a fairly fast writer who loves nothing more than writing about books. I figured that within a few months, I could produce a decent-sized collection of essays, all of them dealing either directly or tangentially with the subject of tsundoku. The book didn’t have to be a long one. In fact, my agent wanted it to be about the length of Kondo’s book, which was only 213 pages long. Easy peasy. By about May of 2019, I had completed a first draft, which I sent to my agent. She wasn’t happy with it. It made numerous references to tsundoku and a few references to Kondo, but the agent wanted the book to be an all-out attack on Kondo’s theories about tidying up. In her book, Kondo argues that no one should ever need to have more than one or two books in the house at any given time. She urges people not to buy books unless they plan to read them right away, and to give them away as soon as they have been read. Or words to that effect (I studied the book carefully back in 2019 but haven’t looked at it since). My agent encouraged me to read Mark Manson’s recently published book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which had become a bit of a phenomenon of its own. That book is a very in-your-face attack on various self-help theories and philosophies, including Norman Vincent Peale’s philosophy of positive thinking. My agent wanted me to be ruthless with Kondo and her tidiness theory. I took another crack at the book, but now I found that my heart wasn’t really in it. Don’t get me wrong. I actively disliked Kondo’s book and her theories of extreme tidiness (although Kondo herself strikes me as an admirable person). When it comes to tidiness, I rank just slightly ahead of Jackson Lamb, the slovenly main character, played by Gary Oldman, on Apple TV’s adaptation of the Mick Herron Slow Horses series of spy novels. But I just found it difficult to muster much antipathy towards a sweet-natured young Japanese woman whose passion was for organizing closets. I was fairly confident I could write a vitriolic anti-Kondo screed if the money was good, but I felt squeamish undertaking such a project. I was hoping that I could make my book, essentially, a collection of essays about books that just occasionally took a swipe at the tidiness phenomenon. But now it seemed clear that, if I wanted my agent to actually sell this book to a publisher, I would have to write a book that would portray Marie Kondo as Public Enemy Number One. So I set about doing exactly that, greed having overcome what little integrity I possessed to begin with. And around May of 2020, I submitted my anti-Kondo screed to my editor. Alas, in that very month, another very sweet young woman, a food writer named Alison Roman, born within a year of Kondo, got in trouble. This was during the peak of the Great Awokening, when it was essentially a career-ending offense for a white person to criticize a non-white person. Alison Roman had made a name for herself as a sort of Gonzo chef, someone who isn’t afraid to do unconventional things in the kitchen. It was for this reason that she had been given a regular writing gig with the New York Times, which is always eager to portray itself as on the cutting edge, although it never actually wants to do anything so edgy that it might upset its advertisers or its wealthy, elite-educated subscribers. But in May of 2020, during an interview, Alison Roman made some mild and humorous criticisms of Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen (also of Asian descent), and was, predictably enough, castigated as a racist. The Times put her on a temporary suspension while she, presumably, underwent a struggle session and some reeducation. Eventually the temporary suspension became a permanent dismissal. Roman’s career survived but lost much of its luster. She hasn’t been anywhere near as publicly prominent since then. My finished anti-Kondo book arrived in my agent’s email at roughly the same time as the Alison Roman story was blowing up. At that time, literary agents were dropping clients left and right for presumed crimes against humanity. Woody Allen’s publishers dropped a memoir of his shortly before it was supposed to be released, citing decades old accusations of child abuse that had been thoroughly refuted. Naturally, my agent wanted nothing to do with an anti-Kondo book at this time. At least that is my assumption. After the Alison Roman controversy broke, I never again heard anything from the agent. I phoned her a few times. I sent emails. But she went radio silent on me. Even her assistant no longer communicated with me. You might think that I was crushed by this development but, in fact, I was okay with it. My heart had never been in the anti-Kondo book. I’d have been happy if the agent had sold it to a publisher for a monstrous advance, but I’d have also been a little bit ashamed of myself too.
Anyway, the tsundoku book I wrote has been sitting idle in my computer’s memory for five or six years now. Recently I dug up my earliest version of the book, the one that was mainly just a collection of literary essays and had little to say about Marie Kondo or even tsundoku. It isn’t exactly the most polished of books — for one thing, the fonts are all wonky — and I have no time just now to give it a major copyedit, but I have decided to share it with you here in its rough and unpolished state. Some of it has appeared before in other essays of mine, but much of it is previously unpublished. I wrote it fairly quickly and that whole bizarre episode with Janklow & Nesbit now just seems like a fever dream from the pre-COVID era. I don’t expect (or advise) anyone to read it all the way through. I’m including it here just to show you that it was an actual project of mine. I spent the better part of a year working on it. Eventually I added a bunch of anti-Kondo stuff to it, but that stuff now seems badly dated and unnecessary. Had the agent shown any interest in this original version of the book, I believe that, together, she and I could have produced a highly readable collection of enjoyable essays for booklovers. Alas, that was not to be…
TSUNDOKU!
Why You Own More Books Than You Can Ever Read and OtherMysteries of the Booklover’s Life
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
The Three Kinds of Books
Mi Tsundoku Es Su Tsundoku
The Bookstore Meditations
The Trouble With Trilogies
A Tale of Two Customers
The Men Who Wrote the Seventies
How to Read Disreputably
The Hardboiled Notary
Reading as a Charitable Activity
Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home
The Children of Shogun
A Nine-Letter Metaphor for Married Life
Their Eyes Were Watching Grandpa Frank
Comfort Reading
The FRAW: A Literary Phenomenon
The Guardian of the Toilet
Dear Millennial
10 Books to Read in Public If You Want to Annoy the Politically Correct
Two Cheers For Erich Segal
My Archenemy
Woody, Clint, & Dutch
Aunt Bonnie’s Christmas Book
An Atheist Reads the Bible
The Book of Brian Shea
Not Famous Enough
The Chatterlings in Wordland
Forty Pages to Go
Sometimes Failure is the Key to More Failure
Words to Live By
Farewell to a Word-Lover
Tower Books: In Memorium
THE THREE KINDS OF BOOKS
I own far more books than I could possibly read over the course of my remaining years, and yet every month I add a few dozen more to my shelves. For years I’ve felt guilty about this situation. But I have read several articles lately that have helped assuage my guilt. The magazine Inc. recently ran an essay by Jessica Stillman that was headlined: “Why You Should Surround Yourself With More Books Than You’ll Ever Have Time To Read – An Overstuffed Bookcase Says Good Things About Your Mind.” Stillman argued that a personal library too big to be read in a lifetime is not a sign of failure or ignorance but rather “a badge of honor.” Her argument was a variation on a theme put forth by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his bestseller The Black Swan, a book about the role that large, unpredictable occurances play in world events. In essence, Taleb argues that people tend to place a higher value on the things they know than on the things they don’t know. But it is the things we don’t know, and therefore can’t see coming, that tend to shape our world the most dramatically. A man (or woman’s) personal library is often a symbolic representation of his own mind. A man who has quit expanding his personal library may have reached the point where he thinks he knows all he needs to know and that what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. He has no desire to keep growing intellectually. The man with an ever-expanding library understands the importance of remaining eternally curious, eternally open to new ideas and new voices.
Taleb argues that a personal library “should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
I don’t really like Taleb’s term “antilibrary.” A library is a collection of books, many of which remain unread for long periods of time. I don’t see how that differs from an antilibrary. An essay at the website brainpickings.com by Maria Popova, notes that the Japanese have a word for a stack of books that you have purchased but not yet read: tsundoku. My personal library is about one-tenth books I have read and nine-tenths tsundoku. I probably own about 3,000 books. But many of those books contain multiple titles. I own a lot of Library of America volumes, books that contain the complete novels of Dashiell Hammett, say, or Nathanael West. Thus, my 3,000-book library probably holds more than 6,000 titles. Once I have read a book, I often give it away or trade it in at a used bookstore. As a result my tsundoku is ever expanding while the number of books in my house that I have read remains fairly constant at a few hundred.
In truth, however, the word tsundoku fails to accurately describe much of my library. I own a lot of short-story collections, poetry collections, and essay anthologies that I bought knowing I would probably not read every single entry in the book. People like Taleb, Stillman, and whoever coined the word tsundoku seem to recognize only two categories of book: the read and the unread. But every true booklover knows that there is a third category that falls somewhere in between the other two: the partially-read book. Just about every title on a booklover’s reference shelves, for instance, falls into this category. No one reads the American Heritage Dictionary or Roget’s Thesaurus from cover to cover. One of my all-time favorite books is John Sutherland’s The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. It’s a fascinating, witty, and very opinionated survey of Victorian England’s novels and novelists, from the famous (Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray) to the justifiably forgotten (Sutherland describes the novels of Tom Gallon as “sub-Dickensian fiction of sentiment and low-life in London, typically written in an elliptical, rather graceless style.”). I’ve owned the book for 20 years and derived great enjoyment from it, but I doubt that I’ll ever manage to read every word of it. The same goes for The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, the Anchor Book of Latin Quotations, and dozens of other books on my reference shelves.
I own ten or twelve collections of short stories by Rudyard Kipling but I’ve never read any of these books straight through. I wouldn’t want to systematically read my way through every story Kipling ever wrote because I like believing that there are still Kipling stories somewhere in my library that I’ve never read before.
I rarely read biographies all the way through. Biographers have a tendency to shoehorn every last tidbit of information they can into their tomes. I don’t really care about the marks that Ogden Nash received on his third-grade report card or how many trunks full of clothing Edith Wharton had shipped across the Atlantic when she moved to France. There are probably hundreds of biographies in my personal library. I have read parts of most of them but I have read very few of them in their entirety. The same is true of collections of letters. Whenever I finish reading a work of fiction by Willa Cather, I’ll be inspired to pull out the massive tome known as The Selected Letters of Willa Cather and try to get the measure of what the author was like when she was “off duty.” I don’t intend to ever read all the way through the letters of Willa Cather, E.B. White, James Thurber, or any other prolific letter writer, but I like having those books available to browse through whenever the notion strikes me.
I have a substantial collection of books about the cinema, including studies of the films of Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, Clint Eastwood, John Ford, and many others. I’ve never read any of these books all the way through, but after enjoying another viewing of, say, Rear Window or Hannah and Her Sisters, I’ll take down one of these tomes and see what the writer has to say about the film I’ve just watched.
My wife and I are big fans of California fine art. We have countless books with titles such as Masters of Light: Plein-Air Painting in California 1890-1930 and California Light: A Century of Landscapes. Although there is plenty of text in these books, we generally take them up just to gaze upon all the beautiful artwork. I read an occasional entry but, for as long as they remain in my possession, these art books will never be more than just partially read.
Whenever I take up a novel, I almost always do so with the intention of finishing it. But through the years my shelves have become thick with novels that I started, didn’t finish, but wasn’t willing to completely give up on either. Every few years I take another crack at The Adventures of Augie March, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moby Dick, The Sot-Weed Factor, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Golden Bowl, The Man Who Loved Children, The Satanic Verses, The Golden Notebook, The Recognitions, Foucault’s Pendulum, or Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Inevitably I fail once again to finish the book, but always I remain unwilling to surrender. These cannot be counted as books I have read but neither can they be labeled tsundoku. Like much of my library they live in the twilight zone of the partially read.
It isn’t only thick, intellectually challenging masterworks that sit on my shelves partially read. Those shelves also groan under the weight of plenty of lighter novels – crime thrillers, westerns, historical adventures, sci-fi, and other pop fictions – that I abandoned at some point but can’t quite bring myself to give up on. Perhaps I began reading a western when what I was really in the mood for was a mystery. This is the literary equivalent of those “it’s not you, it’s me” situations that sometimes occur between dating couples. Every now and then I go back and consummate the relationship by reading one of these books all the way to the end. Usually, I’m glad I did, which is why I am loath to part with any of my other partially-read pop-fictions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that “read books are far less valuable than unread ones” because unread ones can teach you things you don’t know yet. I don’t really agree with him. I think it’s a good idea to keep your shelves stocked both with books you’ve read and books you haven’t read yet. But just as important is that third category of book: books you haven’t read all of yet and may, in fact, never get around to finishing. The sight of a book you’ve already read can remind you of the many things you’ve already learned. The sight of a book you haven’t read can remind you that there are many things you’ve yet to learn about. And the sight of a partially-read book can remind you that reading itself is an activity that a true booklover can never really hope to come to the end of. It is an activity that we are always somewhere in the middle of.
Perhaps the Japanese have a word for that.
MI TSUNDOKU ES SU TSUNDOKU…WITH SOME EXCEPTIONS
There are two kinds of booklovers in the world: those who loan out books and those who don’t. I fall into the latter category. I almost never loan anyone a book. If I want someone to read a book from my library, I don’t loan it to them; I give it to them. I do this because I know firsthand the tyranny of the borrowed book. I know how it sits on your nightstand or your coffee table, tick-tick-ticking, like a time bomb that will someday soon blow up and send shrapnel flying into your relationship with the person who gave it to you. A borrowed book is the worst kind of book – a book that demands to be read. It is “required reading,” as they say in school. And I say to hell with it.
I think the reason I didn’t go farther in school is because I hate required reading. I want to read only what I want to read and only when I want to read it. That’s my motto as a booklover. And just as a school book demands that you read it, so too does a borrowed book. If a friend lent you a book, then it is likely he not only wants the book back in a reasonable amount of time – say one month – but also that he will be expecting some sort of review of said book, probably a positive one, a review that reinforces his own high opinion of the book. Thus, a borrowed book, unlike a book that you are required to read for class, carries with it the expectation that you will like it. You can tell your high-school English teacher that you think Catcher in the Rye has aged poorly and she probably won’t hold it against you. Heck, she may even admire you for it. But no friend lends you a book and says, “Read this – it’s over-rated and hasn’t aged very well.” No, they lend you the book because they want you to like it as much as they do.
In my early days as a reader, when I lent a book to a friend, I expected that within a reasonable amount of time he or she would read it and return it to me. This rarely happened. Even when I lent a book to a fellow avid reader, they seldom satisfied my expectations by reading and returning it in a timely fashion. In fact, an avid reader is probably the worst person to lend a book to, because they probably already have dozens of books on their to-be-read pile (TBR in online parlance). It’s frustrating when you think a friend of yours would really, really love a particular book but you just can’t get them to read it. But even more frustrating is when you lend a book to a friend and then wait months and months for them to return it to you. You don’t want to ask for the book’s return, because that might create awkwardness. What if they’ve lost the book? What if they just assumed that you had made a gift of the book? What if they respond in some sort of snippy manner: “Okay, fine, I’ll read the damn thing this weekend and get it back to you.”? So now your frustrations are compounded. You are frustrated that you can’t get your friend to read a book you are convinced she will love. And you are frustrated that you cannot get said book returned to your personal library. The situation is fraught with complications. And that is why I decided long ago that if I thought a friend might love a particular book but I wasn’t confident I could convince them to go out and buy their own copy, I had one of two choices. Either I could give them the book as a gift – no strings attached, no repeated queries about whether or not they had read it yet – or I could simply pass along my recommendation of the book without passing along the book itself. And usually I choose the former option. I pass along the book with an assurance that I won’t be needing it back.
There is one exception to my rule of almost always giving and never lending a book. When it comes to my tsundoku – the books that I own but haven’t read yet – I am a bit less generous. There, I abide by a different set of rules entirely. If a friend is visiting my house and, somewhere amidst the bookshelves that dominate just about every room, he sees a title that intrigues him and asks to borrow it, the answer will vary depending upon the circumstances. If it is a book I have already read, I will almost always just insist that he take it as a gift. The only exceptions are if the book were a gift from a loved one and carries some sort of inscription from them, or if the book is special in some other way (I bought it at the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on a memorable trip to Paris; it is inscribed by the author; it is a favorite of mine and very hard to find, etc.). But if the book is from my tsundoku, there are other factors in play. For instance: How long have I owned it? If it has been sitting on my shelf unread for twenty years (not uncommon), I will probably not only be inclined to give it away, I will probably also be relieved to do so. Almost nothing can fill me with guilt faster than the sight of a book I’ve been meaning to read for decades but haven’t managed to get around to. If a friend were to ask to borrow The Collected Stories of Frank O’Connor, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, Iain Pears’ The Dream of Scipio, or Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, I would not only be happy to give him the book, I might even be tempted to pay him to take it off my hands and relieve me of the guilt of not having read it for so long.
But what if the book is a recent purchase? What do I do then? Well, this is a tough one. For one thing, “recent” is a relative term. For me any book acquired in the last couple of years is considered recent. I don’t feel guilty about not having read Anne Tyler’s The Beginner’s Goodbye yet because it wasn’t published until 2013 and has been sitting on my shelf for no more than two or three years. It’s practically a newcomer. If someone asked to borrow it, I’d be reluctant to give it up. I’d have to take several things into consideration. Did I pay full price for the book or did I buy it used at a Friends of the Library sale? If I am into it for the full hardcover price of $24.95 (highly unlikely given my parsimony), I am much less likely to give it away than if I bought it as a used trade paperback for $1.99. Was it signed by Anne Tyler (unlikely, but I do own a few books signed by her)? If so, I’d probably be willing to lend it out to a very good friend but I would express a desire to have it returned someday. How eager am I to read it? Nothing makes me want to read a book more than the prospect that it might soon be disappearing from my shelves. Just the thought that my friend could soon be carrying The Beginner’s Goodbye out of my house is likely to rocket it up dozens of notches on my TBR list. In which case I’ll probably politely decline his request, but with a promise that I will pass it along as soon as I have read it. Is the book part of some collectible set? Although I’ve owned it for more than twenty years, I’ve never read my copy of Dombey and Son. But it is part of the Complete Oxford Dickens collection, so I would never give it away, and am unlikely even to lend it to anyone (of course, this is true even of the volumes I have read, such as David Copperfield and Great Expectations). I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking at the gap-toothed smile of a 21-volume set that is missing one of its volumes.
I like to think of myself as a generous person, so if a book has been a part of my tsundoku for five years or more, isn’t especially valuable, isn’t part of some larger collection that I own a complete set of, and doesn’t carry any strong sentimental attraction, then I am inclined to give it away to anyone who shows an interest in it. Mi tsundoku es su tsundoku, as the saying goes. But if you should find a one-hundred-dollar bill tucked between its pages (as I did once, in a book I had just bought from a used-book store), I want it back. The money, that is. You can keep the book with my good wishes.
BOOKSTORE MEDITATIONS
I’ve spent enough time in bookstores – as both an employee and a customer – to know that, in many ways, they are small representations of the world at large. They have sections on birth (where you’ll find titles such as What To Expect When You’re Expecting) and sections on death (On Grief and Grieving, How to Prepare a Last Will and Testament, etc.). They have sections devoted to food, health, money, crime, love, parenting, art, entertainment, travel, history, politics, philosophy, religion, and much more. To get the most out of your visits to the bookstore, consider the following recommendations from someone who has probably spent more time in bookstores than in any other type of commercial establishment.
DON’T BE A ONE-SHELF READER.
The one-shelf reader, like the person with tunnel vision, tends to focus on just a single thing obsessively. At the bookstore where I work, I have a customer who reads only cozy mystery novels with culinary themes. Most of these books have silly, punning titles: Affairs of Steak, Chili Con Corpses, The Long Quiche Goodbye, Cloche and Dagger, Finger-Lickin’ Dead, Delicious and Suspicious, A Batter of Life and Death, Dead Men Don’t Get the Munchies – you get the point. This customer is a kind and friendly woman. I always enjoy her visits. But it’s difficult to engage her in conversation for very long. She doesn’t seem to have many interests outside of cozy culinary mysteries. Generally, the more sections a regular customer of mine visits, the more interesting he or she is to talk to. If you want to be a well-rounded person, visit as many sections as you can in the bookstore of life. This doesn’t mean that you have to master every discipline known to mankind. There’s nothing wrong with preferring histories or mysteries or romances to all other kinds of books. But you shouldn’t let your favorite genre of book become your only genre of book, any more than you should let your favorite kind of food – say, pizza – become the only thing you ever eat. It’s nice to know what you like, but it’s also nice to remain open to new experiences.
READ A FEW PAGES FIRST
Just as you wouldn’t buy a car without first test-driving it, you shouldn’t buy a book without first reading a few pages of it, even if it comes heavily recommended by Oprah Winfrey, President Obama, and Pope Francis. People are as various as snowflakes. Just because everyone you know loves a particular title doesn’t meant that you’ll like it too. You can save yourself a lot of wasted time and money by always reading a few pages of a book before deciding whether to buy it.
NEVER BE TOO OLD TO ENJOY CHILDISH THINGS
I honestly believe that the children’s section of the bookstore contains more wisdom than can be found in the self-help section. We sell children’s books about the importance of sharing with others (The Boy Who Wouldn’t Share, The Rainbow Fish), about resisting conformity (The Story of Ferdinand), about dealing with divorce (My Family’s Changing, Where Am I Sleeping Tonight? My Bonus Mom), about dealing with the death of a loved one (Someone I Love Died, The Invisible String, and Are You Sad, Little Bear?), about LGBT issues (This is My Family, Jack and Jim, The Different Dragon), and a lot of other subjects that you might not expect to find in a section aimed at little children – some of whom are too young to read.
What’s more, if you were an enthusiastic reader as a child, then there’s no better way to reconnect with your childhood than by reacquainting yourself with the adventures of Babar or Madeline or Curious George. And if you find yourself feeling left out when you hear other people discussing Where the Sidewalk Ends or The Lonely Doll or some other classic children’s books that no one ever read to you when you were a child, remember that it’s never too late to fill the gaps in your cultural education. Just as you don’t have to be a literary professor to purchase a copy of Ulysses, you don’t have to be a child – or even have any children of your own – to purchase a copy of The Cat in the Hat or Miss Masham’s Repose. Self-help authors frequently urge readers to get in touch with their inner child. There is no better place to do that than in a bookstore with a really good selection of children’s books.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO BUY TRASHY BOOKS
Nobody likes that guy at the backyard barbecue who points out how fattening potato chips are, or how bad red meat is for your digestive system. Life would be no fun if you didn’t occasionally eat food that is bad for you, blow off a trip to the gym, and watch moronic sitcoms on TV. Likewise, I can’t imagine devouring a steady diet of books that are good for me. My favorite guilty literary pleasure is the old pulp western. I’m not talking about highly-regarded literature of the west, such as True Grit, Lonesome Dove, or Little Big Man. I’m talking about cheap paperback originals from the 1950s and 60s with titles like The Law of The Gun, Ride Into Danger, and Death Stalks Yellow Horse. Man does not live by Proust alone (I don’t live by Proust at all). Indulge your passion for literary comfort food whenever you feel the need.
READ ASPIRATIONALLY
This is the flipside of the previous entry. In the bookstore, as in life, you should dream big. If you’ve always wished you were the kind of person who could enjoy daunting literary classics such as Moby Dick or War and Peace, then go ahead and be that person. Book clerks don’t require you to pass any kind of test before purchasing a book. You don’t have to look professorial in order to purchase a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Don’t read only the books you think someone of your intellect and educational level should read. Read the books that the person you want to be would read. Read books that challenge your preconceived notions about religion, politics, history, the environment, finance, and other topics. It’s not enough to visit numerous sections of the bookstore. Every now and then you should expand your mind by sampling the best of the best. Read things that you fear might be over your head. And don’t be ashamed if it turns out that they are over your head. Someday, all those difficult words, sentences, and ideas may start to make sense to you. You can apply this advice to other venues of life as well. It seems to me that those who read boldly are more likely to live boldly too.
I have trouble with trilogies. And the mere thought of a tetralogy, pentalogy, or sextology makes me start to feel a bit logy. My personal library is littered with the spines of multi-volume fictions I gave up on after only one book, or sometimes even sooner. Gormenghast, Tinieblas, U.S.A., Narnia, Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom books, Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant trilogies, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, Studs Lonigan, the Lanny Budd books of Upton Sinclair – I’ve abandoned them all.
Duologies (sometimes called “dilogies”) I can handle. The Manor and The Estate, a two-novel saga of Polish Jews by Isaac Bashevis Singer – no problem. Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed and its sequel The Gods Arrive constitute one of my favorite Wharton fictions, despite the fact that most experts consider these two books among her weakest. Kidnapped and its lesser-known sequel Catriona (pronounced “Katreena”) together constitute one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s best romances.
I especially like the unofficial duology. This is a species of literature that hasn’t been written about much but exists nonetheless. If Lily Bart’s suicide at the end of The House of Mirth left you feeling bereft, try cheering yourself up by reading Wharton’s later novel The Glimpses of the Moon, which has a happier ending and which, with a bit of imagination, can be read as a sequel of sorts to The House of Mirth. All you have to do is imagine that George Selden arrived at Lily Bart’s apartment in time to prevent her from killing herself and that these two friends finally agreed to marry as they should have long ago. Change George’s name to Nick Lansing, Lily’s name to Susy Branch (easy to do, since the two names are so similar), ignore a fifteen-year shift in time, and you can watch as Lily/Susy (somewhat unconvincingly, I’ll admit) finds the happiness that eluded her in The House of Mirth.
Likewise, if you were depressed by Jack London’s Martin Eden, which ends with the death of a successful writer who throws himself into the water and drowns, solace yourself by reading The Sea Wolf, which begins when a drowning writer is plucked out of the San Francisco Bay by a cruel sea captain who enlists him in all sorts of harrowing adventures that eventually lead to love and happiness, two things Martin Eden could never find.
And if you couldn’t get enough of the spunky heroine of Betty Smith’s classic coming-of-age novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, pick up Smith’s Joy In The Morning, which switches the heroine’s name from Francie to Annie (a barely noticeable alteration) but otherwise continues the story of the first novel without missing a beat.
For me, two volumes seems to be the maximum number of books through which a reader should be required to follow the exploits of the same set of characters. Curiously, even when I greatly enjoy Books One and Two of a series, I rarely read any further. Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth is one of my all-time favorite books. It is part of a trilogy which also comprises the novels Herself Surprised and To Be a Pilgrim. I have read and greatly enjoyed Herself Surprised, but To Be a Pilgrim has sat on my shelf unread for more than a decade.
Frank Norris’ The Octopus is one of my favorite novels. It is Book One in his “Epic of the Wheat” trilogy. I tried reading Book Two, The Pit, but never managed to finish it. Norris himself never managed to finish Book Three. He died while The Wolf was still just a glint in its creator’s eye.
Likewise, After the War and An Affair of Honor, by the late, great, and criminally underrated novelist Richard Marius rank among my favorite reads of the last fifteen years. But they are part of a four-novel cycle, and though the other two novels (Bound For The Promised Land and The Coming of Rain) have been in my possession for years, I have never ventured into them. Whenever I see them sitting on my bookshelf, I think of the young couple who sat at a table next to my wife and me at a dinner theater performance of Harvey years ago. When the curtain rose at the end of the first act, the couple applauded, commented to each other on what an exceptional play it was, paid their bill, and left the theater arm-in-arm, blissfully unaware that there was another act to follow. I am not quite so oblivious. I am aware of the existence of the unread books in Marius’ series, but I am blissfully content to leave them unread for now. I’m not sure why this is but I feel fairly certain it has nothing to do with laziness or some deep-down lack of satisfaction with the two volumes I have already read. In fact, I enjoyed After The War so much that I reread it recently. It lived up to my memory of it as a wonderful saga of life in the small fictional town of Bourbonville, Tennessee during and after the First World War, but it still didn’t inspire me to tackle the two remaining novels in the Bourbonville cycle.
And don’t even get me started with the French. Although I read and loved Germinal, I have no strong desire to read all twenty books in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. The same can be said of Cousin Bette and Balzac’s 90-volume La Comedie Humaine.
While I am more than willing to enter the labyrinth of a multi-volume work of fiction, I almost never persevere long enough to reach that piece of cheese at the end of the long and winding corridor. But, judging from the number of books listed on Amazon.com with the word “trilogy” in their titles (5174), there must be plenty of people out there who are addicted to that labyrinth cheese. I saw this firsthand when I worked as a clerk in a Tower Books store back in the 1990s. Customers were constantly hectoring us clerks for information about the release date of the next installment of (you pick it) Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, and so on. As you might expect, most multi-volume novels fall into the fantasy genre, and most of these appear to be aimed at young readers. Hollywood’s recent embrace of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Harry Potter books, the Lord of the Rings books, and The Chronicles of Narnia is only likely to encourage publishers to bring out more multi-volume fantasy sequences. In fact, it is already happening. Scroll through Amazon.com’s five thousand-plus trilogies and you will notice a preponderance of titles containing such words as “unicorn,” “dungeons,” “elves,” “wizard,” and “sorcerer.” Evelyn Waugh was ahead of the curve when he titled his lone trilogy Sword of Honor. Amazon now lists numerous other “sword” trilogies, including The Sword of the Spirits Trilogy, The Swords Trilogy, The Two Swords Trilogy, and The Swords of Shannara. One can easily imagine the chuckle Waugh’s shade lets loose every time some misguided American teenager purchases a copy of Sword of Honor online thinking that he’ll soon be enjoying a multi-volume dungeons-and-dragons epic.
And speaking of dragons, they are far and away the champions of the trilogy word-title competition. Consider just this partial roll-call of Amazon trilogy titles:
The Dragonlance Series
The Pit Dragon Trilogy
The Dragonvarld Trilogy
The Dragonmaster Trilogy
The Dragon Trilogy
The Dragon King Trilogy
The Dragon Stone Trilogy
The Dragon’s Eye Trilogy
The Dragon’s Wake Trilogy
The Dragon’s Fire Trilogy
The Dragonriders of Pern Trilogy
Most contemporary fantasy trilogies have titles so long that I find myself exhausted after reading only the book cover. If the authors of these tomes are so windy that even their title pages have very little visible white space, it is no wonder they can’t tell a story in under three volumes. Consider for instance these tongue twisters:
The Amulet of Samarkand (The Bartimaeus Trilogy Book One)
The Crystal Shard (Forgotten Realms: The Icewind Dale Trilogy Book One)
The Thousand Orcs (Forgotten Realms: The Hunter’s Blades Trilogy Book One)
Wizard’s Curse: Trinistyr Trilogy, Volume One (Dragonlance: The New Adventure)
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty: The First of the Classic Erotic Trilogy of Sleeping Beauty (Erotic Adventures of Sleeping Beauty Book One)
The last mentioned book was written by Anne Rice (under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure), who was definitely onto something big when she decided to write a series of books combining two popular genres (erotica and fantasy) in one tale. Two of today’s biggest selling novel sequences are Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, which mixes Harlequin-style romance with fantasy, and the Left Behind series, by Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, which mixes fantasy with Christianity (a bit of a redundancy, I know). If someone could manage to combine Jesus and dragons into the same fantasy stew and spread the tale out over three volumes, god only knows how many millions of copies they might sell. I can see the title-page now: The Calling of the Twelve (Jesus, Dragon Lord of Nazareth, Book Two). Frankly, though, whenever I hear a fan of these cross-genre epics speaking enthusiastically about them, I feel like a bit of an outlander myself. I feel left behind.
There seems to be some debate over what to call these multi-volume novels, especially after they surpass the trilogy stage (Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time epic, for instance, runs to at least eleven books as of this writing; pretty soon he’s likely to have an eighteen-wheeler on his hands). “Tetralogy” is the technical term for a series of four related dramatic or literary works. But unlike trilogy, the word tetralogy rarely appears on a book cover. Amazon.com lists only 60 books with the word tetralogy in their titles. These range from the standard fantasy fare (Seeds of Betrayal: Book Two of the Winds of the Forelands Tetralogy) to more serious works of fiction (The Decay of the Angel, Book Four of Yukio Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility Tetralogy), to works outside the novel genre (The East Village Tetralogy, a collection of four plays by New York City writer Arthur Nersesian). Amazon also lists two books with the word “tetrology” in their titles. This variant is listed as an alternate spelling for tetralogy by the online Wikipedia encyclopedia, but I can’t find it in any dictionary I own. Perhaps because few people (myself included, until just now) know that the prefix tetra comes from the Greek word tettares, meaning four, publishers tend to avoid the term. The Latin prefix “quadr” and its variants are more familiar to English-speaking people these days than the Greek prefix is. Which may explain why Paul Scott’s four-volume series is always referred to as The Raj Quartet rather than the Raj Tetralogy. The same explanation probably applies to Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, as well. Calling a four-volume set of novels a quartet is not wrong, but it is less accurate than calling it a tetralogy. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language emphasizes that quartet is primarily a musical term, although it can also be used to describe any group of four. A less conventional deviation from the word tetralogy is employed by the 20th Century Fox Corporation in the title of the boxed set of dvds that comprises the four installments of the Alien film franchise. Fox calls this package The Alien Quadrilogy. Quadrilogy is a term Fox appears to have coined, for I can find it nowhere else in print. Perhaps Fox has copyrighted the word, the way NBA head coach Pat Riley once tried to copyright the word threepeat (come to think of it, threepeat might be a good label for a really repetitive trilogy).
And once a novel series moves past its fourth book, the nomenclature becomes even trickier. According to the Wikipedia, a five-volume dramatic work is called a pentalogy. A six volume series, says Wikipedia, is known as either a sextology or, less frequently, a hexology (both appear to be extremely infrequent, in my experience). None of these three Wikipedia-defined terms appear in either the American Heritage Dictionary or in J.A. Cuddon’s Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Both the Penguin and American Heritage dictionaries have entries for “Pentateuch,” which means “containing five books.” The term comes from the Greek words for five (penta) and book (teuchos). But both dictionaries also assert that this term is now used only to refer to the first five books of the Bible. Likewise, the word “Octateuch,” meaning “containing eight books,” is now used exclusively to refer to the first eight books of the Bible. Although both Jewish and Christian tradition view the first five books of the Bible as a single unit, it is not exactly clear why this should be. Some scholars have argued that the books are linked by the promise of land for the chosen people, but as the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) point out, that promise isn’t fulfilled until the book of Joshua, the sixth book of the Bible. “In which case,” says the NOAB, “the Hexateuch (‘six books’: the Pentateuch plus Joshua) rather than the Pentateuch should be seen as the decisive unit.” Pentateuch, Hexateuch, and Octateuch are all useful terms, but only when you are referring to the Bible. To label a contemporary work of five, six, or even eight volumes, we will have to look elsewhere for guidance. (By the way, I don’t know if there is any relation between the Greek word teuchos [book] and the similar-looking Yiddish word toches [ass, as in kish mir in toches, or kiss my ass] but if so, then perhaps a really awful five-book series ought to be labeled a pentatoches.)
Barbara Ann Kipfer’s otherwise excellent tome The Order of Things: How Everything in the World is Organized into Hierarchies, Structures, and Pecking Orders, offers no guidance for those seeking to label multi-volume sagas. In a chapter devoted to the arts, Kipfer lists the various categories of bestsellers, she explains how International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) are assigned, she lists the seven different sizes of octavo formats and twenty-one different quarto formats, but she makes no mention whatsoever of what ought to follow “duology,” “trilogy,” and “tetralogy” in the hierarchy of multi-volume literature. And if there were such a list, duology might not even be on it. Once again, the Wikipedia is the only source I can find for the existence of the word.
These days multi-volume epics longer than trilogies usually have one of the se- words applied to them: “serial,” “series,” “sequence,” or “set.” On occasion they might also be referred to as “cycles.” But these five sibilant terms are not entirely interchangeable. A “serial” is a continuous drama or story broken up into installments, each of which usually takes up the story right where the other one left off. The volumes in a serial often conclude with so-called cliff-hanger endings, which are resolved in the next installment. The word “series” is generally used to refer to a group of books linked by the presence of one or more regular characters. These groups of books, such as Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford novels and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, generally introduce an entirely new plot and cast of secondary characters with each volume. “Sequence” is a term that, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, can be applied to multi-volume works that are either “related” (like Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire Novels, which are linked primarily by geography) or “continuous” (like The Harry Potter novels, which are installments of a single, very long story). The word “set” is a more general term that can be used to describe books written by the same author (a complete set of Jane Austen novels, for instance) or published in uniform editions (Penguin “Portables,” for instance, or The Modern Library’s “20th Century Rediscoveries”). The books published by The Library of America constitute a set. They are written by different American authors, but they are published in uniform volumes expensively clad in woven rayon and adorned with such extras as hard-shell slipcovers and colored-ribbon bookmarks. The word “cycle” is a more specific term. According to J.A. Cuddon, the works in a cycle -- be they stories, poems or plays -- are linked by a central theme and not necessarily by continuing characters or interlocking storylines. Frank Norris’ unfinished “Epic of the Wheat” was conceived as a cycle, in which the individual volumes would each explore different aspects of capitalism and consumerism without recycling any of the same characters, plotlines, or even settings. And even the aforementioned Pentateuch might best be described as a cycle. The first five books of the Bible were not written by a single author and are not linked by a central human character (Moses doesn’t appear in Genesis). “Nor,” as the NOAB points out, “is there complete coherence of plot among them.” Rather the books are united by their emphasis on law and instruction. “Law is a predominant genre of the Pentateuch, which contains not only the Ten Commandments,” says the NOAB, but also instruction in the laws of circumcision, the laws covering the inheritance of land by women, and other legal matters. As a sequence of legal writings, the Pentateuch may not be as thrilling as, say, Scott Turow’s Kindle County sequence, but they have had a much longer shelf life.
But I don’t care whether you call them “serials,” “sets,” “series,” “sequences,” or even “cycles” – I’ve almost never been able to read my way through one of them. And so to all you novelists and budding novelists out there I say this: “Give me action, romance, intrigue, and suspense – but give it to me in fewer than three volumes.”
A TALE OF TWO CUSTOMERS
I’ve met a lot of interesting people at the bookstore where I work part time. I’d like to tell you about two of them. I don’t know either gentleman’s full name, so I shall refer to them only as The Prince and The Pauper. The Prince was a very friendly guy. He used to come to the store once a week or so and read Barron’s, a business weekly, from cover to cover while sitting on the bookstore couch. He was a retired state worker who had invested his money wisely. He claimed he earned between $2000 and $5000 every weekday morning trading stocks online. To hear him tell it, you’d think he had never made a losing investment. During the five years that I was acquainted with The Prince, the stock market was generally very strong, so it is entirely possible that he made all the money he claimed to make. He told me he lived in a nice house in Curtis Park, an upscale area of Sacramento, and, indeed, I occasionally saw him out in his yard when my perambulations took me through that neighborhood. Once I saw him doing Yoga in his front yard with his personal yogini. In addition to his home, he owned 40 acres of country property up near the Oregon border. It had a swift creek running through it, “with water up to here,” he’d say, holding his hand at chest level. But his goal was to buy a home in a Southern California beachfront town noted for its wealth and celebrities. I never doubted his financial claims. There’s no reason why a state worker who invested his money wisely couldn’t end up wealthy enough to retire in a Southern California enclave of the rich and famous. He wasn’t a con man. He never tried to sell me anything or get me to invest in some get-rich-quick scheme with him.
But The Prince had a blind spot when it came to his own character. He also had a blind spot when it came to my character. He used to say to me, “Kevin, you and I have figured out the secret of life. Here we are, you in your fifties and me in my sixties, and both of us are doing what we love. You love books, so you work part time in a bookstore. You’re not making much money, but you love the work. Me, I play the stock market, not because I care about money, but because I love the intellectual challenge of trying to figure out where the economy is heading and who the winners and losers will be.”
Now, I do indeed love books but, truth be told, if I didn’t need the money, I wouldn’t be working nights at a bookstore – or anywhere else for that matter. The Prince seemed to think my work at the bookstore was more along the lines of a hobby rather than a financial necessity. I never bothered to set him straight, because no one wants to go to a store and hear the clerk complain about his economic woes. I do enjoy working at the bookstore but, given my druthers, I’d rather be home at night curled up with a good book – or, better yet, my wife.
The Prince also seemed to be confused about his own motivations. It may be true that he enjoyed the intellectual challenges of investing, but he never mentioned any of these challenges. All he ever mentioned was the money he made. He’d tell me how he made $50,000 in one week by buying a particular stock, and then another $30,000 shorting that same stock as its price began to drop. For a guy who claimed not to care a whit about money, he was awfully fond of revealing the exact dollar amount he had earned on any given day or from any given transaction. And the only books or magazines he seemed interested in were those that dealt with money. Occasionally I tried steering the conversation towards topics that were of more interest to me – kayaking, food, literature, tennis, travel – but even then all The Prince seemed to care about was dollars and cents (“How much does a nice kayak run these days?” “Who do you think makes more money, Stephen King or the lady who wrote those Harry Potter books?”).
Despite his blind spots, I liked The Prince a lot. He was a walking beacon of positivity, sort of like his hero Tony Robbins. Only one thing really bothered me about him. He never once, in the five years I was acquainted with him, made a single purchase at the bookstore. He read Barron’s cover-to-cover and then returned the rumpled magazine to the newsstand. The cover price of the publication was a mere three dollars. It seemed to me that a guy who made $2000 to $5000 every weekday ought to be able to afford to drop three dollars a week at his local bookstore. But he essentially used the bookstore as a library. He made use of our stock of books and magazines but never bought a one of them. A few months ago he finally sold his Curtis Park home and moved away to the sunny Southern California resort town of his dreams. Despite his stinginess with a dollar, I still miss The Prince. He had a way of brightening up a room, even if the light he cast felt a bit artificial.
The Pauper is a homeless man who hangs out in the Tower District of Sacramento. He spends much of his time panhandling for change near the intersection of 16th and Broadway. On an average day, he earns about twenty bucks. Occasionally he comes into the store after a long day’s panhandling and asks me to convert all his coins into cash. The first time he did this, he laid out $19.92 in coins on my counter. I added eight cents of my own money to the total and then handed him a twenty dollar bill from the cash register. The Pauper thanked me and went on his way. The next day he showed up around eight p.m. with another load of coins. He dumped them on the counter and began to count them out. He told me, “Because you gave me that eight cents yesterday, I’m gonna let you keep all the pennies I got today, even if it’s more than eight.” I told him that wasn’t necessary. It turned out that he had 21 pennies and he insisted that I take all of them. I thanked him and put all the pennies into the register drawer. Then I gave him bills for all his remaining coins. With that one transaction, The Pauper had contributed to the store more money than The Prince ever did during his years as a regular “customer.” What’s more, the The Pauper didn’t wrinkle up any newspapers during his visit.
Every now and then, when he is a few cents short of ten or fifteen or twenty dollars, I will cover the difference for The Pauper. The Pauper never forgets this, and he always insists on paying the store back with a few cents interest.
Like The Prince, The Pauper has a few faults. While walking to and from work I will occasionally see him urinating in some public place. Hygiene is not a priority for The Pauper and the crumpled one-dollar bills he occasionally pulls from his pockets and hands to me in exchange for a crisp, clean five- or ten-dollar bill tend to be damp and smelly. The Roman emperor Vespasian might have thought twice about his famous motto Pecunia non olet (“money doesn’t stink”) had he ever met The Pauper.
Curiously, The Pauper, like The Prince, is a walking beacon of positivity, but the light he casts seems more genuine, the twinkle of starlight rather than the glare of halogen. He always seems to be smiling at some joke that no one but he can understand. The Prince worked hard all his life, invested his money wisely, and realized his American dream of living in luxury in Southern California. I don’t know what The Pauper’s dream is. I know his first name and his age and a few other facts about him, but only because I’ve pressed him for this information. He prefers not to talk about himself. Maybe he’s living on the streets because he made a lot of bad decisions in life. Maybe he’s lazy. Maybe he’s got a criminal record. It’s possible he has a drug- or alcohol-abuse problem, but I’ve never seen him obviously drunk or stoned. In my encounters with him, he has always been perfectly coherent.
I’m not sure which of these two fascinating gentlemen I like or admire more, but I can say this: For all his wealth and financial acumen, The Prince was a bit of a freeloader. And for all his rough ways and tatterdemalion appearance, The Pauper never forgets a debt and always insists on paying it back with interest.
THE MEN WHO WROTE THE SEVENTIES
The decade of the 1970s was the Golden Age of popular fiction in America. If you doubt me, you have only to take a look at a list of the bestselling books of the era. It includes a far more diverse group of writers and settings than you would find on the bestseller lists of the last quarter century. In fact, since about 1980, popular fiction in America has been written by fewer and fewer writers, has included fewer non-American authors, and has featured fewer tales set in real countries outside of America.
Only once, during the thirty years that comprised the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, did one author manage to land two titles on Publishers Weekly’s annual list of the ten bestselling novels of the year. It happened in 1972 when Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File and The Day of Jackal were the third and fourth bestselling novels of the year, respectively. During the 1970s, the year-end lists of bestselling novels displayed a wide array of novelists, and the names could change entirely from one year to the next. For instance, none of the ten bestselling novelists of 1970 (Erich Segal, John Fowles, Ernest Hemingway, Mary Stewart, Taylor Caldwell, Leon Uris, Jimmy Breslin, Victoria Holt, Graham Greene, and Irwin Shaw) appeared on the 1971 list (Arthur Hailey, William Peter Blatty, Irving Stone, Frederick Forsyth, Harold Robbins, Helen MacInnes, Herman Wouk, James Michener, Thomas Tryon, and John Updike). Likewise none of those 1970 top-ten novelists appeared on the year-end list of bestsellers in 1975, and only one of them (Mary Stewart) appeared on the decade’s final list, in 1979.
Compare that with the list for the year 2000. The bestselling novel of 2000 was John Grisham’s The Brethren. The year 2000 was the seventh consecutive year in which the top spot was held by a Grisham novel. The second and fourth bestselling novels were both produced by the writing team of Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. The third bestselling novel of 2000 was Tom Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon. It marked his tenth appearance on a year-end bestselling-novels list, going all the way back to the mid-1980s. Danielle Steele held both the sixth spot and the tenth spot on the list. James Patterson held the eighth and the ninth spot. The list for 2000 was typical except for the lack of a Stephen King title. In the 1980s King missed the year-end list of bestselling novels only once. The same thing happened in the 1990s. But he made up for those omissions by frequently landing more than one title on the year-end list. In 1983 both Pet Semetary and Christine made the list. In 1987 The Tommyknockers, Misery, and The Eyes of the Dragon all made the list. In 1990 he landed two more books on the list. In 1992 he had the year’s number-one bestseller, Dolores Claiborne, and the year’s number-three bestseller, Gerald’s Game. The second bestselling book that year was John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief.
And then of course there is the phenomenon of Danielle Steele. She wrote two of the year’s top-ten bestsellers in 1985, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1995, and 1996. She landed three books on the top-ten lists of 1994, 1997, and 1998. I haven’t even mentioned the numerous years in which she made the list only once. In 1997 books by Steele and Patricia Cornwell accounted for half the titles on the year-end top-ten list. In 1992 Steele and King accounted for forty-percent of the list. Throw in a few titles by Michael Crichton, Mary Higgins Clark, and Anne Rice, and you’ve got a good description of just about every year-end bestseller list of the 1990s. And the list has only gotten less diverse since then. Consider, for instance, the year 2012, when books by Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games series) and E.L. James (The Fifty Shades series) held seven of the list’s ten spots.
Why has popular fiction become so much less diverse than it used to be? A few reasons stand out. It was in the 1980s that massive chain bookstores such as Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Tower Books began to dominate the bookselling market. In the 1970s, and in previous decades as well, most books were sold through independent bookstores rather than chains. And those bookstores were likely to reflect the personalities of their owners and their employees. Levinson’s bookstore in my hometown of Sacramento, California, probably pushed an entirely different list of books than the Argosy bookstore in San Francisco was pushing. But a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Sacramento promotes exactly the same writers as a Barnes and Noble bookstore in San Francisco, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Omaha, and every other city in the country. When Amazon.com came along, the monopolization of massive retailers only increased. It’s easier for a Barnes and Noble or an Amazon.com to stock up on books written by a handful of monster bestselling authors than to stock up on a wide array of books, by a wide array of authors.
The bestseller list of 1970 contained four British authors (Greene, Fowles, Stewart, and Holt) as well as an American (Caldwell) who was born in England and emigrated to America as a child. One of the ten novels (The French Lieutenant’s Woman) is set in the Lyme Regis area of England during the 19th Century. Another (Hemingway’s Islands In The Stream) takes place in the Caribbean. Victoria Holt’s The Secret Woman begins in England and then moves to the South Pacific. Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave is an Arthurian fantasy. Caldwell’s Great Lion of God is about Saul of Tarsus. Leon Uris’ QB VII is a courtroom drama set mainly in England but which also concerns the Holocaust. Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt is about an Englishman who travels across Europe on the Orient Express and later winds up in South America. Thus seven of the year’s ten bestselling novels had absolutely nothing to do with the United States of America. Compare that with a typical year-end bestseller list of our day. The stories nowadays usually take place in a contemporary American setting or an entirely fantastic one (i.e.: Stephen King’s Dark Tower universe, which was inspired in part by America’s Old West, and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games universe, which is a bleak dystopian vision of a future America). Even when a bestseller is set largely overseas, such as is the case with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and its sequels, the story is told through the eyes of an American character and is clearly directed at an American audience.
Here is the bestseller list for 2006:
For One More Day by Mitch Albom
Cross by James Patterson
Dear John by Nicholas Sparks
Next by Michael Crichton
Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris
Lisey’s Story by Stephen King
Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich
Cell by Stephen King
Beach Road by James Patterson and Peter de Jonge
The Fifth Horseman by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
The authors are all Americans, and the stories with one exception are set in America (Thomas Harris’s novel is about the early years of fictional American serial killer Hannibal Lecter, and takes place mostly in Europe). During the first decade of this century, the only foreign author to make it onto a year-end list was J.K. Rowling.
After 1981 the American bestseller list for fiction took a serious turn for the worse, epitomized by the fact that the bestselling novels in both 1982 (E.T., The Extraterrestrial, by William Kotzwinkle) and 1983 (Return of the Jedi, by James Kahn) were novelizations of blockbuster movies rather than original novels. The year-end top-ten list for 1979 has two Brits (Mary Stewart and Graham Greene) and an Australian (John Hackett) on it. After 1980, the few foreign writers who managed to land on the American year-end list were mostly writers like John Le Carre, Frederick Forsyth, and Ken Follett who had made their names in earlier decades. Few new foreign writers would make the list after that. In 1983 the only new non-American on the list was romance writer Jackie Collins, and her book was the distinctly American tale Hollywood Wives. In 1985 the only foreigner on the list was again Jackie Collins, again with a novel, Lucky, that was a wholly American tale. Collins returned to the list in 1986 with Hollywood Husbands, which, needless to say, was an American tale. In 1987 no foreign writers made the list. In 1988 Barbara Taylor Bradford was the only non-American on the list and she had been living in the U.S. for years, was married to an American, and would shortly thereafter become a naturalized American citizen. In 1989 Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses would make the list, but that was a bit of a fluke. Hostility towards Rushdie by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini gave the book selling power that it almost certainly wouldn’t have possessed otherwise. Both LeCarre and Follett also made the list that year, but they had been grandfathered in back in the 1960s and 70s respectively. In the decade of the 1990s only three foreign writers made the list: Rosamund Pilcher made it once, Laura Esquivel made it once and Maeve Binchy made it once. Since the year 2000 the only non-Americans to crack the list have been J.K. Rowling and Steig Larsson (who had been dead for six years by the time he made his appearance there in 2010).
In the year 2014 three of the year’s ten bestselling novels were simply different editions of John Green’s young-adult novel The Fault In Our Stars. Three of the bestselling titles that year (Divergent, Allegient, and Insurgent) were written by Veronica Roth. The three remaining books on the list were all, like the John Green title, propelled there by their film versions: Jeff Kinny’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and Frozen by Victoria Saxon (Bill O’Reilly’s book Killing Patton rounded out the ten-title list, but isn’t technically a work of fiction; Publishers Weekly seems to have categorized it as such simply because it was written by a faux newsman). These are not novels that crawled their way up the bestseller list on the strength of word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied readers. No, these are books, mostly written for children, that became powerful literary brands thanks in large part to their Hollywood iterations. In previous decades Hollywood films often traveled to success while riding piggyback on a popular novel. Nowadays the reverse is often true. A novel that wasn’t a huge bestseller becomes one only after Hollywood has adapted it for the screen.
In the 1970s, bestselling authors usually left the young-adult genre alone. There were no true young-adult novels on any of the Publishers Weekly lists of the year’s bestselling fiction back in the 1970s (although some books, such as Watership Down, were popular with both grown-up readers and young adults). Nowadays, authors who frequent the bestseller lists – writers such as John Grisham, Carl Hiaasen, and James Patterson – have also published numerous young adult novels as well. Even more “literary” writers, such as Jane Smiley and Alice Hoffman, have been branching out into young-adult territory lately, making the consolidation of the two genres almost complete.
Plenty of great popular novels were written prior to Rosemary’s Baby (1967), and plenty of good pop fiction has been written since. But the bestseller lists that predate Rosemary’s Baby tend to be filled with plodding religious uplift, thrillers that aren’t terribly thrilling by post Rosemary’s Baby standards, and predictable romance novels. When we think of great mid-century pop fictions nowadays, we tend to think of the novels of writers like Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, and Philip K. Dick, but those writers made it nowhere near the top of the bestseller list during their lifetimes. Among the bestselling novels of the 1940s were numerous religious titles, including The Song of Bernadette, by Franz Werfel, The Keys of the Kingdom, by A.J. Cronin, The Apostle and Mary, both by Sholem Asch, The Miracle of the Bells, by Russell Janney, The Big Fisherman, by Lloyd C. Douglas, and The Bishop’s Mantle, by Agnes Sligh Turnbull. Henry Morton Robinson’s novel The Cardinal appeared on two year-end lists in the 1950s (1950 and 51). The Foundling, by Cardinal Spellman also made the list in 1951. Thomas B. Costain’s The Silver Chalice, the bestselling novel of 1952, is a biblical epic. Also on the list that year was Agnes Sligh Turnbull’s The Gown of Glory, another traditional novel with a religious subject. The Silver Chalice was the second bestselling title of 1953, behind only Lloyd C. Douglas’ The Robe, a novel about the crucifixion of Jesus (The Robe was also a number-one or -two bestselling novel in the years 1943, 1944, and 1945). Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, about Vatican politics, was the bestselling book of 1963. James Michener’s The Source, a novel about the history of the Jewish people, was the bestselling book of 1965. None of these religious tomes was the slightest bit irreverent or groundbreaking. Ira Levin was the first writer to make the bestseller list with a novel that portrayed religion (in this case Satanism) negatively. Later novels, like Stephen King’s Carrie and Irving Wallace’s The Word, would benefit from the path that Levin blazed.
The 1970s were the first decade in which heavy handed Biblically-inspired novels were not an important element of America’s bestselling fiction lists. Although The Exorcist is a deeply Catholic novel whose heroes are both Catholic priests, its violence, language, and intensity were enough to get the book and the film condemned by the Catholic Church. The best thrillers of the 1970s, books like The Exorcist, The Day of the Jackal, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Great Train Robbery, The Seven-Percent Solution, The Eagle Has Landed, and Eye of the Needle, were a lot more exciting than any of the bestsellers of the 1950s. In fact, prior to Rosemary’s Baby it is difficult to find a novel on a year-end bestseller list that these days would even qualify as a thriller. Those that come closest, such as Daphne Du Maurier’s 1952 bestseller My Cousin Rachel, are somewhat staid historical dramas rather than genuine thrillers.
Even some of the dreckiest bestsellers of the 1970s aren’t quite as bad as you might remember them. Erich Segal’s Love Story, though no literary masterpiece, is short and eminently readable, with touches of humor that seem to have been inspired by J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories and Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus. Indeed, more interesting than the book’s central love story, is the relationship between the narrator, Oliver Barrett IV, and his father, Oliver Barrett III. In that aspect, it could be read as a sort of prequel to Saul Bellow’s much better Seize the Day, which deals with a strained relationship between a well-off senior-citizen father and his less successful middle-aged son. And though all of Love Story’s major characters are gentiles, the book still manages to include an effective critique of anti-Semitism in America. Oliver doesn’t graduate from Harvard Law at the top of his class, but he manages to land the best and best-paying job of anyone in his class, because the other top students in the class are all Jews and therefore not as desirable in the legal job market. Though it is the quintessential early 1970s bestseller, the book is actually set in the early 1960s, long before the Summer of Love and the arrival of the Haight Ashbury scene, and this nostalgic aspect of the book may, in part, have accounted for its success.
Arthur Hailey’s novels of the 1960s and 1970s are not showcases for great prose, but they provide invaluable – and entertaining – glimpses into the ways various industries – the media, Big Pharma, hospitality, air travel, banking, electrical power – worked in the middle part of the American Century. Nowadays the topics covered by Arthur Hailey are more likely to be covered by non-fiction writers like Michael Lewis than by novelists, most of whom tend to look inward these days. Which is a shame. We could use a big fat panoramic novel about America’s health-care woes or it’s infrastructural degradation or its military industrial complex.
In the 1970s Herman Wouk gave us two big fat novels that explored almost every major theater of World War II: The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Our fictions about more recent wars – Vietnam, the Gulf War, the Iraq War – tend to be more personal, focusing on the exploits of a single combatant or a single platoon. The big-picture approach to recent wars seems to be confined only to non-fiction books.
Novels such as Gore Vidal’s 1973 bestseller Burr seem to have given way these days to massive biographies like Ron Chernow’s Hamilton. And something is lost when great fiction writers cede the broad historical canvas to the non-fiction writer.
The fat historical romances of the 1970s, books such as James Clavell’s Shogun and Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, were way too racy to have been published in a previous decade. And after the 1970s, their ilk was replaced on the bestseller lists by the far less ambitious romances of Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and the like. For all their flaws, books like Shogun and The Thorn Birds were not cranked out in a hurry to meet the demands of a busy publishing schedule. They appear to be passion projects whose authors spent years toiling on them. Few pop romance/adventure novels give off any whiff of toil these days. In fact, many of them seem to have come off an assembly line.
McCullough was one of the few females to publish a book in the 1970s that remains one of the defining bestsellers of the era. Most of the decade-defining bestsellers of the 70s – Love Story, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Jaws, The Day of the Jackal, The Winds of War, Rich Man Poor Man, My Name is Asher Lev, The Other, Rabbit Redux, Ragtime, Breakfast of Champions, Burr, Watership Down, The Silmarillion, The Honourable Schoolboy, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Centennial, August 1914, The Dead Zone, and so forth came from the pens of the men who wrote the Seventies. Agatha Christie released a few bestsellers in the 1970s, the final decade of her life, but they had all been written decades earlier, in the 1940s. She wasn’t a hugely significant part of the zeitgeist of the 1970s and none of her books is set in that decade. Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, and Taylor Caldwell released multiple bestsellers in the 70s, but the titles have not attached themselves permanently to the pop cultural memory of the era. Jacqueline Susann had some bestsellers in the 70s but she will always be best remembered for Valley of the Dolls, which was published in 1966. Things might have been different had she not died fairly young in 1974. As it is, Colleen McCullough is the only woman of the era to have written a monster bestseller that remains fixed in the minds of those who care about the 1970s as a cultural landmark. Helen MacInnes was a fine author but she’s never been a cultural icon.
Like Agatha Christie, a lot of prominent Twentieth Century authors would make their last appearance on the year-end list in the 1970s. It would be the final decade in which any of the following played a significant role on a year-end list of bestselling novels in America: Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, Herman Wouk, Arthur Hailey, Irving Stone, Irving Wallace, Kurt Vonnegut, and Graham Greene. But it was also the first decade in which Stephen King and Ken Follett appeared on such a list, and they would go on to produce many more bestsellers. Indeed, both men are still very active as of this writing. Likewise, Michael Crichton, who debuted on the list in the late 1960s, would continue to produce massive bestsellers into the current century. He died in 2008, but his publisher has brought out three more novels by him since then, and the popular HBO series Westworld is based on his work.
On today’s list of America’s bestselling novels there is no real equivalent of Graham Greene. In the Seventies, Greene made the list twice, with Travels With My Aunt (1970) and The Honorary Consul (1973). You could argue that Ian McEwan or Martin Amis or some other serious British literary author is today’s version of Greene, but their books are nowhere near as popular as Greene’s were in the 70s. Neither writer has made a year-end list of bestsellers in America. Greene was highly critical of America and famously said he’d rather live in the Soviet Union than the United States (in fact, he lived much of his adult life in the south of France). But American book buyers didn’t hold it against him. Americans bought his novels in large numbers. Perhaps today’s version of Greene is John Le Carre, another ex-pat Brit who has been highly critical of America’s government. Le Carre is still a bestseller, but he hasn’t made a year-end list in decades. His brand of intelligent thriller has been crowded out of the list by the likes of The Da Vinci Code and the latest by-the-numbers thriller from James Patterson. He made the year-end list thrice in the 60s, thrice in the 70s and thrice in the 80s, but he hasn’t returned to it since, despite being nearly as prolific today, in his late 80s, as he ever was.
Diversity and a spirit of internationalism were hallmarks of the year-end bestseller lists of the 1970s. Those qualities are sadly lacking from most of the year-end lists that Publishers Weekly has compiled since that decade ended.
HOW TO READ DISREPUTABLY
When I was a lad I enjoyed reading in literary genres that were regarded as disreputable: crime fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, western, film novelizations, true crime, etc. Back then, serious books tended to be published in hardback editions and in so-called “quality” paperback editions, the latter being larger than traditional paperback books and printed on paper that wouldn’t turn yellow with age. Disreputable literature, on the other hand, was most commonly found between the covers of small paperback books. These were called “mass market” paperbacks or “pocket books” because they could literally be stuffed into the back pocket of one’s jeans. Thin collections of short stories by the likes of Ray Bradbury, Frederic Brown, Ernest Haycox, and H. P. Lovecraft were staples of my literary diet. Likewise paperback novels by such luminaries as Alistair MacLean, Agatha Christie, Isaac Asimov, and John D. MacDonald could frequently be seen bulging in my back pockets.
One problem these days is that there are no disreputable literary genres any more. Grown women unashamedly sit in the bleachers and read semi-literate softcore porn (Fifty Shades of Gray) inspired by silly juvenile fantasy fiction (the Twilight books) while waiting for their daughters’ soccer practice to end. Grown men avidly read books that recast Abraham Lincoln as a zombie hunter. In the 1960s and 70s only nerds could be seen carrying around tattered paperback copies of J.R.R. Tolkein’s fantasy novels. Now respectable businessmen and -women eagerly devour the latest installments of multivolume fantasy cycles by the likes of George R.R. Martin and Diana Gabaldon in an effort to stay one step ahead of the prestigious big-budget television miniseries based on those tomes. Many of these pillars of the community are reading their Fifty Shades books and Vampires vs. Zombies books on e-readers which make it impossible for the person sitting across from them on the subway to determine if they are reading Stephane Mallarme or Stephanie Meyer. Thus you might conclude that one advantage of the e-reader is that it has made it possible to read disreputable literature in public without fear of being caught at it. But I don’t think this fact is important to most of those who use an e-reader. The truth is that few people these days are ashamed to be caught reading trashy books.
In the old days, reading a tattered, yellowing paperback bedizened with a lurid cover was a way of letting your freak flag fly. It allowed you to announce to the world that you didn’t give a damn about what the cultural snobs thought. And the beauty of it is that much of what passed as pop detritus back in the 60s and 70s is now actually recognized as a truly valuable contribution to Western culture. Tolkein’s fantasies are now taken seriously as literature. Likewise, genre writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard, and Jim Thompson, who were mainstays of the pulp-fiction mass-market paperback racks in the 60s and 70s are now regarded as masters of the American idiom. Their books are now published in classy looking trade paperback editions and their lives are the subjects of serious literary biographies. Time has vindicated many of my own freak flags. The snobs who looked down their noses at me as I read my paperback copy of Leonard’s Mr. Majestyk on a Portland, Oregon, bus back in 1976 now probably speak admiringly of Leonard’s pitch-perfect ear for the way America’s hustlers, grifters, and losers speak. But plenty of my paperback heroes still remain unappreciated. It seems unlikely that the literary snobs will ever embrace the likes of Frederic Brown or Ernest Haycox or Lewis B. Paten despite the many pleasures to be found within their prolific output of novels and short stories. That’s their loss. The point is that the cheap, yellowing, pocket paperback was a uniquely satisfying physical object. The spines tended to be stiff, which meant that it took a bit of effort to hold the book open. The pages tended to absorb odors, which meant that they sometimes smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke or the musty old garage in which the book resided before you bought it for five cents at a yard sale. Blocks of print were occasionally slightly askew on the page, so that one paragraph might be out of alignment with the paragraphs below and above it. Sometimes the print at the far left side of right-hand pages and the far right side of left-hand pages tended to get sucked into the vortex at the center of the book like light being sucked into a black hole. This forced the reader to hold the book with both hands and splay it apart like a mousetrap that one was setting. Occasionally the reader had to squint at the places where some previous owner’s sweaty thumb had washed away some of the printer’s ink. Sure, these imperfections were frequently annoying, but the hardship of reading a cheap paperback generally added to the sense of accomplishment one felt upon finishing the book. Cheap paperbacks could be not only intellectually demanding at times but also physically demanding. All of these physical demands are lost when one reads on an e-reader.
Some literary snobs argue that the greatest flaw of the e-book is that it can never replace the tactile pleasure of holding in one’s hand a really well-made physical book, a book bound with cloth covers, dressed in a beautiful glossy dust jacket, and printed on acid-free paper upon which the words have been set in an elegant typeface ideally suited to the subject matter. But my complaint is that the e-book cannot replicate the thrill of reading a disreputable genre novel in a disreputable format – i.e., a spavined, old pocket paperback whose pages are yellowed and whose print is annoyingly small and whose cheap cardboard is so fragile that dog-earing the corner a few times is likely to cause it to break off like a piece of graham cracker.
Until just recently, when she graduated from high school, I used to escort a granddaughter of mine to various volleyball tournaments when both of her parents were otherwise occupied. The parents and grandparents who accompanied the athletes at these day-long (and sometimes weekend-long) events almost always brought along something to read during the long empty stretches between matches. Most of these adults were, unlike me, reasonably well-off suburbanites and they tended to prefer e-readers to actual books. I usually brought along old paperback books because they were easier to carry than hardbacks. I recall a time when I was amidst a bunch of volleyball parents who were sitting around reading during a break between matches. One of the parents, looking around at the others, began asking us all what we were reading. All of the other parents seemed to be devouring current bestsellers by the likes of Dr. Phil or Deepak Chopra or James Patterson or Sandra Brown. Everyone listened politely while each person described the bestseller she was reading on her e-reader. When it came my turn, however, I held up an old yellow-paged Avon paperback edition of Margaret Millar’s The Fiend. The book had been published in 1964. My paperback edition was a reprint from 1974. Its back pages advertised other popular Avon titles of the era such as Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I’m Okay – You’re Okay by Thomas A. Harris M.D., You & I by Leonard Nimoy, and The Brothers System for Liberated Love and Marriage by Dr. Joyce Brothers. The cover painting was a lurid montage containing an unsmiling woman in a bridal veil, a sad-looking little girl holding a glowering cat, and a shadowy man in a long coat, standing in a public park and eyeing the little girl with evil intent. Everything about the book screamed “cheap, sensationalist trash involving pedophilia!” But Millar’s novel, like almost all her work, is a well-written story of suspense far more interested in psychological portraiture than in cheap thrills. Written back when the sunny, upper middle-class suburbs of southern California were pretty much a literal embodiment of the American Dream, Millar’s book was way ahead of its time in its ability to demonstrate how even in these homogenous, upscale communities, marriages were falling apart, childhood was fraught with anxiety, and even the most ordinary of people could have terrifying tendencies hidden behind their placid outward appearances. I was eager to sing the book’s praises to my fellow readers, but before I could even say, “I’m reading The Fiend by Margaret Millar,” I was interrupted by someone who said, “Wow, that looks like a golden oldie.” Someone else observed, “My grandmother used to have a whole shelf full of old paperback mysteries like that.” Pretty soon everyone was talking about the boxes of old paperbacks their parents used to keep out in the garage, or their neighbor lady who was always buying bagfuls of old paperbacks at thrift stores and yard sales. Although it was almost certainly the best written and most intelligent of the books under discussion in that little circle of volleyball parents, no one wanted to hear about The Fiend. It was relegated to the status of nostalgic curiosity simply because of the format in which I was reading it. No one in that circle of parents was ever likely to read The Fiend because, even to this day, no e-book-version of the novel is available. If you want to read The Fiend, you pretty much have no choice but to seek out a yellowing old paperback at a thrift store or from the box in the garage of the crazy old lady who lives next door to you. Although I was frustrated by the fact that I wasn’t given an opportunity to sing the praises of a great-but-sadly-neglected master of the American suspense novel, I was gratified by the reappearance of a feeling I hadn’t experienced much of since high school – the thrill of reading a disreputable book in a very public place, the thrill of letting my freak flag fly proudly. Crime novels are no longer a disreputable genre because, hey, no genre seems to be disreputable any more. Scott Turow, Michael Connelly, P.D. James, Dennis Lehane, Kate Atkinson – no one is, or should be, ashamed to read the works of these very gifted crime writers in a public place. But, nowadays, no one is ashamed to read even the works of total hacks in public. The only way to make yourself appear disreputable these days is to grab hold of some cheap-looking old paperback. I’m not talking about one of the glossy-covered James Patterson or John Grisham bestsellers that reside on the spinner rack at the airport bookstore. Those are perfectly respectable these days. The covers are usually masterpieces of contemporary design and the words are printed on bright, white, acid-free paper. No, if you want to really experience the thrill of reading a disreputable book in public, you need to get hold of a lurid-looking paperback book published sometime in the 1960s or 70s and then whip it out in the grandstands of some high-school gymnasium or kids’ soccer park or public conveyance or sidewalk bistro. Only then will you get the kind of stares and odd remarks usually reserved for those who have toilet paper stuck to the bottom of their shoes. It is an experience that no e-reader will ever be able to replicate. I recommend it highly.
THE HARDBOILED NOTARY
Like a lot of guys in the Baby Boom generation, I grew up idolizing private eyes: Jim Rockford of TV’s The Rockford Files, John D. MacDonald’s beach-bum-turned-freelance-crime-solver Travis McGee, and various cinematic incarnations of Philip Marlowe by the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, and Robert Mitchum. I watched hundreds of TV crime shows and explored thousands of mean streets with dozens of recurring fictional detectives. I was less interested in police inspectors and FBI agents than I was in private eyes. Even then, I liked the idea of freelancing better than the idea of regular employment. My ideal was Harry Orwell, the private detective played by David Janssen on the short-lived (1974-76) TV series Harry O. Due to an injury suffered while on duty, Orwell received a monthly disability pension from the San Diego Police Department. The pension meant that he didn’t need to take on any work that didn’t genuinely interest him. He lived in a beach house and spent his days trying to renovate an old wooden sailboat called The Answer. He regularly became romantically entangled with beautiful women portrayed by the likes of Farrah Fawcett and Linda Evans. Except for the bullet in his back (which, to be honest, never seemed to give him much trouble), Harry Orwell struck me as having a perfect life.
The TV detectives of the 1970s generally commanded $200 a day for their services. To a kid whose biggest expenses were comic books and pulp paperbacks, $200 a day seemed like a fortune. If you had asked me in 1973 what I wanted to be when I grew up, it’s likely I would have answered, “A freelance detective.”
Forty years have passed since then, and I have never managed to solve a single crime. Nonetheless, I have achieved at least a part of my dream. For much of my adult life I have been a freelancer. Currently I am a freelance merchant who sells books on the internet. I am also a freelance antiques dealer who sells vintage cookbooks and other collectibles out of a stall at a local antiques co-op. I am a freelance writer who sells fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to a wide variety of publications. The nonfiction writing can sometimes be a bit like private detective work. It often requires that I meet with some stranger and interview him about his life and livelihood. Alas, these interviews never result in my being menaced by thugs who threaten to cool me with their .28 caliber roscoes. No moll with great gams ever comes to my rescue by slipping a Mickey Finn to her old man and then lamming it with me to some cozy hideout in the high Sierra. Generally, when I finish interviewing a suspect – I mean, subject – I go back home and write up a profile of said person for a local publication. Not exactly The Maltese Falcon.
I do have one freelance occupation, however, that occasionally simulates private-eye work. For fifteen years or so I have worked as a freelance notary public. I drive to houses and workplaces all over the Sacramento, California, area and help people sign legal documents, usually in connection with a home purchase or a refinance. These assignments bring in about $100 each. If I do two of them in a day I can earn what Jim Rockford earned for a day’s detective work (of course Rockford’s $200 is probably closer to $500 today when adjusted for inflation). Rockford got much of his business via the telephone (each episode began with a different humorous phone message being woven into the opening title sequence, i.e: “This is Maria at Liberty Bail Bonds. Your client Todd Lehman skipped, and his bail is forfeit. That’s the pink slip on your ’79 Firebird. Sorry, Jim, bring it on over.”). Harry Orwell’s clients often seemed to just wander up the beach to his oceanfront home and begin telling him their woes. Philip Marlowe’s clients tended to show up unannounced at his office on the sixth floor of the Cahuenga Building in L.A. My offers of notary work usually arrive via my home computer. If I accept the job, an escrow officer emails me the documents. I print them up on my desktop printer, toss them into my briefcase, and away I go to my date with destiny. Alas, I drive a ’98 Corolla rather than a ’79 Firebird and I never have to punch my accelerator to the floor in order to elude a thug, jealous husband, or crime boss who happens to be tailing me. I do, however, acquire a lot of personal information about the clients I deal with. While collecting signatures on documents, I usually learn how much my client paid for his house, what he owes on it, where he works, what he earns, whether or not he’s ever gone bankrupt or been sued, if he has unpaid tax liens or child-support payments or medical bills to deal with. This is all privileged information and – like a private detective, a lawyer, or a priest – I take care not to disclose the details to anyone. My notary clients are occasionally required to write explanatory notes to a lender explaining gaps in their employment, black marks on their credit reports, and mysterious withdrawals from their bank accounts. If I were a private eye, I would be required to delve further into these matters. As a notary, my job is merely to collect signatures on these explanatory notes and move on to the next document.
Although you’re never likely to see a program called Kevin Mims: Mobile Notary on prime-time TV, notary work can occasionally be eventful. I once had to drive deep into rural El Dorado County to collect signatures at the home of a pair of survivalists who were refinancing their property. The husband’s name was on none of the official documents. He told me he hated all forms of government and did his best to avoid leaving a paper trail that could be traced through government records. Apparently he didn’t mind if his wife acquired a government paper trail. Everything they owned was in her name. The husband was a serious paranoiac. While I sat at the dining-room table collecting signatures from the wife, the husband sat and watched us like a hawk from a chair in the living room. A handgun lay on a small table beside him. He told me that if I tried to make a move on his wife, he would blow me away. His wife looked Jabba the Hut’s older sister and I had no interest in making a move on her. I collected the signatures I needed and then hightailed it away. The next day I contacted the company that had sent me there and informed them that I wouldn’t be traveling into hillbilly territory any more.
And then there was The Case of the Dead Woman in the Next Room. This one occurred just a few weeks ago. My client was a 91-year-old man. He and his wife were selling the house they had lived in for most of the sixty-six years they had been married. Unfortunately, the wife had been suffering from dementia for some time and had recently been declared mentally incompetent. The husband was now the only one authorized to sign legal documents on behalf of the couple. I arrived at the couple’s house at ten a.m. Despite his advanced age, my client was in excellent condition both physically and mentally. He was very kind to me and concerned about my comfort. He offered me coffee and orange juice. He insisted on wiping clean the dining-room table before we sat down at it to commence our business lest it might get my briefcase sticky. His eyes and his sense of humor were both still sharp. It’s always necessary for a notary to copy information from a client’s driver license into the notary book. When this client saw me write the numbers 7-19-17 into my book, he mistakenly thought I was documenting his birth date. He said, “I was born in 1923, not 1917.” I told him, “That’s not your birth date I was copying, it’s the expiration date.” He laughed and said, “Oh, I’m likely to expire long before that.” When I informed him that I would have to collect a thumbprint from him, he joked, “You can try, but I’m so old that my fingerprints have all been rubbed away.” It turned out he was right about that; his thumbprint was mostly just a thumb-shaped black smudge without any whorls in it. “That’s what happens when you get old,” he said, “your identity starts to fade away.” I thought it was a rather poignant comment, considering his wife’s condition.
But it turned out that I was wrong about his wife’s condition. The first document he needed to sign was an addendum to the real-estate contract asserting that the wife was non compos mentis and that her husband would be signing all of the documents on her behalf. After I explained the addendum to him, my client said, “Perhaps we won’t need to sign this document any more, now that Rose is dead.”
Like a TV detective after being told that his client has skipped bail, I did a double-take upon hearing this news. “Your wife is dead?” I asked, confused. The escrow officer had assured me just the previous day that the wife was alive but incompetent.
“She died about an hour ago,” he told me, and he pointed towards a doorway at the end of a hallway. The door was open and I could see a body lying on a bed inside the room. “I haven’t called the authorities yet,” he said. “I want to give my daughter a chance to come over and say goodbye to her mother first. I’ve left a message on her telephone.”
Suddenly I felt as though I had just committed some horrible social gaffe. “Oh, god, I…I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can come back some other time, if you’d like.”
But my client just smiled and shook his head. “It was a very peaceful death,” he said. “Her breathing gradually slowed down until finally it just stopped. Shortly after that her heart quit beating. We should all die as peacefully as that.”
And so we continued with the signing. In a single morning my client was forced to say goodbye to his wife of sixty-six years and to surrender ownership of the house they had shared for most of their married life. But not once did he display any sadness or self-pity. When a private detective leaves behind a house in which a woman lies dead, he is usually in an unpleasant frame of mind. But I departed the house of this dead woman impressed by the composure and courage of her husband, and I vowed that I would face the challenges and setbacks of my own life with similar equanimity.
On another occasion, I was supposed to meet a young woman at her house in Sacramento’s Natomas area for a signing that was scheduled to take place at six p.m. The woman worked as a showgirl in Las Vegas but owned a home in Sacramento which she was refinancing. She called me from the road at five o’clock and told me that she was running late. She was driving in from Vegas and had underestimated her travel time. “No problem,” I told her. “Just call me when you’re a half hour away, and I’ll meet you at your home.” At ten she called and asked if we could do the signing at my house instead of hers. She thought it would be quicker that way. “Fine,” I told her. I gave her my address and told her I’d wait up for her. She finally showed up at my house at one in the morning. She was still dressed in some kind of showgirl outfit – sequined miniskirt, stiletto heels, scanty top. She carried a large purse with a small dog in it. When I opened my front door, I felt as if I were in a cheap detective novel. I found myself hoping she’d tell me that she had stolen $250,000 from a Vegas mob boss and then ask if she could spend a few days hiding out at my place. Alas, she had no interest in anything but signing her loan papers and hurrying home. I signed her up at my dining room table (her thumbprint had plenty of whorls). My wife was asleep in the next room, so I couldn’t even offer the showgirl a drink, the way Jim Rockford or Harry Orwell surely would have.
Being a notary isn’t as exciting as being a private eye. On the other hand, no mob boss is ever likely to show up at my house looking for his ex-girlfriend and the $250,000 she stole from him. And though it may not be an ideal apprenticeship for a life of crime-writing, being a freelance notary does occasionally prove useful to my crime fiction. Whenever Lou Archer or Philip Marlowe or (my personal-favorite among fictional detectives) Bill Pronzini’s Nameless walks into a stranger’s house, he usually makes a quick assessment of what he sees and then uses that information to try to gauge what kind of person he is about to be dealing with. I’ve learned to use this same skill in my notary work. My first notary assignment was a disaster. My client was a single woman in her late 50s or early 60s. When I entered her house I noticed that it was chock-a-block with Coca-Cola collectibles. Trying to break the ice with idle chitchat, I said something like, “Oh, I see you’re a Coca-Cola collector.” That was all she needed. She spent the next hour describing nearly every single item in her collection to me: age, rarity, value, how she acquired it, etc. I was too inexperienced to know how to shut her up. I was afraid to be rude to her, for fear it would cost me future notary work with the company that had sent me there. A few days later I entered the house of another woman and commented on her lovely piano, whereupon she informed me that she was fond of composing and performing her own hymns of worship to the Lord. Not until I had listened to about five of these crimes against melody and lyric did I finally manage to get her to sit down and start signing some documents. I learned the hard way that when you enter a stranger’s house for business purposes, you need to stay in control of the encounter. Like Archer, Marlowe and Nameless, you need to take charge immediately and stay on the offensive. Never let the subject wander off topic. No matter how reluctant his interviewee is to cooperate, a good detective just keeps on firing questions at him. And no matter how eager a lonely widow might be to talk about her stamp collection, her toy poodle, or her late husband’s first wife, a good notary just keeps shoving documents in front of her and collects signatures on them. Nowadays, when I am writing a scene in which a detective arrives at a stranger’s house to ask questions, I write from experience, and I think it lends my fiction a certain authenticity. What’s more, I know how people behave under heavy stress. Often times when I show up at a notary client’s home, it is because they are about to perform a very serious and life-altering activity: take on a large amount of new debt, dissolve a partnership or a marriage, sell the home they have lived in for a quarter century or more, execute a new family-trust agreement that is likely to make enemies of some close relatives. Some of these situations are only slightly less stressful than discovering that your daughter is about to marry a man you suspect of having another wife in another town, or learning that your husband may be mixed up in a murder plot, or any number of other situations that might cause a character in a crime novel to contact a private detective.
I find that writing those scenes where a private detective first makes contact with a client, suspect, or witness is easier for me now that I have about twenty years of experience as a freelance notary under my belt.
No, the work of a notary isn’t as exciting as the stuff that I watched Jim Rockford and Harry Orwell do when I was a dreamy teenager in the 1970s, or the stuff that Travis McGee did in all those color-coded novels by John D. McDonald. Alas, I don’t live on a beach in southern California or south Florida, nor do I find myself having to constantly fend off advances from the supermodel next door. But I did recently buy a boat. It’s a small one-man kayak that I picked up for a few hundred dollars. I can’t decide whether to call it The Answer or The Busted Flush. If I wanted to advertise how I earned the money for the boat, I would have to call it Please Sign Here. But that just doesn’t have a very romantic ring to it.
READING AS A CHARITABLE ACTIVITY
I have friends who are involved in all kinds of noble activities, from helping the homeless to saving the environment. Through the years they have invited me to various marches, meetings and mass assemblies but mostly I have declined. When people ask me what I’m doing to make the world a better place, I generally avoid committing to an answer, pretending I don’t want to toot my own horn. In truth, the charitable activity I devote the most time to is one that most people probably don’t consider a charitable activity at all: reading books.
Reading is viewed as many things in our society – a means of self-improvement, entertainment, even a social activity for those who are members of book clubs – but I believe that, under the right circumstances, simply sitting in a chair and reading can also be an act of charity. Some people might concede that the reading of certain books – The Bible, The U.S. Constitution, The Republic of Plato – is a public good and therefore an act of charity. America would no-doubt be a better place if every citizen regularly read the Constitution. And, by making oneself better acquainted with the foundational documents of Western Civilization, a reader might make herself a better citizen of the world, thus rendering her reading a charitable act. But, for the most part, that’s not the kind of reading I do. I read a lot of forgotten bestsellers of yesteryear, as well as books that were never popular enough when they were in print to qualify as forgotten now.
My friend Don Napoli reads primarily California fiction published between 1890 and 1960. He has uncovered countless forgotten novels and written about them with sympathy and intelligence for his blog Reading California Fiction. Don can’t write off as charitable donations the thousands of dollars he has spent tracking down these books. Society doesn’t tend to look as warmly upon the time Don has devoted to his blog as it does to the hours of time some others might have devoted to caring for the sick or feeding the hungry. But, to me, Don’s project is a public service, and the time and money he has invested in it are the best kind of charitable donations – the kind you can’t write off on your taxes, the kind no organization is likely to give you a Citizen of the Year Award for, the kind done purely out of a passion for making the world a better place. Don makes the world better by reading the lost and forgotten efforts of bygone California writers and bringing them to the attention of a new generation of readers.
I’m not quite as charitable – nor as computer literate – as Don, so I can’t claim to be doing as much for forgotten literature as he is. But in my own, much smaller, way I spend a lot of time promoting books and authors that I feel have been unjustly neglected. To my friends and acquaintances I send out an annual newsletter at Christmastime that contains detailed descriptions of the best books I read over the previous twelve months, a list which is often dominated by relatively obscure titles such as Peggy Simson Curry’s So Far From Spring or Richard McGill’s Omamori. I have worked in bookstores for much of my life, and I have used that bully pulpit to recommend all kinds of forgotten gems of the literary past to potential readers. I am a member of several informal groups of friends who gather weekly for various purposes, and I am well-known (nay, notorious) within these groups as an advocate for lost, forgotten, neglected, or simply under-appreciated books. I long ago grew bored of listening to literate people go on and on about the same small handful of books – The Great Gatsby, The Catcher In The Rye, Catch-22 – as if those are the only books a well-read American needs to know anything about. It thrills me when I can turn one of these readers on to Nancy Hale’s The Prodigal Daughters, or Rose MacAulay’s And No Man’s Wit, or Mildred Walker’s The Brewer’s Heavy Horses, or Jessamyn West’s The Life I Really Lived.
If you believe that writing good books is an act that is beneficial to society, then you can’t deny that reading them is also good for society. Writing and publishing a good book is likely to earn you a few bucks. Buying and reading a good book will usually diminish your bank account. Thus, it seems to me that, as noble as it is to write good books, reading good books is even nobler, because it is done without any contemplation of financial reward.
In a recent interview with Tyler Cowan, author and New York Times columnist David Brooks urged the members of his audience to devote themselves to charitable causes that are dear to their hearts. He quoted (criminally under-appreciated) novelist Frederick Buechner’s advice to those seeking a charitable activity to pursue: “Find the spot where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Reading is my deep gladness, and I try to pursue it in a way that also meets the world’s deep need.
So if you’re wondering why I’m not out in the streets protesting injustice, the answer just might be that I am reclining in my easy chair and reading Henry Dumas’ Goodbye, Sweetwater, a great collection of short stories that has been allowed to fall out of print, which is its own kind of injustice, one that I’m hoping to do something about.
It’s true that my efforts at elevating their status have thus far failed to create a huge upsurge of new interest in The Prodigal Daughters or And No Man’s Wit or any of the other neglected books that I’ve been championing for years. But it’s also true that, despite the best efforts of my many charitable friends, hunger and homelessness are still far too commonplace in America. The fact that one’s charitable efforts have failed to solve the problem they seek to mitigate does not make those efforts futile.
IN PRAISE OF THOMAS TRYON’S HARVEST HOME
Legend has it that Otto Preminger was so abusive to Thomas Tryon, the star of Preminger’s film The Cardinal, that Tryon gave up acting after completing the film. If so, fans of American popular fiction ought to be grateful to Preminger, for, after leaving the film industry, Tryon took up his pen and began writing bestselling novels. Tryon’s writing career also owes something to author Ira Levin. In Paperbacks From Hell, his seminal work on the rise of horror fiction in America, author Grady Hendryx, traces the horror boom to a single book, Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby. Prior to Rosemary’s Baby, horror novels were treated as second- or even third-class citizens of the publishing world. Reputable publishers rarely handled them. But by situating his story in the high-class world of New York’s artistic set, and by winning blurbs from serious literary authors such as Truman Capote, Levin managed to almost single-handedly make the genre commercially viable if still not quite respectable. The careers of William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Anne Rice, and many others might never have blossomed if not for Rosemary’s Baby.
In 1971, four years after the publication of Rosemary’s Baby, two horror novels made the year-end list of the country’s ten bestselling hardbound novels. One was Blatty’s now iconic The Exorcist. The other was, well, The Other, Thomas Tryon’s debut novel, which was published in the same month as The Exorcist. If The Other is mostly forgotten these days it may be because – unlike The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, and other bestsellers of the era – it didn’t give rise to a great film. The film version is dull and forgettable. As a novel, The Other has languished in obscurity for decades. In 2012 The New York Review of Books Classics series published a new edition of the novel that at least put it back into print but doesn’t seem to have gained it a lot of new fans. The Other is a major work of twentieth-century American horror fiction but, in my opinion, Tryon’s follow-up to it, Harvest Home, is even better. Harvest Home sold well upon publication and made the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks, but it didn’t become a juggernaut like Jaws or The Godfather. It was used as the source of a hard-to-find 1978 TV movie called The Dark Secret of Harvest Home. The book appears to have had an influence on Stephen King. In one of King’s first essays for a national publication, which ran in the New York Times of October 24, 1976, he wrote:
It isn’t a great book, not a great horror novel, not even a great suspense novel. My own editor at Doubleday once told me that his fingers itched to get at it and cut out the deadwood; my guess is that Tryon’s editor at Knopf experienced a similar itch in his own extremities and was rebuffed by Tryon. Rightly so, maybe. Never mind the best seller list. Mind this, instead: Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it is a true book; it is an honest book in the sense that it says exactly what Tryon wanted to say. And if what he wanted to say wasn’t exactly Miltonian, it does have this going for it: in forty years, when most of us are underground, there will still be a routine rebinding once a year for the library copies of “Harvest Home,” and, I hope, for “’Salem’s Lot.”
King’s famous short story “Children of the Corn” was almost certainly inspired by Tryon’s novel, which also uses the cultivation of corn as a central plot device. Corn also figures prominently in King’s stories “Secret Window, Secret Garden” and “1922.” In King’s 1992 novel Gerald’s Game, a key character is afflicted with acromegaly, a disease which plays an important role in Harvest Home as well. As far as I know, Harvest Home was the first popular novel to deal with the disease. A Google search of “acromegaly in fiction” didn’t turn up any earlier examples.
If anything, I’m more fond of the novel than King is. I enjoy the leisurely pace of the book’s first 300 pages or so and am glad that no editor got his eager hands on them. Nowadays, thrillers, especially in the horror genre, seem to be contrived to give you a nerve-jangling jolt every twenty pages or so. The result is that the novels are less effective at providing genuine terror. The jolts become so commonplace as to become dull. The horror of the late sixties and seventies was different. Rosemary’s Baby isn’t filled with sudden horrifying surprises. Much of the book deals with the mundane details of Rosemary’s life as a sixties housewife: house-hunting with her husband Guy, doing the laundry in the basement of her New York apartment building, visiting with neighbors, furnishing her new home, fixing meals. The book’s ultimate horror is made all the more horrible because of the seeming normality of much that comes before it. Even The Exorcist builds its suspense very slowly, layering on lots of mundane details about life in upper-crust Georgetown circa 1970. In Harvest Home, Tryon takes this strategy to the limit. The first three quarters of the book are largely devoted to lovingly describing the town of Cornwall Coombs, its oddball citizens and their many strange and Druidic customs. This part of the book could be mistaken for an Updike novel about infidelity and loss of religious faith in the suburbs if it had a little more sex and angst in it. None of this is terribly frightening. The book doesn’t become truly terrifying until about the final fifty pages, at which point Tryon lovingly repays the reader’s patience by delivering an unforgettable final act. The book’s coda is reminiscent of the terrifying final pages of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.
Harvest Home and Ira Levin’s much better-known The Stepford Wives are two sides of the same coin. In Stepford, our female protagonist moves with her husband and children from New York City to an unsettlingly peaceful Connecticut town whose male denizens are hiding a high-tech futuristic secret. Terror ensues for the woman. In Harvest Home, our male protagonist moves with his wife and daughter from New York City to an unsettlingly peaceful Connecticut town whose female denizens are hiding an ancient low-tech secret. Terror ensues for the man. The Stepford Wives is a pallid 120-page spoof of feminism and the resistance to it. It reads like a film synopsis and has twice been made into a big-budget Hollywood film, neither of which is much good. Nonetheless Levin’s title has entered the American language as a synonym for a certain type of vapid trophy wife, more concerned with improving her floors than her mind, with pleasing her husband than with fulfilling her own potential.
Harvest Home, on the other hand is a 415-page masterwork of horror. It reads like a real novel, indeed like an Updike novel, as mentioned earlier, and may have partially inspired The Witches of Eastwick. It is well-written, eerie, and beautifully evokes its uncanny milieu. It can be read as an anti-feminist tract because the matriarchal society it describes is rotten to the core. But it doesn’t have to be read that way. It can also be viewed as an examination of the way that any group that long holds power over another eventually becomes corrupt and evil. It is a much more well-rounded portrait of small-town American life than you’ll find in The Stepford Wives. There are no sympathetic male characters in Stepford (unless you count little boys). Harvest Home has both sympathetic female characters (especially Grace Everdeen, whose murder is one of the central mysteries of the story) and monstrous ones. Its male characters also run the gamut from decent to horrible. Though it has little in common with Rosemary’s Baby, it appears, like almost all horror novels of the era, to have been influenced by it. Like Rosemary’s Baby, Harvest Home includes a scene of ritualistic rape involving a group of fanatic cultists.
Even in the seventies, Harvest Home wasn’t famous enough to qualify as a cultural landmark. But it deserves to be read today not only because it is a fine novel but also because it captures a lot of the anxieties that characterized America in the seventies: fear of sexual liberation, fear of familial breakdown, fear of female empowerment, the growing divide between city dwellers and country dwellers, fear of ecological disaster, distrust of central authority.
Tryon died of stomach cancer in 1991, when he was only 65 years old. He left behind eight novels and two collections of novellas. Horror fiction was only one of his literary strengths. He also produced tales about the dark side of Hollywood stardom, the first two installments of what was intended to be a trilogy of historical novels, a couple of bildungsroman, and at least one young-adult novel. He was neither a great actor nor a great writer, but he was a serious craftsman in both trades and he left an interesting mark on twentieth-century pop culture. Harvest Home is as close as he came to producing a genuine American masterpiece. It is a much better portrait of small-town American life than you will find in many much better-known novels such as William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy or Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, one of which lays on the sentimentality a bit too heavily and the other of which trowels on the satire.
After giving up his film career, Tryon, a gay man, was able to leave behind the celluloid closet. He lived the rest of his life without taking any great pains to hide his homosexuality. Too often, queer writers have been shunted into the ghettos of the literary world, published only by specialty presses in small editions, even when they weren’t writing about LGBTQ subject matter. Along with Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, Tryon was one of the few gay writers of his era who was able to break into the bestseller lists as long ago as 1971, when mainstream publishing was still a very hostile place for gays and lesbians. Harvest Home is far and away his best work, and it deserves to be better remembered.
THE CHILDREN OF SHOGUN
This summer marks the 25th anniversary of the completion of James Clavell’s epic Asian Saga, six novels, totaling 6,240 pages in paperback, that were published between 1962 and 1993. The high point of the saga was the publication in 1975 of Shogun. Set in the year 1600, it chronicles the exploits – nautical, martial, political, and erotic – of John Blackthorne, a British seaman who finds himself shipwrecked in feudal Japan along with a few other survivors of the Erasmus, a Dutch pirate ship he helped pilot. By order of publication Shogun is the third book of the series, but by internal chronology it is the first. It is also, far and away, the most commercially successful book in the series. By 1980 it had sold more than 6 million copies and become the source of one of the most successful TV miniseries in history. It was preceded by King Rat (1962) and Tai-Pan (1966). It was followed by Noble House (1981), Whirlwind (1986) and Gai-Jin (1993).
Grady Hendrix’s 2017 book Paperbacks From Hell admirably chronicles the way that a single novel – Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby – created a boom in cheap paperback horror novels that flourished throughout the 1970s and 80s. Shogun was the Rosemary’s Baby of a somewhat similar publishing phenomenon. It triggered a boom in massive historical adventure novels set in Asia but generally featuring English-speaking protagonists, usually either Americans or Britons. I’ve long been a big fan of these books which, for lack of a better term, I refer to collectively as The Children of Shogun.
Alas, Shogun didn’t produce nearly as many bastard offspring as Rosemary’s Baby did. It was fairly easy for any professional writer with imagination and a passion for horror stories to turn out a handful of 300-page supernatural thrillers over the course of a couple of decades. Producing a 900-page Shogun-like epic is another matter entirely. The Children of Shogun were written mostly by men and women with years of personal experience in Asia. They tended to be journalists or academics with a profound interest in the history and culture of the East. If you were a horror fan in the 1970s and 80s (and I was), it was easy to find titles to feed your hunger for demonic children, seductive witches, and haunted houses. If you craved massive historical epics featuring singsong girls, opium pipes, rickshaws, treaty ports, forbidden cities, warlords, seppuku, pillow dictionaries, footbinding, and godowns filled with tea or silk or jade, feeding your hunger took a bit more initiative. Nonetheless, quite a few such books got published between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, and I’ve read dozens of them. The phenomenon seems to have faded over the past twenty years, giving way to other literary booms: vampire books, fantasy epics, young-adult dystopian series. It is unlikely the boom will ever be revived. In a critical review of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth posted on Goodreads, author Celeste Ng probably spoke for many of today’s woke readers when she complained about “the weirdness that arises from a Westerner writing about a colonized country.” Apparently it’s all right when an Asian author like Haruki Murakami (whose work I love) writes novels inspired by the likes of Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, and Franz Kafka. But Westerners who write about the adventures of English-speaking protagonists in Asia are likely to be shouted down with accusations of cultural appropriation.
The heyday of the West-meets-East historical saga isn’t likely ever to return, but while it lasted it produced some amazing pieces of fiction, at least a dozen of which surpassed the big daddy of them all, Shogun. Here’s a list of my favorites, many of which are out of print and available only online or upon the dusty shelves of those used-bookstores that still stock decades-old mass-market paperbacks.
China Dawn, by Robert Duncan. If Duncan is remembered at all these days it’s probably for having co-written (with his wife Wanda) scripts for some of the worst TV shows of the 1960s, including Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel, and The Immortal. He also cranked out about a dozen novels, many of which were derivative of much better-known works. China Dawn, almost alone among his books, seems to have sprung from a well of deep, personal experience. Duncan was with the American Occupying Force that was stationed in Japan after World War II. In a forward, he mentions this experience and says that he spent forty years writing China Dawn. It shows. The book is full of believable characters and well-drawn recreations of historical events. It must be conceded that the novel is marred by a framing story that takes place in the world of Parisian high fashion circa 1981 and that feels as though it was cribbed from a Judith Krantz novel. But the parts of the story that occur between 1931 and 1945 are riveting. Though the action takes place mainly in China, the main characters are American and Japanese. Though not the best of Shogun’s children, it contains the most horrifying depiction of the Rape of Nanking you are ever likely to find in a popular novel.
Saigon by Anthony Gray is the angriest child of Shogun. Nearly every page burns with the author’s fury over what was done to the Vietnamese by the French, the U.S., and even the British. Sometimes anger can be the enemy of art, but it works well here.
Tanamera, by Noel Barber, has as much in common with Gone With the Wind as it does with Shogun. The title refers to the name of a grand family estate, a la Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara, and if you remove the letters that form the word “name” from it, you are left with “Tara.” Set almost entirely in Singapore and Malaysia, Barber’s novel is a towering tale of love and war. The love, as is usually the case in this genre, is interracial. Julie Soong is an admirably courageous, smart, and fairly liberated Chinese woman, although she can sometimes come across as too good to be true. Johnny Dexter, her soul mate, is the heir to a great British trading company located on Singapore. The fathers of Julie and Johnny are friendly business associates but both of them are dead set against any sort of romantic alliance between their offspring. The book does a fine job of delineating the racism of the British occupants of Singapore. Even the wealthy and educated Asians of Singapore are not allowed to play tennis at the British athletic clubs or join British social clubs or dine at British restaurants. To get anything done, Asian businessmen are pretty much forced to partner with a Brit. Punctuated by harrowing action sequences and torrid sex scenes, Tanamera is both deliciously pulpy and rich in historical detail.
Shanghai by Christopher New is among the best written and most intelligent of the Children of Shogun. The author was educated at Oxford and Princeton and was a long-time professor of philosophy at Hong Kong University. His familiarity with the culture and people of China informs every page of this long novel, which charts the fortunes of James Denton, a Brit who arrives in Shanghai in 1903 to take a job as a customs inspector. Eventually he becomes an important member of the British business community in China, as well as a leading member of the local governing body in Shanghai. Like nearly every protagonist in novels of this genre, he finds himself embroiled in a decades-long love affair with an Asian native. Reading this novel (which stands alone but is also the first in a loosely connected three-book series) is almost certainly the most entertaining way possible to learn about the rise and fall of the British concession in Shanghai.
Pat Barr’s Jade (I prefer the British title of this novel: Chinese Alice) follows the exploits of Alice Greenwood, who is born in China, in 1858, to British missionary parents. It focuses on her rise from childhood rape victim/concubine to proto-feminist firebrand who fights against the practice of footbinding and translates the liberal writings of John Stuart Mill into Chinese. The book has at least as much action, sex, and adventure as Shogun but, probably because it was written by a woman, the publisher seems to have marketed it as a romance novel rather than a gripping historical novel, thus stranding it between two cultures in much that way that Alice herself is stranded. The politically correct will be offended by the fact that Alice gradually develops something like love for a man who raped her as a child.
Zemindar by Valerie Fitzgerald has suffered the same fate as Pat Barr’s Jade. It has always been marketed as a romance novel. It does indeed satisfy many of the conventions of that genre but it is every bit as rigorous in its historical details as Shogun. The author was born and raised in British India. Her grandmother lived through the Sepoy uprising and passed along tales of those times to her granddaughter. Fitzgerald lived a long time but never produced another novel.
Omimori by Richard McGill, is my favorite illegitimate child of Shogun. Like Fitzgerald, McGill appears to have been a one-book wonder. His author’s bio says very little about him other than that he lives in California and spent seven years researching the novel. The research paid off. The book covers numerous well-known historical events – Kristallnacht, the Rape of Nanking, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki – without ever losing its focus on the small, ordinary lives that were most affected by those catastrophes. And it features not one, but two incredibly moving interracial romances.
War Lord by Malcolm Bosse follows, among other things, the fortunes of a young American missionary who is captured by bandits upon his arrival in China. Adventure ensues.
Dynasty by Robert Elegant is an adventurous tale that follows the fortunes of a Eurasian family in China during the 19th and 20th centuries.
One thing that stands out about these authors is that many of them led lives nearly as adventurous as their protagonists. Anthony Gray spent 27 months in a Chinese prison. During his long career in journalism, Noel Barber was stabbed five times and shot in the head once. James Clavell was a prisoner of war during WWII. Robert Elegant covered both the Korean and Vietnam wars as a journalist and Richard Nixon once called him “my favorite China expert.” If books in this genre seem somewhat more convincing than horror novels of the same era, perhaps it’s because no horror novelists of the era were ever actually possessed by Satan, bitten by vampires, or capable of starting fires with their minds.
Although horror novels are still be churned out in large numbers, almost no one is writing Shogun-like sagas any longer. Soon the genre may cease to exist entirely. If you don’t believe me, consider the plight of the novel of American Indian life written by white authors.
During much of the twentieth century, white American authors produced some excellent novels featuring Native American characters. The list includes masterpieces such as Oliver LaFarge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Laughing Boy and Scott O’Dell’s Newbery Medal-winning Island of the Blue Dolphins. Other prominent titles in the genre include Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, Douglas C. Jones’ A Creek Called Wounded Knee, and Margaret Craven’s I Heard the Owl Call My Name. But the production of such novels has dwindled markedly over the last forty years or so. This probably has something to do with what happened to Ruth Beebe Hill after the publication of her 1978 novel Hanta Yo. The early reviews of the book were positive. A reviewer for the Harvard Crimson called Hanta Yo “the best researched novel yet written about an American Indian tribe.” Native American author N. Scott Momaday, author of House Made of Dawn, admired the book. David Wolper, the producer of the landmark TV miniseries Roots purchased the film rights to Hanta Yo and planned to give it the same treatment as Roots. Alas, before Wolper could put his plan into action, the book began drawing criticism from Native American groups contending that it was an inaccurate portrayal of the Sioux. A 1980 article in People magazine summed up the controversy:
A $2 million class-action suit, filed on behalf of the Sioux people, claims that Hill’s sweeping novel set at the turn of the 18th century is demeaning to the Plains Indians. The litigation seeks further to block production of any TV show based on Hanta Yo. Sioux activists have also tried to force the work out of bookstores and libraries and have picketed the author on the lecture circuit, waving signs like HILL HAS A TONTO COMPLEX.
Hill strongly defended her book against the attacks. The article in People points out that she spent nearly 30 years researching the novel and consulted with more 700 Indians during that period. Nonetheless, the damage was done. The TV miniseries was never made and the book soon drifted out of print. Although Hill lived to be 102, she never wrote another novel. No other white novelist has published a novel about American Indian life anywhere near as ambitious as Hanta Yo in the years since. No doubt the fear of being publicly shamed for “cultural appropriation” has had something to do with it.
More recently, author Laura Moriarty triggered a firestorm when she included an American Muslim character in her young-adult novel American Heart. Because the book’s main character was a white girl, Moriarty was accused of creating a “white savior” narrative. According to Ruth Graham of Slate magazine, even before the book was published, it had “already attracted the ire of the fierce group of online YA readers that journalist Kat Rosenfield has referred to as ‘culture cops.’ To them, it was an irredeemable problem that Moriarty’s novel, which was inspired in part byHuckleberry Finn, centers on a white teenager who gradually—too gradually—comes to terms with the racism around her. On Goodreads, the book’s top ‘community review,’ posted in September, begins, ‘fuck your white savior narratives’; other early commenters on Goodreads accused Moriarty of ‘profiting off people’s pain’ and said ‘a white writer should not have tackled this story, and neither should a white character be the center of it.’”
The outcry surrounding Moriarty’s book was so intense that Kirkus took the unprecedented step of removing from its website a positive review of American Heart, even though the review had been written by a Muslim woman who is an authority on young-adult literature.
In a culture where the PC police are everywhere, few white writers are likely to undertake the tremendous amount of research required to produce a book like Shogun or Shanghai or Jade knowing that a hostile reception will almost certainly be awaiting them and their novel when (and if) it finally sees the light of publication. They are likely to be accused of “othering” of “cultural appropriation” of “white-washing” and any number of other offenses against PC culture.
If you haven’t yet experienced the joys of reading your way through the genre that I call The Children of Shogun, a great literary pleasure still awaits you. But read slowly and linger over each book. No more than a few dozen excellent examples were ever published, and no new titles are likely to appear any time soon, at least not if Celeste Ng and her ilk have their way.
A NINE-LETTER METAPHOR FOR MARRIED LIFE
When we met, my wife and I were both Mondays. Now, after 34 years of marriage, she is a Wednesday and I am a Saturday. We are both longtime crossword-puzzle enthusiasts, but she prefers to work from a book of New York Times Wednesday crosswords and I prefer a book of Saturday crosswords.
Crossword puzzles in the Times get tougher as the week progresses. Monday puzzles are a snap. Saturdays can require hours of brainwork (Sunday’s puzzle is much bigger than the rest but not necessarily all that challenging). Life would be so much better if the universe, like Times puzzle-master Will Shortz, always lightened our burdens on Mondays. Just now, I put aside a puzzle because I can’t think of a nine-letter answer to the clue “Recess activity.”
When we got married, way back in 1980, Julie and I both liked to while away our few spare moments with easy puzzles. We were busy people back then and didn’t have a lot of time for brain-busting mental challenges. In those days, we deigned to solve puzzles even in magazines hardly noted for their intellectual content: TV Guide, People, etc. Now we are older, have no children to look after, and wouldn’t be caught dead reading celebrity gossip magazines. Age has weakened many parts of us – knees, backs, eyes, reflexes, etc. – but has only enriched our vocabularies. I couldn’t beat my 22-year-old self in a footrace, a tennis game, or a weightlifting competition, but I could humiliate him in a crossword-solving challenge. The same is true of Julie and her younger self. But while our vocabularies have grown stronger, our crossword puzzle preferences are no longer entirely in sync.
Most days, Julie works at a demanding office job for eight hours or more. I am a freelance writer, freelance notary, freelance antiquarian, freelance bookseller, and freelance anything-else-someone-might-want-to-hire-me-for (housesitting, babysitting, catsitting, etc.). Julie has one job that occupies a lot of hours. I have a dozen jobs that often don’t occupy enough hours. At the end of most days, my brain generally has plenty of energy to burn, while Julie’s is often exhausted. Therefore, when we sit together on the couch after dinner and seek the enjoyment to be found in a good crossword puzzle, she reaches for her New York Times Best of Wednesday Crosswords book and I reach for my New York Times Best of Saturday Crosswords book. She uses crossword puzzles as a means of settling her mind after a hard day’s work. I use them to stimulate my intellect and my imagination. Plenty of times, a clue or an answer that I’ve encountered in a crossword puzzle has triggered an idea for a short story, a poem, or a personal essay (like this one).
I sometimes spend three days working on the same Saturday crossword puzzle. Often I will lie awake at night trying to think of a nine-letter word for “outdoor contemplation locale” (Zen garden) or “the first drink ever ordered by James Bond” (Americano). I actually like crossword puzzles that keep me awake at night. But if I had to be at work by eight every morning, I’d probably prefer crossword puzzles that didn’t cause me to lose sleep.
If crossword puzzles were metaphors for personality types, then I suppose Monday people would be slackers and Saturday people would be overachievers. But I am not a consistent Saturday in all realms of life, and Julie is not a consistent Wednesday. When it comes to financial matters, for instance, Julie is the Saturday person and I am a Monday (at best). She is not only better than I am at earning money, she is better at managing it. In regards to maintaining a clean house, I am probably a Tuesday and Julie a Friday (God help the Monday slob who marries a Saturday neatnik). When it comes to reading habits, I bounce all across the spectrum from Saturday (Chaucer in the original Middle English) to Tuesday (pulp paperback Westerns of the 1950s and 60s) to Thursday (Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles) to Friday (Middlemarch) to Wednesday (Raymond Chandler) to Monday (Mickey Spillane). Where movies are concerned I am, at best, a Wednesday. I prefer the oeuvres of Clint Eastwood and Tom Cruise to those of Francois Truffaut or Federico Fellini. When it comes to television, my tastes are embarrassingly beginning-of-the-week. I prefer old-school broadcast-network programs like Castle and The Big Bang Theory to cutting-edge critical darlings such as Breaking Bad and True Detective. In certain scholastic subjects, such as Mathematics, I am a lifelong Monday. In others, such as History, I am an enthusiastic Thursday. My iPod contains far more Monday music than Saturday music, but that’s mainly because it’s easier to exercise to the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” than to Ravel’s “Pavane For a Dead Princess.”
We all have heard references to May-December romances, but what about the Monday-Saturday romance? Are there many cases of high-achieving brainiacs marrying frivolous slackers? Some people have characterized the marriage of playwright Arthur Miller and actress Marilyn Monroe as such a union, but I’m not sure that’s accurate. Some reports say that Monroe had a high IQ and was much smarter than the bimbos she was often condemned to portray on screen. I have a hunch that some of Monroe’s best work (Some Like It Hot, for instance) will outlast much, if not all, of Miller’s work.
If you saw Julie and me sitting side-by-side with our crossword-puzzle books some evening, you might assume that I was a Saturday kind of guy and she a Wednesday gal. But, like most people, Julie and I contain multitudes. In restaurants, I sometimes order the burger (Tuesday) while she orders the prime rib (Friday). She may walk away from an antique shop with a classy oil painting (Friday) under her arm, while I walk out with a poster from some 1950s horror movie about irradiated ants (Monday). Even where crossword puzzles are concerned we are not entirely consistent. I keep a few Thursday and Friday puzzle books around the house for days when I’m not feeling at my sharpest. And sometimes, when a particularly gnarly clue in a Saturday puzzle has been stumping me for days on end, I will turn to Julie in utter defeat and ask for help. More often than not, she’ll be able to figure out the answer in a minute or two.
So if you should see the two of us walking down the street sometime, don’t make any assumptions about which of us is the smarter or better-informed of the two. Depending upon the circumstances, we move back and forth across the days of the week the way a child might move back and forth across the squares of a hopscotch grid.
Hopscotch! That’s it. A recess activity for children. Now I can get back to my puzzle…
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GRANDPA FRANK
My wife’s first husband is a man of many talents. Frank is adept at all wilderness activities – cooking with fire, pitching a tent, fishing, etc. He is well-versed on many pop-cultural phenomena. He seems to have memorized every single episode of The Simpsons (a television program I’ve never seen) and can produce an appropriate quote from the show to suit any occasion. He is not intimidated by technology and he quickly masters each new method of social networking that comes along – facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, texting, etc. I do not own a cell phone and still haven’t figured out how Myspace works. Frank has an informed opinion about every new viral sensation to hit the internet (Gangnam Style, the ALS ice-bucket challenge, etc.) long before I am even aware that it exists. If a grandchild of mine wants to know how to tie a clove hitch, bait a fishing hook, or operate a remote-control toy helicopter, they always turn to Frank for guidance. He can fix just about anything from a car engine to a leaky faucet. Every Christmas Eve, during our annual family orgy of gift-opening, any item that requires assembly is automatically passed along to Grandpa Frank. Not only can he assemble anything short of an atom bomb, he always seems to have a vast array of batteries in his car, one for any kind of device you can name. He is everybody’s go-to grandfather.
I, on the other hand, am the useless grandfather, the one who usually has his nose in a book and has no idea who Taylor Swift is. Back in 2005, during a family Trivial Pursuit tournament, my granddaughter Ashleigh, a team captain, eagerly selected me with the first pick of the draft. She assumed that my vast store of knowledge about a number of arcane subjects qualified me as the LeBron James of useless trivia. Alas, most of the questions turned out to be about The Simpsons and other recent phenomena of American pop culture, and Ashleigh’s team was trounced by the team that had drafted Grandpa Frank. He was gracious in victory, which only added fuel to my feelings of inadequacy as a grandparent.
Not until January of 2010 did another grandchild turn to me for help. This time it was Ashleigh’s cousin Mallory. She was sixteen at the time and a student at Casa Robles high school. For her English class she was required to write a book report on the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. Not a big fiction fan, Mallory was daunted by this task. Her mother, my stepdaughter Andrea, suggested that she enlist my services as a consultant/editor. For years I had been listening to my grandchildren rave about Grandpa Frank’s amazing resourcefulness and problem-solving abilities. Now, finally, one of them had found herself facing a difficulty that seemed better suited to my skill set than to Frank’s.
I felt confident I could ace this test of my grandfatherliness. After all, I have sold hundreds of essays over the course of my writing career, some of them to prestigious venues such as The New York Times and National Public Radio. What’s more, I am a huge fan of the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. When Mallory arrived at my house for our essay-writing session, she found me sitting at the computer with volumes of Hurston’s works stacked all around me. I had re-read all the introductions to all of her books and was absolutely bursting with ideas for how to explore this great writer’s oeuvre in a short essay.
Mallory tried to warn me that a scholastic essay was supposed to follow certain hard-and-fast rules, but I ignored these warnings. “Your teacher is probably tired of reading formulaic essays that all follow the same simple template,” I told her. “Let’s just let our enthusiasm for the subject run wild and then try to capture of bit of that enthusiasm on the page.” This approach struck me as particularly appropriate – indeed, an example of form following function – because Hurston herself rarely allowed her writing to follow any sort of formula. As Mallory eventually noted in the essay I helped her write:
Both Delia and Janie [fictional characters of Hurston’s] are ambitious, hard-working women who live in communities populated mainly by people who resent their individuality. In this way, they resemble their creator. From the beginning of her career, Hurston was an outcast from the black literary community because some critics believed her work “was not bitter enough, that it did not depict the harsher side of black life in the South, that Hurston made black southern life easygoing and carefree” (Mary Helen Washington in her introduction to Their Eyes Were Watching God). Meanwhile, white critics often dismissed her work just because she was a woman and a “Negro.” Today she is considered one of the best American writers of her time, regardless of skin color. But in her lifetime, she suffered a great deal, like Delia and Janie, for not behaving the way African-American women of the time were expected to behave.
When the project was completed, I felt that Mallory and I had done as much as possible, given the confines of a 1700-word essay, to convey the spirit of Hurston’s work with both the words of the essay and, especially, its format, which refused to conform wholeheartedly to convention. Alas, this was a mistake. A week or so later I was informed by a glum Mallory that she had received a D on the assignment. The teacher didn’t appreciate the essay’s freewheeling style. I had botched my long-awaited opportunity to prove myself a resourceful and helpful grandparent like Frank. From then on, at family gatherings, whenever some grandchild mentioned a school paper that needed writing, Mallory would always warn them, “Don’t ask Grandpa Kevin for help. He’ll get you a D.”
I’ve felt bad about the Great Zora Neale Hurston Fiasco for nearly five years. But recently I came across an essay by novelist Zoë Heller in the New York Times that has eased the sting of that incident a bit. The topic of the essay was “Can Writing Be Taught?” Here is an excerpt:
The other night I took a look at my daughter’s English essay and suggested that she try excising the words “extremely,” “totally” and “incredibly” wherever they appeared in her prose. She did this and was surprised to discover that not only were the intensifiers superfluous, but that her sentences were stronger without them.
Knowing how to write – understanding the basics of what used to be called – “rhetoric” – still matters, even in the Internet age. So it’s a sad thing that in a great many American public high schools, writing instruction amounts to little more than inculcating the dreary requirements of the SAT essay.
No one at my daughter’s school has ever mentioned to her that the use of the word “incredibly” is subject to the law of diminishing returns. No one has ever talked to her intelligently about structure or style. Instead, she has been given a single, graceless formula for writing a book report and told that any departure from it will result in the automatic subtraction of marks: “In the first sentence, state your general theme; in the second sentence, state your thesis; in the third sentence, provide a road map of how you will advance your thesis throughout the rest of the essay and make sure that all subsequent paragraphs correspond accordingly.”
Composing an essay that conforms to this sort of template is the prose equivalent of wearing a too small, too stiff bridesmaid’s dress: It’s a joyless exercise, and the results are never pretty. Writing can be taught, but it deserves to be taught better than this.
I printed this part of the essay on a sheet of paper and folded it into my wallet. The holiday season is just around the corner. This year, on Christmas Eve, while Grandpa Frank is assembling complicated consumer products and providing much needed batteries to various electronic devices, and I am once again feeling incredibly inadequate as a grandparent, I plan to take this excerpt from my wallet and read it silently to myself. And if by chance Mallory should happen to reminisce about the Great Hurston Debacle of 2010, I may even be induced to read it aloud. Something tells me, however, that this isn’t likely to go over well. Perhaps I should just recite Clement Moore’s “A Visit From Saint Nicholas” instead, and keep my observations about writing to myself. As Ronald Reagan once so eloquently put it, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
COMFORT READING
There are certain horror novels I return to again and again, regardless of the time of year. For me they are comfort reading. Let me explain why.
When I was a child, my mother read only two kinds of books. Her favorite genre was the gothic romance. Nearly every book she owned featured a comely but distressed young woman fleeing a dark castle at night. The castle invariably stood on a brooding sea cliff, beneath which the ocean’s waters roiled ominously. I used to tease my mother about this.
“What are you reading?” I’d say. “No – let me guess. I’ll bet it’s a book with a castle, a cliff, and a damsel in distress on its cover.” She would laugh and insist that it was the predictability of these novels that appealed to her. “They always end happily,” she’d say.
The other type of novel that appealed to my mother was the kind of huge bestseller that dominated the spinner racks at airport gift shops and supermarket checkout stands throughout the 1960s and 70s: Valley of the Dolls, Airport, Love Story, The Summer of ’42, The Godfather, Exodus. My mother eagerly devoured these. She was a fan of late-night TV talk shows and would frequently buy a book by an author she had seen chatting with Dick Cavett or Johnny Carson.
I never developed a taste for my mother’s gothic romances but I gobbled up the bestsellers almost as eagerly as she did, even if I sometimes had to sneak them into my room and read them at night, after my parents had gone to sleep (I’m looking at you, Jacqueline Susann!).
My favorites were the horror novels. The 1960s and 70s were a sort of golden era for popular horror novels with contemporary settings. Ira Levin pretty much invented the genre with his novel Rosemary’s Baby, a bestseller of 1967. I was only eight years old when it was published, but my mother rarely got rid of a book, so it was still on our bookshelves in 1973, which is around the time I first read it. That’s probably also when I first read William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, another classic of the genre. The Exorcist might have died in obscurity if not for the aforementioned Dick Cavett Show. The book was selling poorly and bookstore owners across the country were returning their copies to the publisher when, one night in 1971, Cavett’s scheduled guest backed out at the last minute and the show’s producer was desperate for a replacement. Blatty had been part of the entertainment community for years without ever becoming famous. He’d written the screenplay for one of Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther movies, he’d even appeared on Groucho Marx’s game show You Bet Your Life once. In desperation, Cavett’s producer called him and asked if he’d like to come down to the studio and talk about his book on The Dick Cavett Show that evening. Blatty leapt at the chance. He spent more than forty minutes telling a national television audience about his novel and the real-life 1949 exorcism that had inspired it. Within a few weeks the book was listed on the New York Times bestseller list, where it would remain for 57 weeks.
One of the best-known horror novels of the era had no supernatural element in it at all. Peter Benchley’s Jaws, published in February of 1974, has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. The title has become iconic but it was actually a compromise agreed upon by the editor and the author just minutes before the book was scheduled to go to the printer. After rejecting as pretentious such alternatives as The Stillness in the Water and Leviathan Rising, the two men hit upon the idea of using the title to emphasize the enormous power of a great white shark’s jaws. They considered titles such as Jaws of Death and Jaws of Terror before finally opting for the one-word simplicity of Jaws.
I had a happy childhood and I dearly love my mother, which is why I am comforted by almost anything associated with those two things. My mother passed her love of reading on to me, and it was probably the greatest gift anyone ever gave me.
The other day, in a bookstore, I overheard a woman say, “If you read a lot, you’ll never get Alzheimer’s; that’s one thing I know for sure.” Sadly, she was wrong. My mother now lives in a care facility for the memory-impaired. She can no longer recall any of the pop bestsellers we both used to love.
If it seems odd that a Catholic housewife of the 1960s and 70s could have enjoyed so many horror novels, consider these words of horror expert Grady Hendrix, author of Paperbacks From Hell: “Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel still widely read today: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft.” About the pop fiction of the 1970s, Hendrix noted: “Readers couldn’t get enough books about spooky Catholics. In the wake of The Exorcist, a cry went up from paperback publishers: ‘Send more priests!’ And, lo, did the racks fill with demonic men of the cloth and scary nuns.” Catholicism also figured prominently in bestsellers of the era that were not horror novels, including The Godfather, Trinity, and The Thorn Birds.
Perhaps my favorite piece of comfort reading is the aforementioned Rosemary’s Baby. For most people it is a terrifying descent into unspeakable horror (ritualized rape, Satanism, a defilement of marriage and motherhood). For me it reads practically like my own baby book. Like Rosemary Riley, the mother of the book’s titular baby, I grew up in a large Irish Catholic family. Rosemary and I both went to Catholic high schools. While Rosemary is pregnant with her baby, her sister Margaret is also pregnant. Margaret’s baby, born a few months before Rosemary’s, is named Kevin Michael, which is my name. Rosemary’s best friend Hutch dies in a hospital called St. Vincent’s. My brother Bradley was born in a hospital called St. Vincent’s. The book, like me, is very much a product of the intersection of Catholicism and the 1960s. Rosemary’s husband, Guy, is an actor who has appeared in the soap opera Another World, which was a favorite of my mother. Many of the era’s people and products are name-checked in the book: Cap’n Crunch cereal, actress Anna Maria Alberghetti (whose TV ads for Seven Seasons salad dressing were ubiquitous in the 1970s), Pope Paul VI, Look magazine, Life magazine, William F. Buckley, the novel Manchild In The Promised Land, the hit plays The Fantasticks and Wait Until Dark, even Daphne Du Maurier, one of my mother’s favorite writers of gothic suspense.
If you know the stories of such classics as Rosemary’s Baby and Jaws only through their cinematic incarnations, reading the books will bring you many surprises. Did you know that the book Jaws has a mafia subplot? Or that Chief Brody’s wife was having an affair with Matt Hooper, the ichthyologist played by Richard Dreyfus in the film? The film version of Rosemary’s Baby ends on the evening that Rosemary discovers that her baby has “his father’s eyes,” but the book carries the story forward for several more weeks.
The next time you find yourself jonesing for a gripping read, why not try The Other or Harvest Home or Burnt Offerings or Rosemary’s Baby or some other popular thriller published back in the 60s and 70s. Such books are guaranteed to bring you hours of uneasiness. For me, however, they bring nothing but a warm and fuzzy feeling, and maybe a bit of wistfulness for the mother who introduced me to them but can no longer remember them.
The FRAW: A Literary Phenomenon
Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger, Charles Portis, Cormac McCarthy, Harper Lee, J. P. Donleavy, Denis Johnson, Don DeLillo – America has produced an impressive crop of writers who are both relatively famous and famously reclusive. These writers rarely give interviews, appear on television, or engage in public speaking. I am an American and, therefore, perhaps biased, but this phenomenon – the famous recluse writer – seems almost uniquely American to me. There was, of course, the famous case of B. Traven, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, who was so reclusive that to this day, 44 years after his death, no one knows for sure who he was, when he was born, or where he came from (Wikipedia offers two possible identities: he was either a German whose birth name was Ret Marut, or a Pole born Otto Feige).
Undoubtedly Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, and other countries have their share of reclusive writers. But, off hand, I can’t think of any famous living examples from countries other than the U.S. The famous reclusive writer phenomenon is so American that I have created an acronym to describe it in online discussions with fellow literary nerds: FRAW (Famous Reclusive American Writer). What is it that drives certain successful American fiction writers into hiding? The question appeals to me because I live a few blocks away from William T. Vollmann, a fairly famous and fairly reclusive author. In a 2009 New York Times profile of the author, Charles McGrath noted that “Mr. Vollmann, who just turned 50, is a loner, a bit of a recluse, despite being married and the father of a daughter, and a throwback: a wandering, try-anything writer-journalist in the tradition of Steinbeck or Jack London.” I go for a run nearly every morning that takes me past Vollmann’s house. According to MapMyRun.com, Vollmann’s house and mine are separated by a mere .8 of a mile. I see Vollmann about once a week. Usually I am traveling south on Freeport Boulevard and he is traveling north. I am headed to William Land Park and he is headed…I know not where. Presumably some nearby lair where he does his reading, writing, and research. Usually when I see him he is wearing a backpack. Often it is laden with books. I can just see their edges jutting up out of the backpack’s interior. The other day I was forced to delay my morning run until the afternoon. As I came abreast of C. K. McClatchy High School, I stopped and sat down on a bench to remove a pebble from my shoe. When my shoe was back on my foot and securely tied, I turned toward the sidewalk just in time to see Vollmann pass by. This time he was heading south, same as me. Presumably he was returning home from that secret lair of his. A thick book was peeking out of his backpack. Instead of resuming my run, I synchronized my steps with his. I was just a few feet behind him, matching him stride for stride. I considered tapping him on the shoulder and attempting to start up a conversation, but I’m not the kind of person to intrude upon a celebrity’s privacy. And, truth be told, Vollmann is not one of my favorite FRAWs. I’ve never been able to get through any of his famously enormous tomes (his book Rising Up and Rising Down is 3,300 pages long; his book Imperial is 1,300 pages long; at a mere 832 pages, his National Book Award-winning novel Europe Central is practically a short story by Vollmann’s standards). And so I continued just walking behind him for a quarter of a block or so. Eventually Vollmann became aware of my presence and was made uncomfortable by it. He slowed his pace and moved to his right, in order to let me pass. At that point, I had no choice but to pass him or to be revealed as a stalker. I passed him.
Every Wednesday, which is garbage day in our neighborhood, I am tempted to peek into Vollmann’s garbage for discarded pages of literary work. I fantasize about poking my head into Vollmann’s garbage can and discovering the lone typescript of a short novel (say 600 or 700 pages) that his wife has accidentally tossed into the trash, publishing it as my own work, and becoming as rich and famous as Vollmann himself (perhaps even more rich and famous, because I don’t have any qualms about seeking publicity for myself and my work). Alas, according to McGrath’s New York Times profile, “Mr. Vollmann collects pistols and likes to shoot them.” This fact makes it unlikely that I will ever muster the courage to go rooting through his recycle bin. At any rate, Vollmann is a man of my own age, and I tend to be dismissive of geniuses my own age. I’d much rather live within .8 of a mile of Charles Portis or Cormac McCarthy. But running past Vollmann’s house every day has given me plenty of occasions to ruminate on the phenomenon of the FRAW.
FRAWs tend to be male and they tend to be old. Vollmann is one of the youngest living FRAWs and he turned 54 on July 28 (for twenty days each year he and I are the same age, then August 16 rolls around and I become a year older than him). America isn’t producing FRAWs at the rate that it used to. Younger writers tend to be into social networking. Not only are they not reticent when it comes to their lives and work, they tend to chatter endlessly about the most trivial of matters. One of my favorite recent novels is The Golem and The Jinni by Helene Wecker. If I visit her Twitter page I can find 5,222 tweets, in which she discusses everything from what she has been eating to how she smells after a long plane ride. I like Wecker’s work, so it frustrates me to think about the wonderful fiction she might have produced in the time she wasted producing those 5,222 tweets. Thanks to Twitter, facebook, YouTube, and the proliferation of author tours, we may never see another great FRAW again.
Americans seem fascinated by the notion of reclusive writers. The American films Finding Forrester, Field of Dreams, and Nim’s Island all revolve around writers who are both famous and reclusive. We expect film stars to hide behind the walls of their Beverly Hills mansions. We expect wealthy CEOs to be largely inaccessible to the public. But writers are perceived differently. Walk into an independent bookstore in Anytown USA on a Friday evening and you are likely to find some struggling author speaking to a bunch of empty chairs about his new collection of Beat-inspired poems or his self-published mystery novel or his 400-page account of a trip he took down the Mekong River. Even famous writers, when they have a new book to promote, are often quite accessible, doing readings and book-signings for the public at venues all across the country. In my day, I’ve managed to meet in person any number of famous writers – John Irving, E. L. Doctorow, Harlan Ellison, Annie Dillard, Horton Foote, Barry Hannah, Ursula LeGuin, etc. – while attending readings, book-signings, or writing conferences. When I was a teenager, I once had lunch with Kurt Russell, but that was my lone personal encounter with a film star. (Long story short: Russell’s father Bing owned the minor league Portland Mavericks baseball team. A friend and I had gone to Portland’s Civic Stadium to watch tryouts for the team and later, while having lunch at a nearby hamburger joint, we were joined by Kurt, who was a player for the team and wanted to pick our brains for ways to get more kids to attend Maverick games.) No ordinary filmgoer expects to meet Johnny Depp or George Clooney or Kristen Stewart any time soon. But any American booklover with a bit of gumption can probably manage to meet his favorite living American author in person simply by researching the author’s promotional schedule online and driving to a book-signing event. The authors mentioned in the first sentence of this essay, however, are (or were, in the case of the deceased) genuine recluses, people who have no interest in making public appearances or cultivating a public persona. That makes them rarities among American authors, which also makes them noteworthy.
America may not lead the world in the production of Nobel Prize-winning authors, but we seem to excel at producing writers who are both highly successful and almost pathologically shy of publicity. I’m not exactly sure why this is. Someday, I may interrupt my morning run long enough to knock on the door of the Vollmann house and ask William for an explanation of this phenomenon. I just hope he doesn’t shoot me.
GUARDIAN OF THE TOILET
Among my many useless, unofficial titles in life, this is my least favorite: Guardian of the Toilet. I work at a small, independent bookstore in Sacramento, CA. At the back of the bookstore, at the end of a long, narrow passageway crowded with the detritus of the bookselling trade, we have a bathroom (basically just a toilet and a sink) which is for employees only. The owner of the store has warned me not to allow customers to use this facility. He did this not because he is a jerk but because he can’t afford to be sued for violating the Americans With Disabilities Act. The ADA requires businesses that have public restrooms to make those rooms accessible to the disabled. The owner of “my” bookstore claims it would cost him tens of thousands of dollars to make his tiny bathroom compliant with ADA standards. His fear of ADA lawsuits is not unfounded. Many small businesses in our town have been hit by similar suits. There is a lawyer in town who is notorious for filing ADA noncompliance lawsuits. In fact, this lawyer has already sued our bookstore – successfully – once. Outside the store, as required by law, we had a parking space reserved for the disabled. But apparently the law dictates just how much the gradient of a disabled parking space can be inclined. Beyond a certain degree, the space is determined to be noncompliant. The local lawyer who considers himself an ADA watchdog sued the store for assigning the disabled a space whose gradient was a degree or two too steep. Thus the owner had to hire a construction company, at a cost of several thousand dollars, to re-grade that particular parking space. Because of this costly encounter with the ADA, the owner of the store has become extremely wary of noncompliance with the law. By making his bathroom off limits to all customers, he is able to remain complaint with the ADA.
But the owner of the store is not entirely heartless. He is able to recognize certain emergency situations. If someone appears to be in immediate danger of wetting or befouling himself, the owner of the store will often relent and allow the customer to use the “employees only” restroom. Likewise, he has told me that I can allow “very pregnant” women to use the restroom. Also, small children who are in imminent danger of peeing their pants can be taken to the restroom by their parents. But, for the most part, our bathroom is off limits to the public. Employees are told to direct customers in need of a bathroom to the restaurant across the street. This, however, is not an easy trek for a person in immediate need of a bathroom. Our bookstore sits on one corner of a very busy intersection. On foot, it could take up to five minutes to get from our store to the restaurant across the street. And it requires an act – i.e. walking – that isn’t easy when one is clenching one’s butt cheeks or trying not to void one’s bladder.
I work the closing shift at the store – six p.m. to nine p.m. Four nights a week, I am the lone employee of the store during the final three hours of operation. The owner rarely shows up during those hours, which means I am pretty much my own boss. Having numerous times been in dire need of a bathroom while out in public, I tend to be extremely sympathetic to people asking if they can use our bathroom. The boss would probably be horrified if he knew how many people I have allowed to use the bathroom at the bookstore. I almost always allow elderly people to use the bathroom. At 56, I myself am approaching old age, and I know that one’s sphincter and bladder generally become less reliable with age. There was a time when I could hold off my own bathroom visits almost indefinitely. Nowadays, when the need to pee or poop hits me, I’ve generally got about ten or fifteen minutes to find a bathroom before the situation becomes very sticky (not to mention stinky). Thus, in addition to pregnant women and small children, I also allow old people in obvious need to use the bathroom at the bookstore. Needless to say, I also let people whom I know personally to use the toilet there. I don’t know any lawyers personally, so I’m not worried about any of my acquaintances suing the bookshop. If someone looks obviously homeless and asks to use my bathroom, I almost always say yes. Other employees of the store have refused homeless people access to the bathroom only to find that same homeless person, a few minutes later, urinating or defecating behind the dumpster out back of the store. Better to let a homeless person into the bathroom than to have to clean up a mess behind the dumpster.
There are certain categories of people whom I almost never allow to use the bathroom at the bookstore. At the top of this list is anyone who looks as though he or she might possibly be a lawyer. This means that any man or woman dressed in office attire – three-piece suit, tie, slacks, shiny leather shoes, a business skirt and a blazer, etc. – will almost certainly be denied the use of our bathroom, even if said businessperson seems to be in extreme need. Most of these people are not lawyers, but I can’t take any chances with them. I can’t ask, “You’re not a lawyer are you?” every time some well-dressed businessperson asks to use the bathroom. And so I turn them all away. I don’t feel good about discriminating against the well-dressed, but I don’t have much choice.
On the other hand, I often allow people who clearly aren’t lawyers to use the bathroom regardless of how extreme their need may be. For instance, I always allow police officers and firemen in uniform to use the restroom. Likewise, preachers in dog collars are always allowed access to the toilet. If someone is dressed in the uniform of a well-known retailer – Home Depot, Office Max, WalMart, etc. – I generally allow them to use the bathroom. It seems unlikely (though certainly not impossible) that a lawyer would show up at my store dressed in a McDonald’s uniform just for the purpose of tricking me into letting him use the toilet. I usually allow bathroom access to people dressed in the attire of plumbers or auto-mechanics (i.e., people wearing some sort of overalls with the name of a local garage or sewer-rooter company stitched above the pocket). The owner of the store would no doubt be horrified if he knew just how many people I have permitted to use his restroom. But, as I say, I have been in dire need of a toilet on too many occasions to count, and thus I hate to turn anyone away.
If the store is nearly empty and someone who doesn’t look like a lawyer asks to use the restroom, I generally give them permission to do so. The problems, for me, come when the store is crowded and I have to make numerous individual decisions about who can use the toilet and who can’t. For instance, if I turn down the request of a black woman who is dressed in fancy office attire, I have to turn down every other request that comes my way while she is still in the store. Think of what might happen if, after turning down the black businesswoman, I then allow a homeless-looking white male to use the toilet. It might look as if my decision-making process is based on race or gender, which it never is (except in the case of pregnant women). But even if no one else has asked to use the bathroom in the last hour, I still am likely to refuse any request to use the toilet if the store is crowded. After all, if I am seen directing an elderly person towards the toilet at the back of the store, how could I then refuse the next person who requests to use the bathroom?
Ironically, one group of people whom I almost never deny access to is the disabled. Recently, a blind woman came into the store with her husband. About twenty minutes later, the husband told me that his wife needed a bathroom. I could have directed the two of them to the restaurant across the street, but that struck me as cruel. The blind woman walked with a cane in one hand and with her other hand hooked around her husband’s arm. Together they moved rather slowly, and it might have taken them ten full minutes to get to the restaurant across the street. What’s more, the restaurant has a men’s room with a single toilet and a woman’s room with a single toilet. If more than one person needs the women’s room, a waiting line builds up. I wasn’t eager to send the blind woman across the street, but sending her in back to use our restroom was also problematic. As I’ve said, the restroom lies at the end of a narrow, cluttered storage space. It can be difficult for the sighted to navigate this space. I warned the husband that it might be difficult for his wife to reach our bathroom without tripping. He assured me he could lead her there without incident. So I allowed the husband to lead his blind wife to the bathroom, but throughout the ten minutes or so that they were in the back, my heart was in my throat. I was fearful that the woman might trip and hurt herself back there – triggering a potential lawsuit. I was also terrified that the owner of the store might make one of his rare unannounced visits to the store. If he saw a blind woman coming out of our back room, he would probably be apoplectic. He might even fire me.
When I first began working at the bookstore, I was fairly lax in my role as Guardian of the Toilet. Back then, I allowed almost anyone who didn’t look like an attorney to use the bookstore’s non-ADA-compliant, “employee’s only” restroom. Gradually, I became a little bit stingier with the store’s toilet. I have permitted people to use the toilet only to have them come back and complain about how dangerously cluttered the pathway to it is. I have permitted one person to use the toilet and then later denied access to another, not realizing that the second person was in the store when I gave permission to the first. This has led to accusations of discrimination.
Sadly, after years of making a good-faith effort to execute my role as Guardian of the Toilet in a fair and generous manner, I have lately begun to find the role a bit burdensome. I realize that I am not a doctor or a judge in a capital murder case. My job does not place upon me the enormous burden of having to decide, on a daily basis, who lives and who dies. My role as Guardian of the Toilet merely requires me to decide who gets to poop and who doesn’t. But even this small bit of responsibility has begun to weigh upon me. I’m beginning to think that life would be a lot less stressful if I simply denied toilet access to every single customer who asks for it. Lately I have been turning down more and more bathroom requests. Soon, I am likely to change my role from Guardian of the Toilet to Denier of the Toilet. It will be a sad day when that happens. Pants are likely to be pooped in. Pee is likely to run down a few legs. The dumpster out back is likely to become a toilet of last resort for some customers. But I have flouted the boss’s rules for a long time now. If I don’t change my ways, disaster is likely to strike at some point. I’d hate to be responsible for a lawsuit that could force the owner to close the store. In my role as a bookstore clerk, I am a Guardian of the Printed Word for an entire neighborhood of my hometown. It’s a responsibility I take seriously. And if I find it being threatened by my role as Guardian of the Toilet, well, what’re a few soiled britches compared to an entire store full of brand new books just waiting to be explored?
DEAR MILLENNIAL
I am a 60-year-old white male without a college education. Draw from that whatever inferences you want about me. I won’t claim to be the least racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic person you’ve ever met. That would be a lie. I try to treat people – regardless of their creed, color, gender, orientation, etc. – the way I’d like to be treated, but I’m sure I have fallen short of that ideal many times. I probably deserve some of the scorn I often hear directed at working-class white male baby boomers without a college degree. I haven’t been smart with my money. I work in a low-paying service-sector job. I’ve eaten more red meat and rich desserts than anyone should. I like things that every enlightened individual knows are awful: The Eagles, pork chops with mint jelly, the paintings of Bob Ross, Jerry Lewis movies, Billy Joel, cargo shorts, TV shows like Blue Bloods and Castle and Two and a Half Men. Nonetheless, I am writing to ask you to go a bit easy on me and the era that I grew up in.
Lately, whenever I speak up in defense of some cultural icon of my era who has fallen from grace in the 20th Century, I can feel you and the other millennials among my listeners growing quiet and judgy. I’d like to be more woke – I truly would – but it’s impossible for me to separate myself from the era I grew up in.
I understand that Bill Cosby has committed some horrible crimes and probably deserves to be locked away forever. I hate him for that, but I also still kind of love him for all the laughs he brought me as teenager. In the 1970s, I would often gather with friends in somebody’s bedroom or basement and we would listen to comedy albums – i.e. vinyl records – on old-fashioned turntables for hours on end. Comedy albums were like a drug. If you got hooked, you’d eventually find yourself listening to stuff by George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, The Firesign Theatre, and others. But always the gateway drug was Bill Cosby. His albums were clean enough that no parent could object to them, but also funny enough that listening to them seemed somehow indecent. What’s more, Cosby’s specialty was childhood. He talked about frightening fathers, the ridiculousness of unorganized street football games (“Cosby, you go down to Third Street, catch the J Street bus, and have them open the doors at 19th Street. I’ll fake it to you.”), the terrors of middle school, and sibling rivalry.
As a millennial, you’ve grown up with all sorts of African-American voices in your head. But in the whitebread Catholic household in which I grew up, about the only African-American artists you could find in the hi-fi cabinet were Nat King Cole and Bill Cosby. It’s hard to overstate how prominent Cosby was in the virtually all-white suburban world I was raised in. I spent eight years matriculating at All Saints Elementary School in Portland, Oregon, and never once had a black classmate. But, like many of my schoolmates, I could do a mean impersonation of Fat Albert and many another Cosby character as well. That might strike you as a horrific act of cultural appropriation, or minstrelsy, or whatever, but we weren’t laughing at Cosby’s characters because they were black. We laughed because they were funny. To this day I keep a cassette tape of Cosby’s album When I Was a Kid in my car (yes, I still have a cassette player in my car). I pop that tape into the dashboard not to celebrate the work of a serial rapist but to relive an important element of my childhood.
Nowadays, when I’m giving some young person like you a ride in my car, I always quickly toss into the backseat anything that might strike them as offensive. That includes not only comedy albums by Cosby but also by George Carlin, who occasionally assumed a black speaking voice (a “blaccent,” as it’s now derogatorily called) during his act and frequently commented on race relations in routines such as “White Harlem” and “Black Consciousness.” I also hide my copy of Mac Davis’ Greatest Hits, because it contains the song “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked On Me,” frequently cited by feminist groups as being one of the most sexist songs of the 1970s (along with Paul Anka’s “Having My Baby,” for some reason). And let’s not even talk about my collection of Johnny Horton tapes. He sang songs in praise of the Confederacy (“Johnny Reb”), a song that mocked the cockiness and cowardice of the Union troops (“The Battle of Bull Run”), a song that celebrated Andrew Jackson (“The Battle of New Orleans”), a song that celebrated animal abuse (“Electrified Donkey”), and a song called “Cherokee Boogie” whose opening lines are: “Well, a Cherokee chief as he dances along/sings an Indian boogie to a white man’s song.” Oh, there’s also a song called “Comanche,” about an army horse that survived Custer’s Last Stand. The narrator of the song seems sorry that it was the Indians that slaughtered the white men rather than the other way around.
And now, my millennial friend, let us talk about Woody Allen. The 1970s were my most formative decade, and it’s pretty much impossible to discuss the cinema of that decade without referencing the work of Woody Allen. His stuff seemed to be everywhere back then. His movies were highly influential, he wrote for the New Yorker, he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, and my friends and I began to belatedly discover the comedy albums that he put out in the 1960s. I have had bits and pieces of Woody Allen’s work floating around inside my head for nearly half a century (“Don’t knock masturbation; it’s sex with someone I love.” “To you I’m an atheist. To God I’m the loyal opposition.”). It may annoy you to hear me referring to his work so frequently, but to avoid doing so I’d need to undergo some sort of massive deprogramming operation. And while I can understand your generation’s antipathy towards Cosby, I find the hostility towards Woody Allen difficult to fathom. It seems to stem from a single accusation of child molestation made against him more than a quarter century ago when he was in the midst of a messy breakup with his partner of the time, Mia Farrow. Allen vehemently denied that he had done anything wrong. Obviously, I have no more insight into the matter than you do. But Allen is an 82-year-old man and this charge of child molestation is, to my knowledge, the only act of criminality he’s ever been accused of. I think you are making a grave mistake by joining the Woody Allen pile-on. He’s an old man, but given his impressive good health and amazing productivity, he could have as many as ten more films in him still. If, via boycotts of his work and online social-network shaming of the man, you manage to cut his career short, what will you have gained? Even his lesser works generally have a few dazzling scenes, or performances, or jokes to make them worthwhile. Why punish him now, in the twilight of his career, for an unproved accusation made decades ago?
If my collections of favorite record albums and films contain so much that offends you, I imagine you might be horrified by my personal library. I enjoy movies, music, and comedy albums a great deal but none of those has ever been a passion for me. Books, on the other hand, have been pretty much the ruin of me. I’m a 60-year-old man who works as a clerk in a bookstore because it’s about the only thing I’m really qualified to do. I’ve been in love with American pop fiction since I first discovered my grandfather’s collection of Travis McGee mysteries back in the late 1960s or early 70s. McGee (the fictional creation of John D. MacDonald) was a womanizer on an epic scale. If he had a theme song, it would no doubt be “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked On Me.” I can’t imagine him ever being embraced by the #MeToo generation. What’s more I am a huge fan of the traditional Western novel, a genre that I haven’t noticed much fondness for among the millennials of my acquaintance. One of my favorite books of the 1970s is The Education of Little Tree, written by Forrest Carter, a pseudonym for notorious racist and Ku Klux Klan member Asa Earl Carter. I read it and fell in love with it long before the author’s racist past was common knowledge. Nothing I’ve learned about Forrest Carter since has changed my affection for the book. I’ve always believed that each individual human contains multitudes, and that a person can have the capacity for both great evil and great goodness inside of him.
Another of my favorite novels is Danny Santiago’s Famous All Over Town. Upon publication, in 1983, the book was heralded as a masterful evocation of life in an East Los Angeles barrio circa 1970. Just about every significant character in the book, including the narrator, is a Mexican or a Mexican American. The book won early praise and seemed to be on track for a Pulitzer nomination when it was revealed that Danny Santiago was the pseudonym of Daniel Lewis James, a wealthy, Yale-educated white man. At that point, charges of cultural appropriation were raised against the author. Scholar Arnd Bohm, writing in The International Fiction Review, summed up the response this way:
The reception turned negative and indeed hostile when John Gregory Dunne revealed "The Secret of Danny Santiago" in theNew York Review of Books…The reaction ranged from consternation to anger. How could James have managed to dupe the publishers and the critics? How did an elderly affluent white author dare to appropriate the voice as well as the topics of minority writing? The Before Columbus Foundation sponsored a symposium at the Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco on the question "Danny Santiago: Art or Fraud," with the consensus opinion of those who participated leaning toward the accusation of fraud.
Needless to say, the book’s reputation never recovered. It ought to be ranked among the best YA novels ever written. Instead it languishes in obscurity.
I realize that cultural appropriation offends you, but to me it is a vital element of all fictional creation. My personal library contains works in which men write from a female perspective (Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) and vice versa (Frankenstein, Ethan Frome, etc), whites write from the perspective of minorities (William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner) and vice versa (Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee), young people write from the perspective of old people (Little Big Man, written when the author, Thomas Berger, was in his thirties and narrated by a 121-year-old man) and vice versa (the aforementioned Famous All Over Town, John Updike’s Terrorist, etc.), Jews write from the perspective of Christians (Love Story, The Caine Mutiny, etc.) and vice versa (Updike’s Bech: A Book). That kind of cultural cross-pollenization is good for literature. Outsiders to a group are often able to see the group in new and surprising ways. Two of my favorite American Westerns – The Heart of the Country and Power In The Blood – were written by Australian Greg Matthews, who also had the audacity to pen a sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the quintessential American novel. Far from being something to condemn and shun, cultural appropriation is the force that gave us The Beatles, Panda Express, The Magnificent Seven, and chess. I embrace it, and so should you.
The recent death of Burt Reynolds has got me thinking about the 1970s, because Reynolds was the decade’s signature movie star. Although plenty of other 70s icons are still breathing, political correctness has consigned them to a cultural twilight zone where they are not quite dead but no longer allowed to practice their trades. Al Franken first came to prominence in the 1970s as a writer for and occasional performer on Saturday Night Live. He rose all the way to the U.S. Senate before being forced to resign as the result of some minor indiscretions. He would have made an excellent presidential candidate in 2020. Now it’s unlikely that millennial voters would support him in a run for local dogcatcher. Zero tolerance may someday leave you with zero political heavyweights. The 70s also saw the birth of Garrison Keillor’s radio program A Prairie Home Companion. I hesitate to mention to you my fondness for Keillor and his works because accusations (which Keillor denies) of inappropriate sexual behavior on his part have caused him to become persona non grata with the #MeToo generation. And speaking of prairies, Michael Landon’s TV version of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books was another iconic artifact of the 1970s. Nowadays, Wilder, too, is persona non grata in some circles. Her name was recently removed from a literary award because she wrote like a woman of her own time and failed to anticipate the political correctness of ours. The 1970s was the decade in which I discovered the writings of Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, and H.P. Lovecraft, all of whom, like Wilder, failed to anticipate the political correctness of our era and thus have fallen out of favor with people such as yourself, who know only of their sins and nothing of their saving graces. Lovecraft, like Wilder, recently had his connection with a prestigious annual literary award terminated because of his racism – a racism that made itself evident in only a tiny fraction of his works, mostly minor ones.
As a child I devoured not only the pop fictions of my own era (Jaws, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby) but also that of my parents’ and grandparents’ eras (Gone With The Wind, Rebecca, Peyton Place, From Here To Eternity, etc.). Those earlier eras produced plenty of pop culture that even by the relatively lax standards of the 1970s was considered problematic: Charlie Chan movies, Amos ‘n’ Andy, heck, even Gone With the Wind was beginning to catch some flack by then. But I didn’t think any less of my parents or grandparents just because a few artifacts of their youth were now deemed highly inappropriate by some cultural arbiters. Every generation produces its fair share of embarrassments, but I don’t see any reason to scrub them all from the historical record. It’s kind of a shame that the Amos ‘n’ Andy TV show is considered too politically incorrect to be broadcast on NetFlix the way other old TV shows such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Twilight Zone are. For all its casual racism, the series was a showcase for the amazing comic talents of its African-American cast, particularly Alvin Childress, Spencer Williams, Tim Moore, Ernestine Wade and Amanda Randolph (the first African American ever to star in a regularly scheduled network TV show, according to Wikipedia). Those actors were every bit as talented as the cast of I Love Lucy but they are largely forgotten while I Love Lucy plays on and on despite its casual misogyny. Last Christmas I took a temporary job at a local Amazon warehouse in order to make some extra money. The assaultive hip-hop music that played incessantly over the loudspeaker there, with its frequent “niggers” and “bitches,” struck me as far more racist and misogynistic than anything I ever encountered in an episode of Amos ‘n’ Andy or I Love Lucy. But I never complained about it or asked for a change of format. I’m tolerant of the political incorrectness of your generation. All I ask is that you be tolerant of the same in me and my generation. I can’t rid my conversation of any and all positive allusions to Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, The Dukes of Hazard, Chico and the Man (in which Freddie Prinze, a man of German and Puerto Rican ancestry played a Chicano stereotype that some people found offensive), Garrison Keillor, Al Franken, Mac Davis, or any other icon of my youth. Because of that I am likely to say things from time to time that strike you as wildly inappropriate. I get that and I apologize for it. But Bill Cosby helped us to laugh during an era in which some decidedly unfunny events (the Vietnam war, campus unrest, political assassinations) dominated the news and much of the cultural conversation. Chico and the Man debuted one month after Richard Nixon’s resignation. Yeah, it was a stupid caricature of Chicano culture in East L.A. but, after enduring the slow-motion train wreck of Watergate for two years, man, did it feel good to laugh again.
You have already begun putting some of your own pop icons (Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, James Gunn, etc.) into cultural purgatory for their relatively minor sins. I suggest that you rethink that policy. Creative artists, like the rest of us, have only a finite time here on earth. It would be a shame to reduce the number of good jokes, good TV shows, and good movies in the world out of a misguided effort to purify the culture of every flawed contributor to it. Flawed people like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor and Forrest Carter often produce some of the most memorable cultural artifacts of their era. Let the justice system decide whether these people belong in jail or not. As long as they are free to produce their creative work, we ought to let them do it. Boycott it if you want, but don’t block it or embargo it. Someday, when the kerfuffle surrounding their recent indiscretions has died down, you may wish you had a few more James Gunn movies to watch, a few more comedy routines by Aziz Ansari or Louis C.K. to laugh at.
If you insist on purging your brain of some of the more problematic voices of your generation’s culture, so be it. But please don’t ask me to purge my brain of the more problematic voices of my generation. Those voices have been in there for a long time. And sometimes they are the only ones that truly speak to me.
10 POP FICTIONS TO READ IN PUBLIC IF YOU WANT TO ANNOY THE POLITICALLY CORRECT.
Banned Books week is upon us again. Traditionally it is a week during which liberals pat themselves on the back for resisting the efforts of concerned parents who wish to have controversial books pulled from various school libraries and/or curricula. Generally these are books that support a liberal worldview. Last year’s list of the most banned books included Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (challenged by some parents because of sexually explicit material), Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why (challenged because of its frank discussion of teenage suicide), Raina Telgemeier’s Drama (inclusion of LGBT characters) Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (sexual violence and promotion of Islam), Alex Gino’s George (the inclusion of a transgender character), and so forth. Books that support a conservative worldview (Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Glenn Beck’s The Overton Window, William F. Buckley’s Redhunter, anything by Tom Clancy) are rarely pulled from school curricula because they rarely make it into the curricula in the first place.
My modest proposal for this year’s Banned Books week is that we all spend a little time out in public reading books that are never likely to be included in your typical American high school’s curriculum. If you enjoy annoying the politically correct members of the illiberal left (and what right-thinking American doesn’t?) these are the books you should carry with you on buses, trains, planes, and subways. These are the books you should read with great ostentation at sidewalk bistros, corner restaurants, and doctors’ waiting rooms.
TRAVELLER by Richard Adams. All over the American south and elsewhere statues of famous Confederate leaders are being pulled down, sometimes lawfully by public consent, and sometimes unlawfully by people practicing civil disobedience. We shouldn’t lionize Confederate soldiers. They were fighting to keep African-Americans in chains. But neither should they be erased from our history. Robert E. Lee was one of the most fascinating Americans who ever lived. He was both a patriot who worshipped George Washington, and a traitor who tried to tear his own country apart. Traveller is a novel narrated by Lee’s horse. Knee-jerk liberals are likely to be offended by the notion of Lee’s life story being made into the stuff of popular romance. And the thought of that story being related via the somewhat comic device of a Mr. Ed-style narrator is likely to be seen as insensitive to all the genuine suffering Lee and his ilk perpetuated. But Adams’ novel is not a blind paean to Lee. It’s actually a very sneaky anti-war statement, in the same vein as Stephen Crane’s poem “War is Kind.” Because he has a limited understanding of human language, when Traveller hears southerners whooping and cheering about “going to war,” he believes that War is a place, a destination somewhere up North where everything will be wonderful and glorious. When he finds himself surrounded by humans who are killing each other in large numbers, he asks a veteran warhorse why they would do such a thing. The response: “You might’s well ask me why the sun goes acrost the sky. It’s what they do, like flies bite. They always have and they always will.”
STATE OF FEAR by Michael Crichton. Climate science has not been especially kind to this technothriller, which pooh-poohs the notion that humans might be responsible for global warming. Nine of the ten hottest years on record have occurred since this book was published in 2004. Crichton didn’t live to see most of those years. He died in 2008 of lymphoma. Though he was a doctor/scientist, Crichton frequently ignored the scientific consensus, which may account for the fact that he maintained a smoking habit of several packs of cigarettes a day for most of his adult life. But good solid science has never been the best reason for reading a Crichton novel. As Stephen King put it: “A Crichton book was a headlong experience driven by a man who was both a natural storyteller and fiendishly clever when it came to verisimilitude; he made you believe that cloning dinosaurs wasn't just over the horizon but possible tomorrow. Maybe today.” So go ahead and enjoy this exciting thriller. Just don’t quote from it when debating climate change with your liberal Prius-driving neighbor.
THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE by Forrest Carter. For years this book was quite popular among school librarians. It tells the story of a boy who is orphaned at five and goes to live with his Cherokee grandparents, who instill in him a love of the land and of his Native American ancestors and their ways. Originally published in 1976 as a memoir, the book was reclassified as fiction in 1991 because of evidence produced by scholars that Carter had made up most of the story. Oprah Winfrey once recommended the book on her website. She pulled the recommendation when it was revealed that Forrest Carter was actually Asa Earl Carter, a notorious racist and one-time leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Carter’s racism can’t be excused as George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson’s racism often is by saying, “His racial attitudes were typical of the time.” Even for his time (1925-1979) Carter’s racism was horrifying. He was once a speechwriter for Alabama’s white-supremacist Governor George Wallace. But even Wallace, amazingly, found him too fervent a racist, and got rid of him. It should be noted that Carter’s nastiness wasn’t just directed at African Americans. He once shot two of his fellow Klansmen in a dispute over money. All of which makes it even more amazing that he produced a beautifully written novel that is a hymn to the idea that mankind should live in harmony with the natural world and the spirit world. It also contains many beautiful observations on language itself. Consider the scene where a peddler named Mr. Wine explains to Little Tree the difference between “stingy” and “thrifty”:
[Mr. Wine said] If you was stingy, you was as bad as some big shots which worshipped money and you would not use your money for what you had ought. He said if you was that way then money was your god, and no good would come of the whole thing.
He said if you was thrifty, you used your money for what you had ought but you was not loose with it. Mr. Wine said that one habit led to another habit, and if they was bad habits, it would give you a bad character. If you was loose with your money, then you would get loose with your time, loose with your thinking and practical everything else. If a whole people got loose, then politicians seen they could get control. They would take over loose people and before long you had a dictator. Mr. Wine said no thrifty people was ever taken over by a dictator. Which is right.
To his dying day, Paul Robeson never denounced his devotion to Stalinism, but that is no reason for us to eschew listening to his records. Stalinist or not, he was a great singer. Likewise, Carter’s racism is no reason for us to eschew his fiction. And it reached its pinnacle in The Education of Little Tree.
The illiberal leftie sitting next to you on the long flight to Chicago may furrow his brow, but go ahead and read this book. It is proof that even in the most benighted of souls a little light sometimes penetrates.
HANTA YO by Ruth Beebe Hill. According to Michael Korda’s Making The List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller – 1900-1999, Hanta Yo was the 15th bestselling novel of 1979. It was generally well-received by critics. A reviewer for the Harvard Crimson called it “the best researched novel yet written about an American Indian tribe.” The positive reception didn’t last long. Shortly after the book’s publication, Sioux activists took offense at its portrayal of Plains Indian life and, according to an article in People magazine, “tried to force the work out of bookstores and libraries.” Ironically, one of the things the protestors objected to back in 1979 was that the book portrayed homosexuality as if it were a natural part of Indian life. Nowadays that might be a selling point for the politically-correct. The author spent nearly 30 years researching this 1100-page tome. She interviewed more than 700 Native Americans during the course of her research, one of whom, Chunksa Yuha, lived with her and her husband and acted as her technical advisor for fifteen years. The back of the book contains an extensive glossary of Lakota Sioux words, and a separate compendium of the tribe’s idiomatic phrases. The book has been out of print for years, but it deserves a rediscovery. If you really want to annoy your politically-correct seatmate, mention that Ruth Beebe Hill was an active member of both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Ayn Rand Institue.
THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER by William Styron. The author was a lifelong lefty and a close friend of James Baldwin. His book was a phenomenal success, winning a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and placing second on the list of the bestselling novels of 1967. So why should it enrage your politically-correct seatmate? After its initial success, the book began drawing heavy criticism from African-American scholars and critics. Some didn’t like Styron’s portrait of Turner as a bumbling would-be revolutionary. Some didn’t like what they saw as a too-sympathetic portrait of wealthy southern plantation owners. Some didn’t like his treatment of interracial sexual attraction. These objections led to an anthology, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, which was generally negative in tone. The book has survived the controversy. It has remained perpetually in print and is even included on some collegiate reading lists. Still, hyper-correct members of the illiberal left, most of whom probably haven’t read the book, tend to turn up their noses at Styron’s act of “cultural appropriation.”
Anything by Elia Kazan. If The Confessions of Nat Turner finished in second place on the fiction bestseller list of 1967, what masterpiece of American literature finished in first place? Believe it or not it was The Arrangement, a novel by film director Elia Kazan. Is it any good? In a word, no. But Kazan’s name on the title of a book should be enough to annoy any illiberal leftie, provided he’s old enough to remember the controversy Kazan stirred up when he went before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee back in 1952 and gave them the names of Communists he had known in his own days as a fellow traveler. Kazan wrote five novels, none of them distinguished, but a couple of them are at least fun to read in a so-bad-it’s-good kind of way. My personal favorite is The Assassins, in which Kazan’s hero, Master Sergeant Cesario Flores, murders a man in cold blood because the man is a (wait for it) hippie! James Baldwin provided a blurb for the paperback, and it’s a masterpiece of noncommittal-ness: “The tone of the book is extremely striking, for it really does not seem to depend on anything that we think of as a literary tradition, but on something older than that: the tale being told by a member of the tribe.”
THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie. When The Satanic Verses was first published in 1989 liberals considered it practically a duty to rush out and buy a copy. For writing the book, the author was given a death sentence by Ayatollah Khomeini. In those long-ago days progressive thinkers objected to any kind of book-banning. Thus the book became the sixth bestselling novel in America for the year 1989. But things have changed. Since September 11, 2001, liberals have become extremely deferential to all things Islamic. President Obama was criticized by right-wing commentators for refusing to even utter words such as “Islamo-fascism” or “Islamic terrorism.” Leftwing newspapers go out of their way to avoid triggering an Islamic backlash by refusing to publish depictions of the Prophet Mohammad in their pages (this is understandable, considering the disastrous consequences the publishers of Charlie Hebdo suffered for violating this policy). Nowadays if you’re caught reading The Satanic Verses you’re more likely to be construed as an enemy of Islam rather than as a defender of free speech. But who cares what the politically correct think?
THE FAR PAVILIONS by M.M. Kaye. Rushdie wouldn’t like to see his book cheek-by-jowl with this one. In his essay “Outside the Whale,” he had this to say about the TV adaptation of Kaye’s novel: “Now of course The Far Pavilions is the purest bilge. The great processing machines of TV soap-opera have taken the somewhat more fibrous garbage of the M.M. Kaye book and pureed it into easy-swallowing, no-chewing-necessary drivel.” Rushdie considers Kaye’s writings about India to be part of a long line of “fake portraits inflicted by the West on the East.” But M.M. Kaye was born in India and spent the first ten years of her life there. She spoke Hindustani before she spoke English. She was sent to England for some formal schooling, but she later returned to India to get married and raise a family. Though she spent the last several decades of her life in England, her last will and testament instructed her heirs to scatter her ashes upon Lake Pichola in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Like many of the daughters of British colonial officers, Kaye was a woman torn between two cultures and not fully accepted by either of them. If her India was more romantic and melodramatic than Rushdie’s, it was nonetheless born of a genuine love for the land of her birth. The romanticism of her novels was a deliberate attempt to offset the wholly negative view of the British Raj that was presented in most serious novels of the era. In her memoir The Sun in the Morning she wrote: “Too many people have already written, or are engaged in writing, ‘committed,’ politically slanted or fashionable books for me to try adding to their number. Yes, there was poverty, squalor and starvation; drought and famine; epidemics and corruption…But if I do not choose to write much about such things it is because I know I can safely leave that to the legions who can – and are only to eager to do so.” She held a particular contempt for E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India, which she considered “an anti-British fairy-tale.” In her memoir she asks rhetorically if any of these anti-Raj writers ever do any research on the Raj, “or are they so anxious to blacken its name that they invent these tales deliberately, as E.M. Forster invented some of the preposterous statements he made in that virulent attack on his own race, A Passage to India, a book that seems to be regarded as Holy Writ by the trendy who have swallowed every word of it and for some reason like to think the very worst about the British in India. Forster has been equally slanderous and nasty about Indians. Nastier, in fact – though none of his admirers has chosen to notice that. Or perhaps they think the Indians are not quick enough on the uptake to know when they are being insulted.”
With her great imagination, M.M. Kaye would likely have been a successful novelist no matter where she was born. To fault her for writing about India, is to fault her for having been born there. If you love a great big fat romantic adventure novel, ignore the cultural snobs and dive into The Far Pavilions, the fourth bestselling novel of 1978, according to Michael Korda. (Korda’s own novel, Queenie, about the rise of an impoverished girl from India to Hollywood stardom is itself an insanely entertaining act of cultural appropriation.)
GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell. You knew this was coming. The bestselling novel of both 1936 and 1937, Gone With The Wind remains one of the most popular American novels of all time. Had it been written by a man, it might be ranked alongside From Here To Eternity and The Red Badge of Courage as one of the greatest of all American war novels. Having been written by a woman, it has generally been categorized as a romance novel. And nowadays it’s likely to be categorized as a racist romance novel. It’s true that Mitchell wasn’t much interested in portraying the evils of slavery. Hers is a rather romantic version of the antebellum (and bellum) South. You shouldn’t read this book (or any other) uncritically. But you should read it. It’s beautifully written and fiendishly plotted. Nobody faults James Jones for the fact that his novels don’t fully explore the racism of the segregated U.S. Army during World War II. For the most part he tells his stories through the eyes of working-class white men, who probably weren’t bothered much by racism. Likewise, Gone With the Wind is told through the eyes of Scarlett O’Hara, a daughter of the Southern aristocracy. It makes sense that she doesn’t care to dwell on slavery. Had Gone With the Wind been written by a man, the quest for the Great American Novel might have been settled in 1936. Instead, Mitchell’s work has been generally derogated as The Great American Pop Fiction. Literary snobs might object to its melodrama and accessibility. Illiberal leftists might justifiably object to its white-washing of the horrors of slavery. But go ahead and read it anyway. Few American novels have ever been as absorbing as this one.
THE GOOD EARTH by Pearl S. Buck. In a review she posted at Goodreads.com, author Celeste Ng, wrote: “It’s difficult for me to explain how much I hate this book.” And then she goes on to mention, among other things, “the weirdness that arises from a Westerner writing about a colonized country.” Ms. Ng was born in Pittsburgh, PA, grew up in Shaker Heights, OH, and attended nothing but exclusive American schools, including Harvard University. Ms. Buck, on the other hand, was taken to China by her American missionary parents when she was five months old. She was raised largely by a Chinese nanny, spoke Chinese before she spoke English, and spent most of the first forty years of her life in China. If a 40-year-old Vietnamese-born writer who came to America at five months and spoke English as her first language were to publish a novel about white Americans, would she be castigated for being an Easterner writing about the West? I can’t imagine it. Don’t listen to the haters. Buck was no cultural appropriator (whatever that might be). She knew China as well as anyone who has ever written about it. Buck was born into a country (the U.S.A.) where women had few rights, and she was raised in another country (China) where women had few rights. When she reached adulthood, she still wouldn’t have been allowed to vote in the U.S. and would have had trouble pursuing any kind of credentialed profession. Instead, she turned her considerable intellect and imagination to one of the few creative avenues open to gifted women of the era, the production of literary works. To punish her now for having written about pretty much the only subject matter she was an expert on, Chinese life, is to retroactively deny her even more rights. Read her books, and don’t apologize for her. There is a curious aspect of sexism in much of the criticism of both Pearl S. Buck and M.M. Kaye. To my knowledge, neither Celeste Ng nor any other Pearl S. Buck hater has registered any displeasure with the work of John Hersey, even though his biography is in many ways similar to Buck’s. He was born in China to American missionary parents. He spoke Chinese before he spoke English. Many of his works (The Call, A Single Pebble, White Lotus, Hiroshima) are set in Asia. Like Buck he was the winner of a Pulitzer Prize. Like Buck’s, his books were widely read. Why has he escaped the criticism of being “a Westerner writing about a colonized country”? Likewise, the case of M.M. Kaye and her literary agent, Paul Scott. Scott, no doubt inspired by Kaye, also wrote novels about India. Scott was born and raised in England. As a young British soldier, he spent a few years in India during World War II. He returned a couple of times to do research, but he had nowhere near the connection to India that M.M. Kaye had. And yet he generally escapes the “cultural appropriation” criticism that dogs M.M. Kaye. Why? Scott was a nasty alcoholic and an abusive husband to his wife, who kept the family afloat financially for years while he flailed as a writer. Kaye has no such nastiness in her biography, so why does she get so much grief for writing about the country of her birth while Scott gets off practically…well, Scott free? I have no proof that sexism is to blame for this unequal treatment, but it can’t be entirely discounted either.
There you have it. The left enthusiastically supports the reading of banned books but isn’t so eager to have you read politically incorrect ones. Your assignment for this year’s Banned Books Week, then, is to read a novel that, though it may not be banned in your local high school, probably isn’t promoted there either. Liberals claim to be the great champions of problematic literature. Test their tolerance by going out in public this month and reading a book that’s sure to annoy them.
TWO CHEERS FOR ERICH SEGAL
Born the son of a rabbi in New York City, Erich Segal managed to gain admittance to Harvard University in the 1950s when it was still a very WASPy and anti-Semitic place. Despite the handicap of his Jewishness, he became both the official poet of and the valedictorian of Harvard’s Class of 1958. That might have been highlight enough for one man’s life, but it was just the beginning of Segal’s. He became a renowned scholar. He taught both Greek and Latin at some of the world’s most prestigious universities: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Oxford. His book on the Roman playwright Plautus inspired a renewed interest in Roman comedy and was the inspiration for the Broadway smash A Funny Thing Happened To Me on the Way to the Forum. Segal co-wrote the screenplay to the Beatles film Yellow Submarine, during which period he hung out a great deal with John Lennon. He wrote the screenplays for several other films before banging out an outline for a movie he called Love Story. When he couldn’t interest a studio in making a film from his story, he decided to turn it into a novel. The novel – and the subsequent film version – became massive successes.
At this point Segal became a bit full of himself. Nora Ephron profiled him for an issue of Esquire shortly after Love Story had become a monster bestseller. The man Ephron describes is a shallow jerk. Approached at a New York City restaurant by a couple of fans who want him to sign their menu, Segal tells the couple, “Go next door and buy the book and then I’ll sign an autograph for you.” Even Jacqueline Susann, the author of Valley of the Dolls and a world-class egomaniac herself, found Segal obnoxious. She once chided him, “You don’t need to add the words ‘world-wide bestseller’ every time you mention the name of your novel on TV.” Nobody deserved a precipitous fall more than that version of Segal did. And the fall came. His sequel to Love Story, called Oliver’s Story, was nowhere near as successful as its forbearer and was widely derided by critics. Another romantic novel, A Man, A Woman, and a Child, was equally as forgettable. Segal was hired by ABC TV to provide color commentary during the Olympic Marathons of 1972 and 1976 (Segal himself was a competitive marathoner who completed the Boston Marathon numerous times). By the end of the 1970s he was better known as a TV commentator than as a writer. But in the 1980s Segal began to craft that American second act that F. Scott Fitzgerald once deemed to be as mythical as a unicorn. Instead of knocking out very short schmaltzy romances that were little more than prose film treatments, Segal began writing very long, multi-layered, many-charactered dramas centered around his old alma mater, Harvard. The Class, published in 1985, follows a fictionalized version of Segal’s own Harvard class of 1958. In it, Segal does an admirable job of marshalling a complex group of characters and steering them through many ups and downs, beginning with their arrival at Harvard in 1954 and concluding with their 25th class reunion in 1983.
In 2012, two years after Segal’s death and 27 years after the publication of The Class, Harvard graduate and novelist Deborah Copaken Kogan wrote a sentimental re-evaluation of the novel for the Times. In it, she detailed the novel’s shortcomings. Segal’s writing could sometimes be clichéd and his stories tended to be a bit melodramatic. But she also justifiably praised its strengths as well:
What can you say about a 72-year-old man who died? More salient, what can you say about a 27-year-old novel that survives him? That it was a best seller. And brilliant in parts, but mostly not. That it loved Mozart and Bach. And Harvard. Also Harvard. Did I mention Harvard?
In “The Class,” Segal — who taught at Yale but held three Harvard degrees — grapples, consciously or not, with the twin millstones of Harvard and early fame via five “Mad Men”-era graduates who conquer the world in quantifiable, exceptional ways: the Harvard myth — nay, the Segal myth — writ large.
As Kogan makes clear, The Class is not great literature, but it is great pop fiction, much more so than the sappy Love Story. Although Kogan didn’t mention it, Segal followed up The Class with an even better novel set at Harvard. Doctors, published in 1988, follows the Harvard Medical School graduating class of 1962 from their childhood days in the 1940s all the way up into their own forties. It is a potent mix of medical drama, legal drama, and academic drama. Once again, the book has a few too many clichés to qualify as great literature, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a more gripping nearly-700-page novel on the bestseller lists of any particular decade. Segal clearly did his homework on this one. In a postscript he talks about shadowing numerous doctors in a variety of specialties on their rounds for several years. But the book wears its research lightly. Segal focuses on the human stories rather than on the technical details of a doctor’s life and work.
After Doctors, Segal had two more good books left in him, Prizes and Acts of Faith. Prizes follows a number of scientists in various disciplines, all of whom have reason to believe they might someday garner the attention of the Nobel Prize Committee. It’s filled with drama and melodrama, pushy stage parents, unfaithful lovers, scientist who steal research from others or don’t properly credit their research assistants – even a Hollywood movie producer with a yen for hot young starlets makes an appearance. It’s juicy pulp fiction with a lot of surprisingly interesting commentary about science and those who pursue it as a vocation. Acts of Faith follows several characters pursuing religious vocations: an Irish-American Catholic who wants to be a priest, a young Jewish man who is expected to follow in his rabbi father’s footsteps, a young Jewish woman who wants to be a rabbi despite her family’s objections. It’s less pulpy and more earnest than Prizes, but still a compelling piece of entertainment.
When writing about the ups and downs of highly intelligent people pursuing professional careers, Segal positively shined. It’s a shame he wasted so much of his energy writing third-rate romance novels.
MY ARCHENEMY
For years I have been a casual collector of other people’s diaries, especially travel journals. At flea markets, garage sales, antiques stores, and estate sales, my eyes are constantly on the lookout for small leather-bound books with the words “My Travels” or “My Voyage Abroad” embossed on the cover. Throughout the 1980s and 90s these were fairly easy to find and I could afford to be picky when it came to buying one. If the price seemed slightly high or the content slightly ordinary, I could walk away from a journal confident that a better one would present itself on my next antiques hunt. But old-time travel journals have become scarce lately. I used to find a half dozen good ones every year. Now I’m lucky if I encounter one or two.
Although the supply of handwritten journals is drying up, my appetite for them has not. And since I can no longer satisfy that appetite at local garage sales and flea markets, I’ve been forced to turn to that vast online timesuck/money pit known as eBay. It won’t surprise you to hear that eBay has old-time handwritten travel journals aplenty. eBay probably has silver-plated Peruvian nose-hair clippers aplenty. But eBay also has about a gazillion daily visitors, which means that when an elderly Curtis Park resident dies and the contents of her home go up for sale, I am likely to find myself competing for her 1937 travel journal not with just a few other Sacramento-area garage-sale junkies but with every other handwritten-ephemera enthusiast in the universe. Fortunately, travel journals handwritten by obscure dead people are nowhere near as popular as, say, Mickey Mantle rookie cards or 1964 mint-condition Spiderman comic books. Unfortunately, one online rare-manuscripts dealer seems determined to completely dominate the market in handwritten diaries and travel journals. And his pockets are much, much deeper than mine. This man is my archenemy. His online shop is a handwritten-ephemera lover’s dream. Except for the prices. They are a nightmare. I don’t want to disclose my archenemy’s name. For convenience, let’s just call him Archie.
Many’s the time I’ve placed what I thought was a generous bid on an old diary, only to be immediately outbid by Archie. At other times he has allowed me to be the high bidder on an item for days on end, permitting me to get so close to success I can practically taste it on my tongue, only to swoop in at the last second and defeat me with his superior economic resources. If Archie were a true lover of ephemera like me, a person who derives an inexpressible thrill from holding an old diary in his hands and traveling to another place and time via the words of some long-dead human being, I wouldn’t begrudge him his victories over me. But love doesn’t seem to have much to do with Archie’s interest in handwritten ephemera. Mere days after he has defeated me in another eBay auction, I will visit his website and find that his latest acquisition is up for sale, always for at least four or five times what he paid for it. This isn’t a man who savors the touch and smell of an old leather-bound journal with art-deco lettering embossed in gold on its cover. This isn’t a man who returns again and again to the same journals, reading over and over some twentysomething young woman’s unpretentious account of her trip to Europe in 1927. No, Archie is a man with his eye on the main chance, always on the lookout for an opportunity to convert a one-of-a-kind literary treasure into cold hard cash. Sometimes he does this in ways that I find shameless.
A few months ago Archie and I both bid on a journal written by an American woman while she was traveling through Europe in the summer of 1978. Naturally, Archie won the bidding war. This diary-keeper (I’ll call her “Beth”) was 23 in 1978 and away for the first time in her life from her small hometown in the Great Plains. Like many another young American in the 1970s, Beth experimented freely with sex and drugs, and she wrote about it candidly in her diary. But, judging by the excerpts from the diary that were posted on eBay, she wrote about a lot of other things as well: the excitement and scariness of being so far away from home, the thrill of encountering well-known European landmarks she had formerly seen only in movies and books, the oddity of foreign food and places and people. But you wouldn’t know all this from the description of the diary on Archie’s online store. The website uses Beth’s real name in full (unlike the eBay seller, who discreetly withheld it) and then describes her diary as a tale of “drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” Despite the fact that the hippie era peaked ten years earlier, Archie calls Beth’s diary “a study in hippie era travel and indulgence and the writer shares it all.” In his semiliterate English, Archie goes on to say that Beth and her traveling companions “meet several men, smoked hashish and pot, drank and drugged quite a bit, and the writer describes their travels sometimes in a quite rank and salty language. She really holds nothing back. As with so many young people coming out of ‘the sixties’ which many call the age of ‘irresponsible excess and flamboyance.’ This diary documents it well.”
What is galling about this invasion of privacy is the fact that Beth died at 55, of breast cancer, in 2010, leaving behind two adult sons and several grandchildren. Judging from an online memorial created for Beth by her friends and family, she was an amazing person, a single mother who put herself through college, graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology at the age of 40. She was a lifelong lover of animals, and eventually the owner-operator of her own small business, although earlier in her life she had often held two jobs at the same time just to make sure that her children never knew want. But you won’t learn any of this from Archie’s website. He didn’t care enough about her to do any research into her life. As I recall, Archie acquired Beth’s diary for $300. He is now offering it for sale at $2295.
For his treatment of Beth and for other reasons, I often find myself despising Archie. But, if I’m being honest, I have to admit that there are advantages in having an archenemy. Mine has saved me a truckload of money over the years. I love handwritten ephemera but I am damned near a pauper and shouldn’t really be spending money on anything that isn’t an absolute necessity.
Although I have never bested Archie in an auction, I have managed to at least do some damage to him. Through the years I have forced him to spend thousands of dollars more for diaries than he would have if I hadn’t competed with him. Because, unlike Archie, I don’t sell diaries online, he is almost certainly unaware of my identity. But I’m sure he senses that I am out there. I can sometimes tell by the number of bids that he and I are the only ones competing for a particular item on eBay. I know who my competitor is but, if he knows me at all, it must be as The Shadow, a mysterious ephemera enthusiast who bids on almost every travel diary that gets posted on eBay but never wins the bidding.
Archie and I have never met, we live thousands of miles apart, but thanks to the internet and our mutual interest in handwritten ephemera, we are bound to one another like Spiderman and Doc Octopus, Superman and Lex Luther, Batman and the Joker. I am not a superhero (or even a regular one) but having an archenemy sometimes makes me feel as though I am. Sadly, Archie possess more of the only superpower – wealth – that matters in the skirmishes between us. Ah well, if nothing else, these skirmishes provide me with material for my own handwritten diary.
WOODY, CLINT, AND DUTCH: THREE AMERICAN MASTERS, EACH WITH A LONG-TERM COMMITMENT TO CRIME FICTION
Few American pop-culture icons remain active and relevant in their chosen field for very long. Most pop-culture icons are associated with a particular decade, even if they managed to put together a career that spanned a half century. We associate Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner with the 1960s. Nothing they did after the original Star Trek series was ever quite as important. We associate Olivia Newton John and Burt Reynolds with the 1970s. Writer Jean Auel was a 1980s phenomenon. Pearl Jam was a 1990s phenomenon. Only a handful of the artists who survived long enough to not only see this current decade but also to make an important cultural contribution to it were also culturally relevant in all of the previous six decades. That handful, you could argue, consists of only three men: Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, and Elmore Leonard. Yes, I am aware that Tony Bennett recorded his first number-one record in 1951, but he has never had anywhere near the pop-cultural cache that Eastwood, Allen, and Leonard have all achieved. Likewise, writer Lawrence Block has a distinguished publishing career stretching all the way back to the 1950s but, alas, he is a household name only to connoisseurs of great crime fiction. The average American couldn’t pick him out of a line-up.
Elmore Leonard’s first published story appeared in Argosy magazine in 1951. If we argue that no one really hits the cultural big time in America until he’s discovered by Hollywood, then we can date Leonard’s true cultural relevance to 1956, the year of his first credit on the Internet Movie Database. Woody Allen’s first IMDb credit dates back to 1956 as well. Clint Eastwood’s first IMDb credit is from 1955. In essence, all three of these men first crept into the public eye within the span of about a year.
Eastwood didn’t make a big splash until 1959, when he began costarring in Rawhide, a popular Western TV series. Leonard’s first big splash came in 1957, the year that two of his western stories were made into films, The Tall T (from a story called “The Captive”) and 3:10 From Yuma. Allen first gained pop-cultural relevance when he began writing gags for TV performers such as Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, Buddy Hackett, Jack Paar, and Ed Sullivan in the mid to late 50s. Born in 1935, Allen was more precocious than either Leonard or Eastwood. He began selling jokes professionally while still a teenager. Eastwood was born five years before Allen and Leonard was born five years before Eastwood, but they all hit the big time in the same decade.
The decade of the 1960s was a big one for all three men, though it certainly wouldn’t prove to be the acme of any of their careers. Allen’s first feature film as both writer and director, Take The Money and Run (a title befitting at least half of Elmore Leonard’s crime novels), was released in 1969. Eastwood’s legendary collaboration with Sergio Leone began in 1964 with the release of A Fistful of Dollars. And in 1969 Leonard made one of the most important transitions of his career when he switched from being a writer primarily of westerns to being a writer primarily of crime novels. That was the year The Big Bounce, his first crime novel was published.
You could argue (many have) that Allen’s career peaked in the late 1970s with the releases of Annie Hall in 1977 and Manhattan in 1979. Other prominent Allen titles of the 1970s include Love and Death, Sleeper, Bananas, and Play it Again, Sam. But of Allen’s 24 Academy Award nominations, 17 have come after the end of the 1970s. Three of them have come in the current decade. His work in the 1980s included such masterpieces as Hannah and Her Sisters, Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Crimes and Misdemeanors. I would argue that Allen, who will turn 80 this year, remains one of America’s most prominent, and relevant, filmmakers. His most financially successful film is Midnight In Paris, released earlier this decade.
Although the 1970s were huge for Leonard, his biggest decades were still to come. Four of the novels he published in the 70s (Fifty-Two Pickup, Swag, Unknown Man # 89, and The Switch) have been collected for posterity in a Library of America edition of his works. Likewise, four of his novels of the 1980s (City Primeval, Glitz, LaBrava, and Freaky Deaky) have received the same honor. The decade of 1990s was arguable his peak as a novelist. That was the decade during which he became celebrated by writers outside the crime/mystery genre. In 1995, Martin Amis reviewed Riding the Rap in the New York Times Book Review and declared that Leonard possessed “gifts -- of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing -- that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet.” Saul Bellow was also a fan. Two of Leonard’s best crime novels – Get Shorty and Out of Sight – were published in the 1990s, both of which became critically acclaimed films. It was also the decade in which he introduced the American public to Deputy U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, inarguably his-best known fictional creation. Givens first appeared in the novel Pronto, but made his biggest cultural impact in the FX network television series Justified, which is based on the Leonard short story “Fire in the Hole.” Justified will almost certainly stand as Leonard’s most widely known contribution to popular culture (the series was developed for television by Graham Yost). Leonard’s novel Pronto, published 22 years ago, has generated a mere 152 user comments on Amazon.com. The TV series Justified has generated 15,984 Amazon.com comments, roughly 100 times more than Pronto’s total. The series debuted in March of 2010 when Leonard was still very much alive and active. He received a writing credit on four of the episodes. Although Leonard died in August of 2013, the series remained on the air until April 2015. To the very end it remained popular with viewers and critics alike.
It’s difficult to say which decade of his career was Eastwood’s most successful, but there’s no question that his most commercially successful production was last year’s film American Sniper, which earned $349 million dollars at the domestic box office. Most of that money was earned early in 2015, making this year arguably Eastwood’s most successful. Of his eleven Academy Award nominations, ten have come in the last dozen years.
Elmore “Dutch” Leonard, Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen. The three men share many attributes, both bad (messy personal lives) and good (tremendous critical and popular success), but there is no doubting that all three have shared a strong commitment to crime fiction that dates all the way back to the 1960s. In Leonard’s case, the commitment to crime fiction is self-evident. Most of his published oeuvre is in the crime genre. Likewise, Eastwood’s most iconic film role is the character of “Dirty” Harry Callahan, the San Francisco police inspector he played in five films between 1971 and 1988. And Dirty Harry was far from Eastwood’s only contribution to crime fiction. As a director he has brought the work of many noteworthy crime writers to the screen, including novelists Michael Connelly, Dennis Lahane, and David Baldacci (Eastwood and Elmore Leonard collaborated on the film Joe Kidd, a 1972 western starring Eastwood, written by Leonard, and directed by John Sturges). Play Misty For Me, Eastwood’s directorial debut, was a crime thriller. His filmography bulges with work in the crime and mystery genres: Escape From Alcatraz, Tightrope, Pink Cadillac, The Rookie, In The Line of Fire, A Perfect World, Absolute Power, True Crime, Blood Work, Mystic River, Gran Torino, and so forth.
Ask someone to associate Eastwood or Leonard with a particular genre of fiction and they are likely to mention either the western or the crime story, although Eastwood, at least, has done plenty of work in other genres such as the romance (The Bridges of Madison County), the spy thriller (The Eiger Sanction, Firefox) and the war film (Heartbreak Ridge, Where Eagles Dare, American Sniper). Ask the average American to associate Woody Allen with a particular genre and they are likely to answer “film comedy” or perhaps “romantic comedy.” What many people seem to overlook is the fact that Allen has written and directed more crime films than many directors who are far better known for their work in that genre. As I noted earlier, his directorial debut was the comic crime caper Take the Money and Run (technically his debut was What’s Up, Tiger Lilly, but that spoof is primarily an overdub of a Japanese film directed by Senkichi Taniguchi). His film Sleeper is the story of a man on the run from a gestapo-like organization in a futuristic police state. Broadway Danny Rose is about a talent agent involved with the mob. Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Bullets Over Broadway, Small Time Crooks – the very titles of those films scream out “crime story!” The Curse of the Jade Scorpion is about a jewel theft, Match Point is a tale of illicit sex and murder, Scoop is a supernatural murder mystery, Cassandra’s Dream is a dramatic tale of murder and its aftermath, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger includes a character who plagiarizes a dead man’s unpublished novel, and Blue Jasmine deals with a woman’s struggle to survive after her wealthy husband is jailed for multiple financial crimes. Even when he takes an acting job in some other director’s film, Allen seems to be drawn to crime stories. In Martin Ritt’s film The Front, Allen plays a man who attracts the attention of the FBI and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee after he agrees to fraudulently represent himself as the author of TV scripts that were actually written by writers blacklisted for their ties to communism. In Alfonso Arau’s 2000 film Picking Up the Pieces, Allen stars as a butcher who murders his unfaithful wife, chops her body into pieces, and buries them in a New Mexico desert. In the animated film Antz, directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson, Allen voices a character who is falsely accused of being a war criminal. In John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo, Allen plays a pimp. Even much of Allen’s lighter comedic fair has some element of criminality in it. In Magic in the Moonlight, for instance, the main character, played by Colin Firth, is a magician who is trying to expose a con woman, played by Emma Stone. In Deconstructing Harry, a distraught woman (played by Judy Davis) attempts to murder her ex-lover (Allen) by firing a gun at him. Mighty Aphrodite involves a prostitute and her violent pimp. Shadows and Fog involves the search for a serial killer. What’s more, Allen has spoofed detective fiction in numerous prose pieces written for the New Yorker. These include such comic gems as “The Whore of Mensa,” “Mr. Big,” “Match Wits with Inspector Ford,” “This Nib for Hire,” “How Deadly Your Taste Buds, My Sweet,” and “Above the Law, Below the Box Springs.”
Clint, Dutch, and Woody. Until recently, all three were still walking the earth and still very much an important part of the contemporary cultural scene. It’s curious that three men who spent so much of their lives crafting stories about lives cut short by murder would themselves live such long and productive lives. Dutch is no longer with us, but Clint and Woody remain professionally active to this day. With luck, we may get another decade or two of work out of them. Let’s hope that at least some of that work is in the crime genre. Few filmmakers have done it better.
AUNT BONNIE’S CHRISTMAS BOOK
My two stepdaughters and their father are world-class Christmas shoppers. All three of them love braving the holiday crowds and filling shopping cart after shopping cart with expensive presents for all eight of my grandchildren. My wife refuses to compete in this costly Olympics of commercialism. She has always been the family’s unofficial photographer, snapping numerous pics at birthday bashes, volleyball tournaments, backyard barbecues, and the annual family trek to Apple Hill. As Christmas approaches, she selects each grandchild’s best photo, mattes it, and places it in a frame. She buys inexpensive off-the-rack frames and does all the work herself. The cost per grandchild is about ten bucks. Through the years, the thousands of toys my grandchildren have received as Christmas presents have mostly vanished, but my wife’s framed photos have mostly endured, proving that it’s the gifts you can’t buy at Toys-R-Us that tend to last the longest.
I was reminded of the age-old tradition of handmade Christmas gifts when, at the monthly Second Sunday Flea Market in Sacramento, I discovered (and purchased for $10) an odd little poetry book amid a pile of old paper ephemera. The book was written by one Bonnie Madeline Barnes. She wrote it specifically for her niece, Carol Keeny Rawlings. The book is titled “Rambling Rhymes of Childhood Times.” The title page was hand-decorated by “Aunt Bonnie.” The other 50 pages (containing 23 poems) were carefully produced (not a single typo) on a manual typewriter and collected in an old three-ring binder with black leather covers. According to Ancestry.com, Aunt Bonnie was born in 1880, and her niece Carol was born in 1914. The poems appear to be addressed to a child between the ages of ten and fifteen, so Aunt Bonnie must have written them in the late 1920s.
The poems are mainly anecdotes in verse, many of them ending with a quatrain that sums up the (usually trite) moral. At the end of a poem about two naughty boys named Peter and Paul she writes:
To all little girls I send this warning
Till late at night from early morning,
Don’t pattern your actions by Peter and Paul,
Do what is right or do nothing at all.
Though Aunt Bonnie wasn’t much of a poet, she was a gifted storyteller. Most of her anecdotes deal with her own childhood, and they must have given Carol plenty of insight into her own mother’s upbringing. When Aunt Bonnie was a child, her father decided to uproot his family and move them from Marengo, Iowa, to Helena, Montana. This upheaval is recounted in a poem called “The Young Immegrunts” (though she was a schoolteacher, Aunt Bonnie’s spelling is often quirky; this was probably done intentionally, for comic effect). Bonnie’s father (Carol’s grandfather) left for Montana ahead of his family in order to prepare a home for them. It was left to Bonnie’s mother (Carol’s grandmother) to pack up the Iowa house and bring the nine children by train to Montana. Bonnie’s harried mother hired a young woman to help look after the kids on the long train ride. It didn’t work out too well. About this maid, Bonnie wrote:
But she was a crafty thing
And used this means, at best,
As a method of getting herself
And her sweetheart, too, out West.
He was hiding on the train,
Keeping hid from sight,
Mother didn’t see him
Till well along toward night.
Then it happened like this –
The maid couldn’t be found,
So mother began to search,
Hunting all around.
Till she found the pesky thing
On the very back of the train,
Neglectful of her duty,
Spooning with her swain.
Bonnie’s sister Ethel (Carol’s mother) was about ten at the time of the trip, and nearly got her younger brother killed while crossing a switching yard:
Your mother, I think it was,
Took Bill across the track.
He caught his foot in a switch
As they were coming back.
An engine stood nearby,
Puffing and blowing steam,
And when we saw it start,
How we kids did scream!!!
Some men came running to help,
The engine came to a pause,
And so we loosed Bill’s foot
From those awful iron jaws.
Although generally sweet and anodyne, Aunt Bonnie’s book takes an occasional dark turn. In one poem she describes how an aunt of hers tried to get one of her nephews, Nathan, to break off his friendship with an African-American boy named Willie Jones. The aunt even employs the dreaded “N” word in this conversation, after which:
Nathan looked puzzled,
Pondered a bit,
And then he asked,
The reason for it.
Auntie decided
It wasn’t best
To emphasize “Color”
Along with the rest.
So she compromised
With a statement mild,
That she didn’t like
The looks of the child.
Now this to Nathan
Was not enough,
I guess he decided
To call her bluff.
“Auntie, I don’t
Like your style,
But I’ve got to be with you
All the while.
“And your looks to me
Are homely and tame,
But I love you,
Just the same.”
Elsewhere Aunt Bonnie recalls instances when her own father behaved cruelly towards her or one of her siblings and then roared with laughter as though delighted with some joke. Aunt Bonnie doesn’t spare herself either. One poem describes a time when she, still a young girl, stole a dollar from her father’s business partner. Apparently Aunt Bonnie had enough respect for her niece not to try to sugar coat the family’s history.
The best poems in the book are about Aunt Bonnie’s experiences as a teacher. As a rule, she preferred the children of the poor to the children of the wealthy.
The kids from homes of the rich are spoiled,
Those from the poor seldom are,
And the things one tries to do for them,
Are more enjoyed by far.
Their faces are dirty, their clothes are ragged,
As a rule their manners are bad.
But the touch of refinement they get at school
Always makes them feel glad.
She takes particular delight in watching her students wrestle with the English language. In one poem she recalls a child asking her, “Can I go bareheaded on my feet?” Other poems contain similar acts of childhood word play:
In stories they took the keenest delight,
But sometimes they were slow.
To help them understand, I’d explain
The terms they didn’t know.
Once I was reading a tale of old,
Of castles, and queens, and kings,
Of knights, a moat, a buttress,
And various other things.
And when we came to the “Buttress” word,
I stopped my reading a bit,
And asked some one to explain to me,
What was the meaning of it?
Up spoke a rowdy little boy,
A kid raised in the gutter.
“Aw, I know what a buttress is,
A lady who peddles butter.”
Reading the booklet, I was frequently reminded of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books about Anne Shirley, aka Anne of Green Gables. Aunt Bonnie was born just six years after Montgomery, who was born in 1874. The fictional Anne Shirley was born around 1890. In Anne of Avonlea, Anne Shirley is a 17-year-old first-year school teacher whose exploits in her small Canadian town probably very closely resembled Aunt Bonnie’s early years in the profession. Like Aunt Bonnie, Anne Shirley derives a great deal of pleasure from her pupils’ struggles with the English language. Chapter eleven of the novel, called “Facts and Fancies,” consists entirely of a letter Anne writes to her friend Stella, a fellow teacher, which describes the many humorous mistakes that pepper her students’ spoken and written communications. She writes, “Yesterday I was trying to teach Lottie Wright to do addition. I said, ‘If you had three candies in one hand and two in the other, how many would you have altogether?’ ‘A mouthful,’ said Lottie…Did you know that Thomas a Beckett was canonized as a snake? Rose Bell says he was. Also that William Tyndale wrote the New Testament. Claude White says that a ‘glacier’ is a man who puts in window frames!”
Lucy Maud Montgomery was a far better writer than Aunt Bonnie, but none of her examples of youthful malapropism strikes me as being as funny as Aunt Bonnie’s “buttress” anecdote.
Amazingly, this book, so full of wonderful family stories, all of them written in verse, wasn’t the first of its kind that Aunt Bonnie gave to her niece. In the opening poem, Aunt Bonnie refers to last year’s poetry collection. Apparently this was a tradition of hers, writing up family history in verse and passing it on to her niece at Christmas. She must have spent a good part of each year working on her annual collection. This may be the best example I’ve ever seen of the tradition of making homemade gifts that are personal and uncommercial.
I don’t know what Carol Keeny Rawlings thought of her Aunt’s Christmas gift. A search of the internet reveals that Carol died on September 30, 1972, at the age of 57 or 58. But the fact that the book was still in remarkably good shape roughly 90 years after it was assembled and 44 years after Carol’s death suggests that not only did Carol treasure it but some of her heirs must have treasured it too.
Now it’s mine to treasure.
AN ATHEIST READS THE BIBLE
Last year I read the Bible – every word of it. I even have the documentation to prove it – a certificate signed by the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California which says, “Kevin Mims met the Bible Challenge By Reading the Bible in One Year, January 2013 to January 2014.” I may be the only atheist in town who can boast of having received such a citation.
I have owned a big fat copy of The New Oxford Annotated Bible for years without ever so much as dog-earing a single page of it. Now my Bible is filled with bookmarks, Post-It Notes, and marginal scribblings. It looks like the book of a Biblical scholar, or at the very least of a devout Christian, though I am neither.
I was part of a group of people that met every Thursday, at noon, in a meeting hall at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Sacramento to discuss the Bible verses we had read that week. The Episcopal Church has a program called The Bible Challenge, which divides the text up into 365 easy installments. Each day we were assigned a chapter or two of the Old Testament, a single psalm, and a chapter of the New Testament. The people in my group tended to be older (in their 60s, 70s, or 80s) and female (I was one of only two men in the group). The group included people who were raised in variety of different Christian faiths – Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc. One woman was raised a Seventh-Day Adventist and tended to read the Bible very literally. The cradle Episcopalians tended to view the Bible more metaphorically. Because I couldn’t bring any religious faith to these meetings, I decided to bring the next best thing: cookies. I was the only member of the group who didn’t miss a single Thursday session, and I brought cookies to all of them.
Our group sessions were presided over by an Episcopalian priest, but she didn’t make any effort to pass herself off as an expert on the Bible or to discourage heretical thinking. We were there simply discuss our thoughts on what we had read. We were not required to conform to Episcopal orthodoxy – or any other orthodoxy for that matter.
Reading the Bible from cover to cover in a short period of time emphasizes just what an odd document it is. It is less a book than a collection of books, many of which seem to be in conflict with each other. The Song of Solomon, for instance, is a sequence of poems that celebrate sexual love. How it found its way into the Bible, I don’t know. It is filled with beautiful and suggestive imagery: “Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits…” It would be difficult to run a longer quotation than that one without violating the standards of a family newspaper. Because sex is so often treated as a cause for shame and punishment in the Bible, it was refreshing to come upon a book that doesn’t have any Thou Shalt Nots in it, a book that celebrates love and allows its female narrator to talk openly about her desire without being branded a harlot. The women in my group were particularly fond of it, having endured so many passages in the Bible which condemn women as wanton hussies (see, for instance, the Book of Hosea, which employs a particular five-letter synonym for “prostitute” so frequently that the book might just as well be called the Book of Hos).
The Song of Solomon and The Book of Hosea aren’t the only two books of the Bible that appear to be in conflict with each other. In 2 Samuel we see King David behaving appallingly, committing adultery with Bathsheba and making a cuckold of her husband, Uriah. Not content to simply cuckold Uriah, David eventually has him murdered. And even on his deathbed, as recorded in the Book of Kings, David behaves abominably, using his final breaths to order the death of a loyal supporter and violating an earlier oath never to do so. But later, in the second Book of Chronicles, many a subsequent King of Israel is criticized for not being an upright, godly leader like David. Again and again we are told that David never did anything wrong in the sight of the Lord, and yet earlier passages of the Bible have detailed much wrongdoing on David’s part.
I was also surprised to see that the Bible contains some outright errors. In 2 Chronicles 21, we learn that King Jehoram of Israel died at age 40 and was succeeded by his son, Ahaziah, who was 42 at the time. The notes in the New Oxford Annotate Bible disclose that this error occurs in the original and that Ahaziah’s age should probably read “22” not “42.” In any case, a 40-year-old man can’t have a 42-year-old son, so here is a clear evidence that the Bible can be in error.
While reading the Bible I found it difficult to understand how anyone can claim to follow it to the letter. In Leviticus, for instance, we find the famous injunction, “Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” But in Matthew 5:39 Jesus says, “You have heard it said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also…” So which command should one follow if one wishes to live Biblically? You could argue that Jesus’ words trump those of the author of Leviticus. After all Jesus (and later Paul) frequently contradicts Old Testament teaching (for instance, the O.T. is full of dietary restrictions but Jesus tells his followers to eat whatever they want; he also rejects the Pharisees’ strict interpretation of the O.T. injunction against working on the Sabbath). And yet elsewhere in the Bible Jesus insists that every word of the Old Testament is to be followed: “Do not think I have come to abolish the law (of the Old Testament)…For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law.”
So how did the members of my Bible Challenge group resolve these scriptural inconsistencies? We didn’t. But we agreed that having read the entire Bible was likely to make us skeptical of those who assert that the Bible supports only one particular reading or only one particular side of a moral, political, or philosophical argument. Reading the whole Bible teaches you how unhelpful – and even dishonest – it can be to quote selected passages from scripture out of context.
The Bible, like humankind itself, is a record of evolution. Its harshest passages and most Draconian laws come in its earliest books. Gradually, the Bible becomes less aboutrule-making and thepunishment ofevildoers and more about being kind to others and looking after the needy. In the Old Testament, the list of people who inspire the wrath of God is long and wearisome. The Old Testament God wants children stoned to death for disobeying their parents. He wants people punished for eating shellfish, getting tattoos, wearing polyblend clothing, shaving their beards, reading their horoscopes, working on Saturday, engaging in same-sex physical relations, and a whole host of other behaviors that nowadays seem perfectly innocuous. Jesus’ list of evildoers is much shorter than the list found in the Old Testament. He is silent on the matter of tattoos, horoscopes, homosexuality, beard-shaving, polyblend clothing and most of the other Old Testament laws. Jesus saves most of his wrath for the rich. But even though the wealthy come in for a great deal of criticism from Jesus, he never comes close to calling for them to be punished in any way, at least not here on earth, and he certainly doesn't want them executed. When you read the entire Bible, it's hard not to notice that it tends to evolve away from punishment and in the direction of greater forgiveness and kindness to others. It becomes less tribal and more universal. It becomes less about rules and more about personal choices. It becomes less about what not to do and more about helping others. But even this evolutionary reading of the Bible is open for debate. After all, even Jesus, who often comes across as the ultimate peacenik, says at one point, “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth. I come not to bring peace but a sword. I have come to set a son against his father and a daughter against her mother.”
To most of the Bible Challenge meetings I brought chocolate-chip cookies. Occasionally I decided to mix it up a bit. To one meeting I brought a very popular type of cookie that I have always called a Russian Tea Cookie. When I showed up at the meeting with a bowlful of these, I was astounded to hear how many different names my fellow group members had for this one variety of cookie. Some knew them as Mexican Wedding Cookies. Some knew them only as Christmas Cookies. One woman called them Italian Butterballs. Another called them Pecan Puffs. Another claimed they were known as Ambrosia Balls, while still another woman just called them Snowballs. Regardless of what they were called, we all enjoyed them. And no one insisted that her particular name for the cookie was the only truly accurate one. In that regard, the Bible is a bit like a Russian Tea Cookie. Everyone in my group seemed to interpret the Bible in her own unique way. Rarely were we all in agreement about any particularly troubling passage of scripture. There’s nothing wrong with reading the Bible and trying to live by it. But it’s important to recognize that everyone interprets scripture in her own way. It’s best if you don’t insist that everyone interpret it the way you do. We live in a world where few people can agree on what to call a cookie made with pecans, flour, salt, butter, granulated sugar, vanilla extract, and a bit of powdered sugar. We’ll only create trouble for ourselves and others if we insist that everyone interpret a book written thousands of years ago by numerous different authors over a period of many centuries exactly the way we ourselves interpret it.
That’s what I learned from my year of reading the Bible.
THE BOOK OF BRIAN SHEA
In the spring of 2018, I met with Terry Pappas, a Sacramento artist who didn’t know what to do with an enormous unpublished manuscript that her brother left behind when he died the previous year in his early seventies. Her brother’s name was Brian Shea. He and Terry and their siblings grew up in the Bay Area in a middle-class household. He was a multi-talented artist who did a little painting, a little sculpting, some photography, and some collage work, before dedicating himself almost exclusively to creating origami artworks. In the 1970s he moved from the Bay Area onto some land that his family owned in a remote part of Amador County. On this tract of a little over 60 acres Brian spent most of the rest of his life. He was incredibly talented with his hands. He taught himself to play a variety of musical instruments just by picking them up and tinkering with them. Despite having no formal training in the building industry, he managed to build, single-handedly, an amazing compound of houses on his family’s property. Using almost nothing but recycled materials, he built a multi-story, multi-colored building that resembled the pilothouse of some massive wooden ship. He built it in 100 days using reclaimed barn wood he had purchased for $100. He kept a log of the project called One Hundred Days/One Hundred Dollars. Out of recycled galvanized steel he built a gallery for his origami work that looks like a cross between a cathedral and a Quonset hut. He built a small amusement park/play area for his nieces and nephews that featured all sorts of clever rides, none of which required any motorization to operate. He built a sort of honeymoon cabin where he planned to live with his fiancé after they married. Alas, the marriage never came off and the cabin remained largely untenanted. Neither he nor his former fiancé ever married.
His buildings were all strictly off the grid. They used captured rainwater and underground wells as their only source of water. The electricity was provided by generators and solar panels. Most of the lighting was done by oil lamps and candles.
Brian was not a loafer. When he wasn’t practicing one art form or another, or building some new structure from scratch, he was reading and writing. He was a bit of a renaissance man. He knew a little about a lot of subjects, and he knew a lot about quite a few subjects, including the history of Amador County (on which he self-published a few books) and the history of art. Over the course of about forty years, he spent a part of each day writing down his prolific thoughts about all manner of things. He was particularly obsessed by a handful of subjects: capitalism, materialism, creativity, money, progress, nature, technology, psychology and so forth. He would write up these thoughts in longhand and then painstakingly type up clean copies of every adage, maxim, and witticism using an old-fashioned manual typewriter. In addition to his own original observations he frequently typed up quotes from others as well. He quoted people as diverse as Li Po and Sarah Palin. He typed up advertising slogans that he thought encapsulated the mindset of the American consumer. Everything was grist for his mill. And by the time of his death (he died alone of a heart ailment that might easily have been detected had he not abhorred visits to the doctor) his manuscript stood roughly nine feet tall and comprised more than 22,000 numbered pages.
After acquiring the manuscript, I occasionally delved into it, hoping to dig up some gemlike observations from the mind of a man who was clearly an unconventional thinker. I promised Brian’s sister that if I could winnow out a book’s worth of brilliant quotations I would pass it on to her so that she could consider having it published, either privately or commercially. What I had seen of Brian’s life – his works of art, his construction projects, his library – gave me every reason to believe that his massive manuscript might just be a compendium of mind-blowing observations about all manner of subjects. But my hopes, thus far, have been disappointed.
To date, I have read only a few hundred pages of Brian’s manuscript. You can take the measure of almost any literary work by reading a few hundred pages of it, but I’m not sure it’s fair to pass judgment on a 22,000-page manuscript after having read only a bit more than one-percent of its content. Many of his observations are commonplace, if not downright banal: “Each of us wears the mantle of SELF.” “The future of the world depends upon which government does what.” “If ever we give up questioning, we will have sacrificed the thrill of enquiry.” Sometimes he just quotes snippets of ordinary life in the age of the smart phone: “I’ve got to step outside where I can get a better signal.” “Stay connected for further webisodes!” And, as I mentioned before, he quotes a lot of inane commercial-speak: “Only one store has been a part of your life for the past 150 years – Welcome to the Magic of Macy’s!”
Some of Brian’s original observations are indeed pithy and clever (“Violence is force behaving badly.” “Nothing fallacious holds unless stubbornness shores it up.”). But my favorite parts of the book are the quotations that sound profound but whose meanings are somewhat elusive. These come along every few pages or so, and when they do they remind me of the poetry of John Ashbery, the master of the elusive epigram. Here are some of my favorites so far:
Never more are we to be whatever we might have been before.
Such harmony as machinery promises doesn’t sing in organic euphony.
In the Court of Celebrity, appearances get the job done.
How thwartive to human evolution if everything potentially new was immediately channeled into the maintenance of more-of-the-same.
All efforts run their course within the spent range of their available potential.
Clearly, connivance enjoys no comfort zone within the reverberating light of the vital moment.
Nothing arising from within a panoply will ever be capable of reining it in.
In nearly every classroom I ever sat in, there was always one nonconformist who couldn’t seem to parrot the lessons by rote, who refused to accept the conventional wisdom. Generally that type of student is ostracized but we should be celebrating them instead. Brian Shea was one of those people. It’s too late to show him any kindness, but perhaps in his honor we could all try being a little bit nicer to the oddballs and misfits among us. Who knows, they may have an amazing manuscript hidden somewhere inside them.
NOT FAMOUS ENOUGH: HOW POLITICAL CORRECTNESS SUNK ONE OF THE BEST Y-A NOVELS IN THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON
This year marks the 35th anniversary of the publication of Famous All Over Town, one of the best coming-of-age stories in the American literary canon, but don’t expect to see any retrospectives or appreciations of this masterpiece in the mainstream media. The book is funnier, more moving, and better written than Catcher in the Rye, but the fact that it was written by an old white guy rather than a young Hispanic guy keeps it from being better known. Originally, this wasn’t a problem. The book was published under a pseudonym – Danny Santiago (a sort of Latinized version of the author’s real name: Daniel Lewis James) – and the author’s bio suggested he was young (“grew up in Los Angeles,” “his first novel”). The book received raves upon publication. The reviewer for the New York Times wrote: “It is cheering to report that Danny Santiago is a natural…His Famous All Over Town is full of poverty, violence, emotional injury and other forms of major disaster, all vividly and realistically portrayed, yet, like a spring feast-day in a barrio, it is nevertheless relentlessly joyous. Best of all is its language…a rich street Chicano English that pleases the ear like sly and cheerful Mejicana music. Famous All Over Town is a classic of the Chicano urban experience. And Danny Santiago is good news.”
The book was published in 1983. In early 1984 it won a $5000 literary prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The publisher wanted to nominate the book for a Pulitzer Prize but the author refused to provide an author’s photo (a necessity for a Pulitzer nomination). But soon the forces of political correctness turned against it. On August 16, 1984, the New York Review of Books published an essay by novelist John Gregory Dunne in which he exposed that the book was written not by a young Chicano born in L.A. but by an old white guy with a patrician background: moneyed family, Andover Academy prep school, classics degree from Yale, etc. Dunne’s exposé was well intentioned. Daniel Lewis James was not only a friend of Dunne’s and his wife, Joan Didion, but also their former landlord. For a while, in the late 1960s, Dunne and Didion lived in a home owned by James and his wife, Lilith. Dunne thought it was a mistake to publish the novel under a pseudonym. He wanted to show the world that fiction writers don’t need to be born into a particular culture in order to write effectively about it. But Dunne’s essay ignited a bit of a firestorm. Soon the self-proclaimed arbiters of authenticity began pointing their fingers at James and crying “cultural appropriation.”
Scholar Arnd Bohm, writing in The International Fiction Review, summed up the response this way:
The reception turned negative and indeed hostile when John Gregory Dunne revealed "The Secret of Danny Santiago" in theNew York Review of Books…The reaction ranged from consternation to anger. How could James have managed to dupe the publishers and the critics? How did an elderly affluent white author dare to appropriate the voice as well as the topics of minority writing? The Before Columbus Foundation sponsored a symposium at the Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco on the question "Danny Santiago: Art or Fraud," with the consensus opinion of those who participated leaning toward the accusation of fraud.
Fortunately, political correctness was not as powerful a cultural force in those days as it is now. Plenty of voices in the literary community, including some Hispanic ones, came to James’ defense. Interviewed by the New York Times, novelist Thomas Sanchez, an early champion of James’ novel, said, “A work must be judged by the work itself, not the political or ethnic orientation of the author. A lot of professional Chicanos, professional blacks, professional Jews, professional Anglo-Saxons say no one else can cut into their territory. I don't believe in terms of the human race there is any such thing as territory. What creativity and art are all about are the absolute freedom to cross all those lines and go into any point of view in terms of the context of the work.''
Had it been published in 2018 the book might have inspired the kind of pearl-clutching from the illiberal left that recently motivated The Nation to apologize for a poem it had published, called “How-To,” that was written by a white man (Anders Carlson-Wee) from a black man’s perspective. Or it might have created the kind of tempest that brewed up when author Laura Moriarty decided to include a Muslim character in her young-adult novel American Heart (2018). Accused of creating a “white savior narrative,” Moriarty was denounced in often obscene terms on numerous online forums devoted to young-adult fiction. Spooked by the outcry, Kirkus shamefully took the unprecedented step of withdrawing a positive review it had published of Moriarty’s novel.
The backlash against “Danny Santiago” wasn’t as harsh. His book remained in print and no positive reviews were pulled. But, given the magnitude of James’ achievement, the book’s relative obscurity these days is damn near a crime. At the website GoodReads.com, the book has only fifteen reader reviews. This comment, by “Melissa” demonstrates that the pseudonym controversy still hovers over the book’s reputation: “The fact that the author's name is fake so that an old white dude could pretend it was written by a Chicano author does, in fact, take away from the book.” At Amazon.com the book has a mere thirteen reader reviews, including such comments as: “The author has a controversial background and that disrupted the whole reading experience.” The book deserves the kind of prominence that To Kill a Mockingbird (10,175 Amazon.com reader reviews) and Catcher in the Rye (3,613 reader reviews) enjoy. But misguided notions about authenticity have denied the novel its due.
The book does an excellent job of illustrating that Chicano culture, which nowadays is more likely to be referred to as Latino or Hispanic-American culture, is not a monolithic entity. Among the Chicanos in Famous All Over Town, the American-born tend to look down upon the Mexican-born. Those who arrived from Mexico recently are looked down upon by those who arrived years ago. The book shows that even the Spanish language has many permutations, not all of them appreciated equally by all Spanish speakers:
“Ai-yi-yi,” Mr. Pilger said when he saw [the narrator’s grades]. “C-minus average with a D in Spanish? In Spanish, Rudy Medina?”
I didn’t mention it but Miss Helstrom’s Spanish was from Spain. If you talked Mexican, forget it. Only Anglos got A’s with her.
While visiting Mexico with his family, the narrator and his sister find the local Spanish hard to fathom. “Eeeho,” his sisters says, “but they sure talk real crazy Spanish down here. Mercado for marketa, camion for troque, and I had to act out lip-stique, if you can believe it.”
At another point, the narrator says: I went in and found my grandma jabbering that rattle-tattle language of hers…
Of an Italian-American bank manager in L.A., Rudy says: He spoke Spanish almost like a native but with spaghetti sauce on it.
Famous All Over Town engages with many issues that are even more inflammatory now than they were in 1983. At one point the police shoot dead a Chicano teenager who has stolen a car worth only about $50. The author makes clear that the youth was killed not because he stole a car, but because he was poor and Hispanic. The shooting and its aftermath are major episodes in the story:
“You mean to tell me,” Mr. Pilger shouted, “you mean to tell me two weeks’ suspension is all that killer gets?”
“Without pay,” I added.
“And then goes back in uniform to shoot some other kid. And nobody protests? Nobody brings charges? Where’s the ACLU?”
The best reason to read Famous All Over Town isn’t its topicality or its insights into Chicano street life in East L.A. circa 1970. The best reason to read the book is that it is beautifully written. The family’s trip to Mexico goes sour when Rudy and his sister Lena criticize their macho father in front of his in-laws. Almost instantly the father decides to end the vacation and drive his family back to L.A. Here’s how the author describes it:
We climbed into the Buick like strangers on a bus. Nobody came outside to see us off. Four days ago we rolled in there like the Three Magic Kings. Today we were scuttling off in the dawn like the cucarachas…When you’re a kid, your father is like the sun in the sky. Your whole family circles him like a bunch of planets. He gives you your winters and your summers, your good days and your bad, and it’s a black night when his back is turned to you. But we had disobeyed him. We had shamed him in public, and now our Gravity was all gone. The only thing that held us together was the Buick.
Throughout the novel, the Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation is trying to use eminent domain to get the city to condemn and destroy Shamrock Street, the neighborhood where Rudy Medina and his family live. The family and their neighbors fight this effort but, inevitably, the railroad wins. Here’s Rudy describing the destruction of his neighborhood:
It’s enough to make you cry to see Shamrock Street, the way they murdered it. Don’t tell me houses have no feelings. You should have heard them scream when the bulldozers ripped them down, boards splitting open, plaster crashing, nails hanging in there for dear life. I had to hold my ears…”Stop and look even if it hurts,” I told myself. “Look hard so later you could testify.”
When his proudly Mexican father is humiliated by his countrymen at a border inspection, and Rudy’s mother has to buy their passage through the barrier gates with a pair of beloved earrings, Rudy writes: And after that, on our long road south, my father never saluted the Mexican flag again, and he talked more English than I ever heard him speak in L.A., in gas stations and other public places.
In his short story “Red Wind,” Raymond Chandler produced the most famous literary description of the Southern California weather phenomenon known as the Santa Ana wind: There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
For my money, this description from Famous All Over Town is even better: A certain wind visits L.A. from time to time, and the Santana is its name. It comes roaring in hot off the desert like a raging bull, and so dry your mouth tastes full of sand. Women snatch washing off the line before it goes flying over the next-door roof. They scream their kids off the street, spank them for nothing, and then turn up the television to drown out the world while the beans burn black on the stove. Men do worse things. Everybody seems to hate that wind. Not me. It stirs my blood around till I’m ready for anything, and the harder it blows, the better I like it. It could blow L.A. into the ocean for all I care.
Here’s one of Rudy’s neighbors describing her precarious financial situation:
“All my life I’ve lived with second-hand,” Virgie preached, “first my father’s house, then my own. Salvation Army and Goodwill, they were my department stores, and sometimes the city dump. Day-olds from the bakery, dented tomato cans, sunburned shirts from store windows. Never two chairs alike and lucky if one shoe matched the other. To me the prettiest thing in the world is a price tag without a Fire Sale on it.”
And here’s Rudy describing the appearance of a cop car on his street:
A black-and-white had just turned into Shamrock and now it came prowling up the street. A black-and-white on Shamrock is like a cloud passing across the sun, it chills you. Loud guys get quiet, quiet guys get loud. Some walk casually into backyards, others start flaky conversations and everybody feels Wanted For Murder. The cops raked the sidewalk with those glassy eyes of theirs, and I stared right back at them. They don’t like that.
There is a beautiful little book lost inside the American literary canon that’s just perfect for readers both young and old but almost nobody is reading it because of a 35-year-old controversy involving a pseudonym used by the book’s long dead author. Curiously, Daniel Lewis James came by his pseudonym out of necessity. He and his wife, while successfully employed in the film industry in the 1940s (he was an assistant director on Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator), were active members of the communist party. In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee called them to testify. Both James and his wife refused to self-incriminate. They were blacklisted. To make ends meet, James needed to work under a pseudonym. He began writing screenplays under the name Daniel Hyatt. For 25 years Daniel and Lilith James served as volunteer social workers in the largely Latino East L.A. neighborhood depicted in the novel. When it came time to write a novel set in that neighborhood, the penname Daniel Hyatt didn’t seem to suit. It wasn’t until he came up with the name Danny Santiago that James finally felt free to write about the people and places he knew so well. If Senator McCarthy hadn’t come gunning for him, he might never have even considered the use of a pseudonym. If you don’t like the fact that the name Danny Santiago appears on the cover of Famous All Over Town, you have the U.S. Government to blame for it.
The ending of the novel strongly suggests that the author was planning a sequel. If so, the controversy surrounding the book may have dimmed his enthusiasm for continuing the project. In any case, the author died in 1988 at 77 years old without ever publishing another book. The one novel he left us is a masterpiece of cultural appropriation. You can no longer punish him for his “crime” by refusing to read his book. You can only punish yourself.
THE CHATTERLINGS IN WORDLAND
If you are interested in exploring the differences between words whose meanings are nearly similar, your most eloquent guide might be Crabb’s English Synonymes, a classic reference book. Other helpful guides include Adrian Room’s The Penguin Dictionary of Confusibles, Harry Shaw’s Dictionary of Problem Words and Expressions, Peter Melzer’s The Thinker’s Thesaurus, S.I. Hayakawa’s Choose the Right Word, the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, or just about any language book with the word “usage” in its title: Harper’s Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage by Bergen and Cornelia Evans, and so forth. If, however, you would like to interest a child in what distinguishes a word from its near synonyms, you might want to visit a rare bookstore and look for a copy of Michael Lipman’s The Chatterlings in Wordland, originally published in 1928 and revised in 1935.
Dedicated to “folk whose feet prefer puddles to pavement,” Lipman’s book is a linguistic fable of nearly 100 pages describing the mythical kingdom of Chatterland, whose King is such a stickler for precise usage that, if he requests a plate and is brought a saucer, he goes into a near homicidal rage. In fact, the King’s obsession with proper usage is so extreme that “When a Chatterling got into the habit of using the wrong words, by way of punishment, he had to wear a long pointed red hat, and after that he was always known as a Red Chatterling. He had to wear great, heavy, wooden shoes, too, that clattered when he walked.” As a result of this prejudice against sloppy speakers, “The good subjects of the King have as little to do with them as possible. No one would talk to a Red Chatterling except on business. It was so easy to get into the habit of using the wrong words. Anyone could, just by listening.”
As the fable opens, the King is an old man and looking for someone to replace him on the throne. He summons his favorite prince, Tip o’Tongue, and offers to make him King on one condition: Tip must find two words that have exactly the same meaning. The King gives Tip three days to accomplish this feat. Tip goes forth eagerly and encounters his friend Toby Trubble. He explains his quest to Toby. Toby tells him that the object of his quest is easily found. In fact, Toby knows three words that share the exact same meaning: fog, haze, and mist. Delighted by this information, Tip o’Tongue returns to the King and reports his findings. Alas, “The King didn’t seem to think very much of these words.” He explains to Tip that “fog is a watery vapor, much like steam; mist is rain, falling in many tiny drops; haze is a vapor, too, [but] it isn’t so damp as fog.” Disappointed by his failure but now endowed with a keen appreciation of the razor-thin differences between near synonyms, Tip sallies forth to renew his quest. During the course of his quest he discovers what distinguishes a “boat” from a “ship” and a “crown” from a “coronet.” He learns that “a prudent person avoids unpleasant things; but a wise man overcomes them.” He learns that “vast” describes something “that extended a long distance, like an ocean, or a range of mountains,” whereas “huge” describes “something bulky,” like an elephant. After mulling the words “stupendous,” “tremendous,” and “enormous,” Tip concludes that “stupendous meant something so big that it would stupefy one just to look at it; that something tremendous would cause one to tremble. Enormous, he thought, meant something much bigger than the ordinary, or normal thing.” When Tip asks the King if “obtain,” “receive,” and “acquire” mean the same thing, the King responds, “Not exactly. Obtain and acquire are close though. A person may receive a thing without effort, but he has to exert himself to obtain anything. He would expect to keep anything that he acquired…If you get the Kingdom, you will have acquired it, expecting to keep it. You might acquire wisdom, too, from books – though it’s surprising how few have.” Later, when Tip asks the King if “enough” and “sufficient” mean the same thing, the King explains, “A greedy person never has enough, though he may have much more than sufficient. Do you see the difference?” And even when the differences aren’t spelled out in the text, Lipman provides illustrations that clarify the differences between, for instance, “coils” and “spirals,” or between “stewing,” “boiling,” “steaming,” and “broiling.”
Though the book is well written, whimsically illustrated, and entertaining, it is also, alas, dated (or is the adjective I’m looking for “outdated”). Many of the word distinctions that Lipman celebrated are now lost. Few people nowadays would insist that the word “ship” be applied only to vessels with three masts and square sails. In fact, even in 1935, the fine shades of gray that distinguish Lipman’s near synonyms from each other had mostly faded away. When Tip says he thinks “spacious” and “commodious” mean the exact same thing, the King responds, “A goodly number of other people think so, too. But they are wrong. SPACIOUS means large, as a room or a garden may be large while a COMMODIOUS room might be small. But it would have to have in it, close at hand, just those things one would happen to want.” But the King is living in the past. The first definition of “commodious” in the current (4th) edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is “spacious, roomy.” Lipman’s definition of the word – “handy” – is described as “archaic.”
Despite its outdated information, however, The Chatterlings in Wordland could still be very instructive to a child, providing it is read to him by an adult who is willing and able to point out its archaisms and explain how it is that sloppy usage can, over time, cause near synonyms, such as “spacious” and “commodious,” to lose their small but important differences. What’s more, many of Lipman’s word pairs (or threesomes or foursomes, etc.) still retain their distinctions. His discussion of “look” and “observe,” for instance, concludes with the sensible observation that “one might look for something and not see it at all; anything one observed had to be seen clearly.” Likewise, although “distort” is frequently these days used as an exact synonym for “misshape,” most contemporary dictionaries that I’ve consulted still preserve the difference that Lipman notes – i.e. “a thing could only be distorted by twisting, while it could be misshaped in almost any way.”
There is a linguistic rule known as Muphry’s Law which states: “If you write anything criticizing the way other people employ words in their writing, you are sure to make a glaring error in the piece.” Lipman’s book of good-humored writing advice is not exempt from this rule. He (gently) chastises those who use a general term such as “crown” to describe a specific item such as a “coronet” (which is a small crown), and yet he describes the Red Chatterlings’ wooden footwear as “shoes” rather than employing the more specific term “sabots.” You can argue with Lipman’s linguistic prescriptions endlessly – in fact, that may have been part of his intention: to arouse debate – but his passion for words is undeniable. And if you read The Chatterlings in Wordland to a bright child, you are almost certain to pass along that passion to at least one more user of the English language.
FORTY PAGES TO GO
My favorite part of a novel? Roughly forty pages from the end. Every novel is different, of course. Some, such as Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and William Kennedy’s Quinn’s Book, have superb opening chapters that they never quite live up to. Both Of Human Bondage and East of Eden have dull beginnings (especially East of Eden, which begins back in the ice age and describes how glaciers formed California’s Salinas Valley) and tediously drawn out endings, but both books are enlivened by long, tremendously fascinating middle sections that make the reading experience worthwhile. The same could also be said of War and Peace, which starts slowly and seems to take forever coming to a conclusion, but has lots of interesting stuff in between. For the most part, however, if a novel follows a fairly conventional – or, if you want, classical – story arc, its final forty pages are, in my opinion, the most fun to read. Some might say that this final 40 pages is merely the climax of the book and that a climax is logically a pleasing phenomenon to any human being. But I think it is about more than just the plot reaching its climax. I like to think of this part of the book as the last three or four miles of a marathon or – if you run 10Ks rather than marathons – think of it as the last K. It’s that point in an endurance event where you know that you will finish and you feel fairly certain you will enjoy the experience. Some 10Ks – especially if they are run in foul weather into the face of a headwind – can be miserable experiences from start to finish. The same is true of some books. Many endurance runs start out daunting. This is true of the famous Dipsea Endurance Run, an annual event since 1905 which begins in Mill Valley, California. You start out by climbing three flights of stairs comprising a total of 672 steps – roughly the equivalent of running to the top of a 52-story building. I ran the race, just once, back in the 1980s. By the time I reached the 672nd step, I was seriously doubting the wisdom of entering the run. After the stair climb, numerous challenges remained: a steep descent into the Muir Woods, a tortuous crossing of rocky trails with names like “Cardiac” and “Dynamite,” and another steep ascent known as “Insult Hill.” Somewhere along the way, however, this run ceases to seem merely arduous and somehow transforms itself into an almost sublime experience. Near the end, as tired as I was, I found myself eager to prolong the experience, unhappy about the idea of reaching its conclusion. While most runners begin to sprint towards the end of a race in order to improve their race times, I usually slow down a bit, in order to forestall the end of an enjoyable experience. Likewise, there comes a point in many good books where I don’t want to pick the book up. I am enjoying the story, I like thinking about the characters and their dilemmas, and I am not overly eager to see it all end. This, I think, is the best experience reading has to offer. Yes, I love fast-paced thrillers that keep me turning the pages rapidly and speeding to the end. But even better, in my opinion, is the book that makes you not want to speed to the end, that makes you want to savor that final sprint, maybe even slow it down to jog. For me this usually happens about forty pages from the end of a book. I’m talking primarily about fairly modern novels, novels whose length is somewhere between, say, 150 pages and 400 pages. In triple-decker Victorian novels by Dickens or Trollope or Eliot, you may find yourself intentionally slowing down with a hundred or more pages to go. The longer the book, the longer the final stretch. But if, like me, you read a lot of novels in the 250- to 350-page range, then you will probably find that it is usually about forty pages from the end of a good novel that you begin forcing yourself to read more slowly, resisting the urge to pick up the book until you can read it without distraction.
Novels, generally, are not spontaneous artistic outbursts and they cannot be enjoyed as such. They are not cave paintings, which may have been sketched in an hour or two only to go on fascinating observers for thousands of years. They are not poems, such as “Kubla Khan,” which can be scribbled out in a few minutes during a burst of sudden creativity (with or without opium). The novel is a fairly recent development in human history, and a bit of an unnatural one. For millennia, stories rarely lasted longer than a single comfortable sitting would allow. Even movies and TV shows, for all their technical complication, would seem to have more in common with storytelling’s roots than novels do. Novels, even very enjoyable ones, are always a test of one’s endurance. And in every successful test of endurance comes a moment when one realizes that a) one is going to make it to the end, and b) the end is going to be enjoyable. In a marathon or a 10K, one can’t realistically come to a dead stop a mile or two from the end and put off the conclusion in order to savor it. To do so would be to destroy the continuity of the experience. But rarely does one read a novel straight through in a sitting (I’ve done it maybe ten times, and always with a fairly short novel, such as Tom Perratta’s Election or James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity). A novel is a test of endurance in which stopping now and then is pretty much a requisite. Usually, my stopping points are fairly random, dictated by how tired I am or how much reading time I have at my avail. I supplement my writing income by working as a freelance notary public. I often find myself sitting in the waiting room of an escrow company or real estate firm with twenty minutes to kill until my next notary appointment. Frequently I kill this time by reading a novel. But I never bring a novel with me that has entered that juicy final forty pages. I don’t want to read that part of the book if there is any other claim on my time, or any chance I’ll be interrupted before the end. When I realize that I have once again found a novel with a promising final forty pages, I always put off finishing it until I am alone and have no distractions ahead of me.
Recently I read The Cocktail Waitress, a James M. Cain novel that was left to languish in the cabinet of his agent’s office after Cain’s death and was not published until 2013. Though it is not the equal of Mildred Pierce or The Postman Always Rings Twice, the book was nonetheless an absorbing and, for me at least, very satisfying read. The story concerns a gold-digging cocktail waitress named Jane Medford who may or may not have killed her first husband and may or may not be planning to wed and kill another man. The hardback book is 254 pages long. On page 213 (41 pages from the end) a very interesting (and kinky, as befits a Cain novel) development occurs. Jane Medford (now Mrs. Earl White II) answers the door of her husband’s mansion and finds herself face to face with a prostitute/masseuse dressed in a nurse’s uniform who has come to give Jane’s husband a hand job (Jane won’t sleep with him, so a hand-job-for-hire is the only way Earl, who suffers from angina and can’t engage in traditional intercourse, can relieve his sexual urges). At this point I wanted to slow down and delay arriving at the end of the book. It became clear here that Cain was going to make the climax of his story as down-and-dirty as his imagination and the mores of mid 20th Century publishing would allow him to. Sure, much of the writing in the book seemed as if it could use some additional polish. Yes, the plot was often preposterous and some of the characters were made of cardboard, but this was nonetheless a good old-fashioned fifties-style pulp novel in which a master of the genre was clearly trying to push the boundaries of sexual explicitness. I had every confidence that Cain was about to deliver a conclusion that, if nothing else, would be wildly entertaining. And I was right. A few hundred words after the arrival of the “nurse,” Jane is in a cocktail bar when she gets a call from her housekeeper informing her that Mr. White has suffered a serious heart attack as a result of his masseuse’s manual manipulations. “Get out here, Miss Joan,” the housekeeper tells her, “He’s bad off this time – real bad.” I was on page 215 when I read those words, 39 pages from the end of the book. It was late at night, the ideal time to read a noir thriller, but though I could have finished off the final 39 pages fairly easily before going to bed, I decided not to. I wanted to savor the ending of the novel. I knew it would be juicy and salacious and I didn’t want to rush through it. I put the book aside and went to sleep. I decided to finish reading it the following night. That would give me an entire day to ponder what might be coming in those final 39 pages.
A few weeks before reading The Cocktail Waitress I read Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel Naomi. The book is what Lolita might have been if it had been written by James M. Cain and set in Japan in the 1920s. It’s the story of 28-year-old Joji, a boring corporate drone, who becomes obsessed one day with a beautiful 15-year-old café waitress (not, alas, a cocktail waitress, but close enough) and sets out to transform her into a lady in somewhat the same way as Henry Higgins sets out to refine Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. Unfortunately, the sweet-looking and virginal Naomi doesn’t remain a virgin for long. Nor is she ever all that sweet. She allows Joji to woo her and, eventually, marry her only because she is hungry for the material things she can buy with his money. Joji tries to rein in her appetites for sex and shopping, but with little success. Naomi becomes a monster of greed and lasciviousness. After draining Joji’s bank account, she leaves him in search of other men to sleep with and sponge off of. Even then, however, Joji is determined to win her back, still believing that she can be made into a proper lady if she is given enough love and instruction. On page 193 – 44 pages from the end of my 237-page paperback edition of Naomi – Joji receives some devastating news. Up to this point he believes that Naomi has been unfaithful to him with only two other men. Now he learns otherwise. Abandoned by Naomi, Joji has sought out Hamada, one of Naomi’s young lovers, to find out what has become of her. Hamada tells him, “There’s no telling how many times you’ve been disgraced behind your back…When you were in Kamakura last summer, how many men do you think Miss Naomi had?” Joji answers, “I know about you and Kumagai. Was there someone else?” And Hamada tells him. “Don’t be startled Mr. Kawai…Seki and Nakamura too.” Stunned, Joji responds, “You mean the whole group, every one of them?” “Yes,” answers Hamada. “Was Naomi manipulating them,” asks Joji, “so that they didn’t know about each other?” “No,” says Hamada, “Sometimes two of them would even run into each other” on their way in or out of her summer abode. “They were tacitly in league with each other. They shared her.” This shocking info sends Joji into a tailspin. By this time we are on page 198, exactly 39 pages from the end of the novel. As a reader I found myself eager to know what Joji would do next. Would he seek out Naomi and kill her? Would he kill himself? Would he swear off his obsession with Naomi once and for all and get on with his life? Would Naomi hit rock bottom and come crawling back to him? If so, how would Joji respond? In mid book, the plot might go just about anywhere. With 40 or so pages left, the options are limited, which makes them more thrilling to contemplate. Early in the book, it was still possible to believe that Naomi might reconcile herself to loving just one man for the rest of her life and decide to be faithful to Joji. With 40 pages to go we can scratch that possibility from our list. Though I was eager to see where Tanizaki’s plot was leading, I put the book aside at this point. I wanted to savor the possibilities for awhile.
Shortly before reading Naomi, I read Irene Nemirovsky’s lurid sex-and-murder drama Jezebel (Yes, I like lurid sex novels; so sue me!). The Vintage paperback is 199 pages long. The title character (whose name is actually Gladys) is in a bind. For years, her beauty has allowed her to trick people into believing that she is much younger than her real age. She has also fooled people into believing that her daughter died at age 14, when in fact the daughter was closer to 20 and had just given birth to a son. When the daughter died, Gladys, unwilling to face being a grandmother, bribed a working-class family to take away her grandchild and raise it as their own child. But the grandson has grown up and learned his true identity. He has discovered Gladys’ whereabouts and is threatening to reveal her many secrets to society (that she was responsible for her daughter’s miserable demise, neglected her own grandchild, and is much older than she claims). This will almost certainly ruin Gladys’ chances of marrying the handsome but penniless count Aldo Monti who is bewitched by both her beauty and her money and can offer Gladys a secure position in society. Monti is 36. He believes Gladys to be about 45. She is actually closer to 60. Will he still want her if he finds out her actual age? In Chapter 17, which begins on page 161 – 38 pages from the end of the book – Gladys’ grandson begins really turning the screws. He wants money. He wants recognition. And he wants revenge. By this time, Gladys’ options have begun to narrow. Will she murder her own grandson? Can she successfully buy him off? If she goes to Count Monti and confesses her age, will he still love her? At this point in the book, I put it aside to relish the pleasure of Gladys torment (she is a thoroughly unlikable character) and to try to guess which of the dwindling options available to Gladys the author would choose for her. (Generally, as a protagonist’s options narrow, his plight becomes more engrossing.)
I could cite dozens more examples of this forty-pages-from-the-end phenomenon. Sometimes the phenomenon occurs sixty pages from the end, sometimes 20. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. For me however, due to some correlation between the length of the novels I tend to read and the point in a story where I find myself eager to stretch out the reading experience, about forty pages from the end seems to be my favorite part of a novel, the point where I am eager to keep reading but don’t want the book to end. Often I will find myself in this paradoxical situation and only then will it occur to me to see how many pages the book contains. More times than I can remember, I have flipped to the end to find that I have 40 pages remaining, or 41, or 39. That general neighborhood seems to be my sweet spot as a novel reader.
Of course I don’t always make it to that point in a novel. Plenty of times I will abandon a novel after fifty or a hundred or two hundred pages. If I’m a quarter of the way through a book and it isn’t thrilling me in some way, I’ll generally put it aside (John Updike once said, “At some level, every novel aspires to be a thriller” or words to that effect; and I believe that every novel should at least try to thrill its readers). I’ve given up on novels after reading to the halfway point and even a bit beyond. But I’ve never quit a novel that I was 40 pages from the end of. At that point, it’s a sure thing that I will finish the book. If it is only a so-so book, I won’t bother putting the book aside in order to draw out the pleasure to be derived from reading those final forty pages. I’ll just finish up the book and move on. For me, one sure sign of an author’s skill as a storyteller is his ability to get me to slow down and savor those final forty pages. Not everyone can do it. Generally it takes a master craftsman such as Cain or Nemirovsky or Tanizaki. Most recently it happened while I read Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Modern (another novel in which sexual betrayal figures prominently).
If you are an avid fiction reader, it is likely that you have experienced this phenomenon yourself without really noticing it. To find out if my theory about the last forty pages is correct, go to your bookshelves now and take down four or five of your favorite novels, preferably novels in the 250- to 400-page range. Flip to a place roughly forty pages from the end of the book. Start reading from there and see if you find yourself once again falling under the author’s spell. If, like me, you happened to be blessed with a horrible memory and can’t recall how a book ended two months after reading it, you may just find yourself racing through those final forty pages to learn once again how it is all going to end. Generally, if a novel is really good, rereading its final forty pages will be enough to remind you of why you enjoyed it so much. Just as I rarely read a book in one sitting, I rarely re-read a book, even those I really love. I’ve re-read maybe ten novels in my life (I reread Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye every ten years or so just to see if perhaps I’ll finally find myself enjoying them; so far it hasn’t happened with either book). But fairly often I will pick up a favorite book and reread its last forty pages or so, just to bring the thrill of the original reading experience back. It’s kind of like eating a bit of cold turkey from the refrigerator three days after Thanksgiving. Just a bite of it will help you conjure up the memory of all the pumpkin pie and stuffing and gravy and mashed potatoes which brought you such pleasure a few days earlier. You don’t need to re-eat the whole meal in order to experience a brief reminder of how great it was.
If you are a novelist, you might want to give some thought to this forty-pages-from-the-end phenomenon. That’s the point at which your readers’ curiosity about how the story will conclude ought to reach terminal velocity. If you force the reader to begin his stretch run too early – seventy pages from the end, say – he may grow fatigued before reaching the final page. If you save the stretch run for the last ten or fifteen pages, he won’t have enough time to savor it. Every reader is different, but if you want to make a lifelong fan out of me, start your novel’s stretch run about forty pages from the end of the book. Reviewers are always praising books for being unputdownable. Me, I want a book that begs to be put down forty pages from the end in order to savor the anticipated pleasure those last forty pages are likely to bring.
SOMETIMES FAILURE IS THE KEY TO MORE FAILURE
You hear a lot of people singing the praises of failure these days. Here are some recent headlines from a variety of publications:
Why Failure is So Important to Success -- Forbes
The Importance of Failure -- Psychology Today
What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? -- The New York Times
Why Failure is Good For Success -- SUCCESS Magazine
In Praise of Failure -- The New York Times
The Wisdom of Learning From Failure is Incontrovertible -- The Harvard Review
You Can Learn More From Failure Than Success -- Business Insider
Don’t Fear Failure -- The Huffington Post
Failure, these writers argue, is the key to success. Failure teaches us how to succeed. Just as “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (or so claimed William Blake), we are now told that the road of failure leads to the palace of success.
But here’s another thing about failure: it doesn’t always lead to success. Oftentimes it leads only to more failure. Take it from me. I know a thing or two about failure.
I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a writer. My oldest rejection slip is dated July 1973, at which time I was 14. Throughout my teens I submitted short stories to magazines and scripts to television production companies. I wrote poetry, drama, comedy, nonfiction. I wrote crime stories, fantasy stories, science fiction stories, even love stories. Our household didn’t subscribe to The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly. Most of the contemporary short stories I read in the 1970s I found in the pages of my mother’s “ladies magazines”: Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, and so forth. It was to these magazines that I submitted most of my early literary efforts. But I also sent stories to Analog Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and other genre publications. My favorite authors were Kipling, Stevenson, and Jack London.
Though I attended private (Catholic) schools for twelve years, I was not much of a student. I did well in classes I enjoyed (English, Reading, Art) and not so well in classes I didn’t (Math, Religion). I didn’t bust my ass trying to get good grades in high school because my goal was always to follow in the footsteps of writers like London and Hemingway and Bradbury and bypass college on my way to literary success. Many of my favorite writers at that time were pulpsmiths whose academic careers had ranged from rocky to nonexistent.
As a teenager I corresponded with a number of successful television writers, guys like Sterling Siliphant (Route 66), Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men), Roland Kibbee (It Takes a Thief), and many others. I submitted completed scripts to shows like The ABC Movie of the Week, M*A*S*H, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Streets of San Francisco. Though I wanted also to write novels and short stories and poetry, my original plan was to move to Los Angeles at 18 and take a stab at trying to sell some TV scripts. I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull this off because, although I had held a few summer jobs during my teen years, I had nowhere near enough money to set myself up in the writing business in southern California. I figured I’d have to work in a burger joint or (if I were lucky) a bookstore by day, and do my writing by night. I’d probably also have to find myself a few roommates to share expenses with.
About a year before my eighteenth birthday, my father grew tired of his life as a Portland, Oregon, accountant and announced that he was taking a job with an accounting firm in Sacramento, California. He would move down to Sacramento and find a house, then the rest of the family would follow. My dad had never been the adventurous type. For him to move the whole family to California just as I was (secretly) planning my own move there, struck me as some sort of karmic intervention. I decided that the universe wanted me to move to Sacramento. Back then, there didn’t seem to me to be much difference between Los Angeles and Sacramento. After all, they were both in California. My lack of interest in high school Geography may have hurt me here. I didn’t realize at the time that, in terms of and proximity to the entertainment business, Sacramento might just as well have been Portland, Oregon, or Peoria, Illinois. I have lived in Sacramento now for 40 years and have never crossed paths with a movie or television star on the streets of this city. On a recent trip back to Portland, I encountered Ed Begley, Jr., as I was entering a Powell’s Book Store on Hawthorne Boulevard and he was exiting it. What’s more, as a kid, I once dined with Kurt Russell at a hamburger dive across the street from Multnomah County Stadium where he had been helping to assess talent for a baseball team owned by his father and I had been in the stands watching the tryouts. He saw me and a friend eating our hamburgers and came over and sat down at our table and asked us for ideas for promoting his father’s team among kids our age. He asked us if we might be interested in selling season tickets for the team door-to-door. To this day, it represents my most personal encounter with a celebrity.
But back in 1976, I didn’t realize just how large the distance was between Sacramento and Los Angeles. I thought I could move into my parents’ house in Sacramento, take a part-time job somewhere to cover my meager expenses, and spend the rest of my time writing TV scripts. My dad made this easy for me. He bought an old Airstream trailer, the kind that now sell for tens of thousands of dollars but which back then could be had for a few hundred bucks, and set it up in the garage as my “bachelor pad.” I lived and wrote in that garage for several years, producing all sorts of TV scripts, short stories, and poems that I mailed out to literary agents, production companies, TV studios, pulp magazines, and elsewhere. I published none of this. But I wasn’t disheartened. Ray Bradbury once said, “It takes ten years for a writer to get all the bullshit out of his system,” or words to that effect, and I figured I was just going through the inevitable “bullshit” period that nearly every writer has to endure. I had begun submitting manuscripts for publication when I was fourteen years old. I figured that by the time I turned twenty-four I’d be ready for success and success would be ready for me.
As it turned out, my parents didn’t like California all that much, and after four years they moved back to Portland. But I didn’t. I took the only job I could find at the time – a file clerk for a title-insurance company – and moved into an apartment. This was a definite step down from the relatively luxurious life I had lived in my parents’ Sacramento garage. Their house sat on a half acre that included a clay tennis court and a built-in swimming pool. My new apartment complex had a swimming pool and a tennis court, but it just wasn’t the same. I used to get some of my best literary ideas while doing laps at night in my parents’ unlighted pool. The apartment house didn’t allow swimming after nine p.m. Nonetheless I soldiered on. I also fell in love.
The object of my affection was a divorcee eight years my senior, with two daughters, ages twelve and eight. Thus, at the age of 22, I found myself “married, with children,” as the saying goes. I knew that this might put off my dream of literary triumph for a few years, but it was a tradeoff I was more than willing to make.
Those first years of marriage were filled with financial difficulties. My wife and I moved all over Northern California looking for opportunities. In the space of about seven years we lived in Truckee, Grass Valley, Roseville, Fairfield, Grass Valley again, Loomis, and several other towns. I managed to do some writing during this time but I submitted very little of it to publishers or producers. I was too busy being a drone in the insurance industry, a husband, and a stepfather.
Both of my stepdaughters turned out to be self-starters who dropped out of high school, got married young, but somehow managed, after a few rocky years, to become successful businesswomen. These days, one of them owns her own travel agency and the other owns her own escrow service. Both of them, fortunately, married much better than their mother did.
By the time I was thirty and my wife was thirty-eight, we were empty nesters. We had no more children to provide for. At this point my wife and I decided that I should once again focus most of my energy on my writing. This was in the late 1980s. By now I had been writing seriously for about fifteen years, with virtually no publications to my credit. It was time to correct that. I realized that trying to break into Hollywood from Sacramento was probably not a good idea. I decided to lower my aim and focus almost exclusively on the pulp-fiction magazine market. While my wife kept the bills paid by working as an escrow officer, I stayed home and wrote. And wrote. And wrote. I started cranking out fantasy stories and crime stories and adventure stories and sending them to every pulp magazine I could find listed in the pages of the annual Writers’ Guide to Literary Markets. At this time we were living in a rented house in Loomis, California, and I was writing on an Apple IIc word processor, my very first home computer. I printed out my stories on a dot matrix printer and mailed them off in droves. And just as fast as I mailed them out, they came back to me accompanied by rejection letters. I remained undaunted.
My wife and I moved to a rented house in Auburn. The house had two bathrooms, but we only used one. I converted the second bathroom into a makeshift storage room for all of my rejected manuscripts. Specifically, I piled these manuscripts in the old-fashioned tiled shower stall of the bathroom. Eventually the shower was filled to shoulder height with manila envelopes containing rejected stories. Of course, this pile contained multiple copies of each rejected story, but still it was an impressive sight. I was constantly worried that a pipe might burst in the shower and cause all my manuscripts to be destroyed. Ironically, the manuscripts were eventually destroyed by water, but the culprit was a leaky roof, not the plumbing. My wife and I returned from a weekend away from home, to find that the roof had leaked during a heavy rainstorm. The water had collected above the ceiling of the shower. Eventually the water became too heavy and the roof collapsed, causing gallons of rainwater to come cascading down upon my manuscripts. I had to throw them all out. Only the most recent of them were saved on computer discs. But I figured it was good for a writer to throw out a lot of his earlier work. It forces him to move on and produce new stuff.
The roof disaster had come at a time when I had begun to lose interest in pulp fiction. A few years earlier my wife had begun subscribing to The New Yorker. As a result I had begun reading a lot of so-called “serious literary fiction.” This caused me to set aside my Raymond Chandler and Ray Bradbury collections in favor of collections of by Raymond Carver, among others. I began haunting area bookstores in search of small literary quarterlies. Now, instead of writing time-travel stories for the likes of Weird Tales and The Twilight Zone Magazine, I found myself submitting mainstream tales to quarterlies and reviews such as The Threepenny Review, The Mississippi Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, The Paris Review, and on and on. Carver’s name-brand K-Mart minimalism seemed to speak to my own experiences like the work of no other writer I knew. Like Carver I had been born in Oregon but found myself somewhat stranded in Northern California in my early twenties. I had a wife and two children to look after at a very early age. Carver once worked for Sutter Hospital in Sacramento and cranked out fiction in his car during his lunch hour. I had done the same thing while working at another Sacramento hospital, the U. C. Davis Medical Center. Though I had been lucky enough to avoid alcoholism and divorce, my life had otherwise been straight out of a Carver story. My wife and I had had a house foreclosed on. We had lost good jobs and been forced to flee a house in the middle of the night to avoid a showdown with the landlord to whom we owed money. Once, while living in Truckee and working at a title-insurance company in Tahoe City, I had had my car repossessed from the parking lot of the office where I worked. Very embarrassing. The repo men – two huge dudes out of Central Casting’s villains department – came up to my desk and demanded my car key. I meekly handed it over. At the end of the day, my wife had to drive from her office in Truckee to pick me up. A snowstorm blew up as we were driving home. The car skidded from the road and was damaged. Now we had no working vehicle. Straight outta Carver!
Anyway, at age thirty I decided to quit writing about elaborate murder plots and space aliens and to try to make literary art out of my own Carveresque domestic disasters. Like Carver I wrote both poetry and fiction about my hardships. It was the poetry that seemed to catch the eye of litmag editors. Within a year or so of switching to mainstream writing, I had had nearly a dozen poems accepted for publication at reputable magazines. Then I had a story accepted for publication by the Crescent Review. I had at last found my métier – mainstream literary prose and poetry. What’s more, I had begun selling journalism to a small independent newsweekly in Sacramento called The Suttertown News. About six months later, I left The Suttertown News for a regular freelance gig with The Sacramento Business Journal. Each story I wrote for the Business Journal brought in a paltry $125. But it was the first money I had ever earned for my writing and I was thrilled with it. I was now contributing a whopping $500 a month to the family coffers. Not a huge sum of money, but our rent at the time was a mere $600 a month. For the first time in my life I felt like a professional writer. I had a dozen poems in print. I had a short story in a reputable litmag. I had a regular gig with an area newspaper. I was thirty years old. My million words of bullshit had been written. I still had a shot at literary glory.
In early 1989 a friend of mine encouraged me to apply to the Clarion West Science Fiction Writers Conference in Seattle. At first I turned up my nose at the suggestion. I was a serious literary writer now. Why should I attend a conference for sci-fi hacks? But my wife talked me out of my snobbishness. She reminded me that I had had a lifelong love for genre fiction. What could it hurt to spend six weeks of my summer hanging out with fellow lovers of the written word? She was right of course. So I decided to apply to the conference even though we couldn’t afford it. I wasn’t at all sure that I’d be accepted, so why worry about the cost? After being accepted, I had to borrow money both from my parents and from a friend of my wife’s in order to cover the cost of tuition, board, and travel. In June of 1989 I drove to Seattle and attended my first-ever writing conference. I had been a writer for sixteen years. I had submitted hundreds and hundreds of stories and poems to a wide variety of magazines. But I had barely ever met another aspiring writer. Now I was surrounded by them.
I made a couple of close friends at the conference, but I also realized why so many writers tend to be loners who shun the companionship of other writers. The shop talk could be incredibly petty and stifling. There was bitching about the way the Hugo and Nebula and other science-fiction awards are distributed, as well as bitching about various editors and publishers and agents and other writers. There was way too much marketing talk and way too little craft talk. Two writers arguing about the worth of their favorite authors would throw out the number of Hugos won and Nebulas nominated for as proof that their writer was the better of the two. I had been almost entirely ignorant of the way that professional (and wannabe professional) writers love to compete with each other by listing every penny-ante publication they’d ever received an acceptance from, every midlist nonentity they’d ever met in person. I was glad I had attended the conference, but I drove home to Sacramento convinced that I had made the right move when I gave up genre writing for mainstream writing. (I didn’t know it at the time, but mainstream writers can be every bit as petty and insecure and insufferable as genre writers.)
The experience of spending six weeks in Seattle with a bunch of sci-fi geeks proved to be life-changing for the guy who was my roommate and closest friend at the conference. He returned to Southern California just long enough to ask his wife for a divorce. Then he moved back to Seattle and began a relationship with a writer he had met at the conference, a woman who had already made a few professional story sales. She introduced my ex-roommate to one of the biggest editors in the business. My ex-roommate, being a generous and kindly fellow, called me up in Sacramento and urged me to return to Seattle for a few weeks. He swore that he could introduce me to a few major figures in the sci-fi field who could open all kinds of doors for me. I was tempted, but by this time I was so sick of sci-fi, I didn’t really care if I ever made a professional sale in that genre. I thanked my ex-roommate but told him that I was going to focus on mainstream fiction and poetry for awhile. He has gone on to publish numerous successful books in the science fiction field. I went on to publish stories and poems in a handful of reputable litmags – The Threepenny Review, Gordon Lish’s The Quarterly, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Florida Review, etc. – but I was never able to catch fire. It seemed that to become successful in the world of serious literature you had to either live in New York City or be connected in some way (graduate of, teacher at, or both) with a prestigious MFA program. I was none of those things. I had never gone to college and was living in lowly Auburn, California. Over the course of the 1990s, I wrote and submitted for publication dozens and dozens of mainstream stories, but the acceptance letters were few and far between. I also attended numerous mainstream literary conferences (Sewanee, Squaw Valley, Napa Valley, etc.), but didn’t make any consequential professional connections.
I turned 40 in 1998. By then I had written millions of words. I had put in far more than the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell says are required to master any particular discipline, and I still had not earned more than a few thousand dollars in any given year from my “profession.” And almost all of my earnings as a writer had come from penning stories for the Business Journal about the amount of square feet that remained unleased in the Sacramento warehouse market, or about the new breed of Sacramento car dealers who were using something called “the Internet” to market their wares to a wider share of potential buyers.
After ten years of reading and writing almost nothing but “serious literary fiction” I finally found myself sick of the stuff. I spent about six months writing nothing but freelance business stories. My reading suffered as well. I started a lot of literary novels but rarely finished them. Eventually I found my way back into both reading and writing by returning to my roots: genre fiction. I binged on the best crime writers I could find: Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, and a handful of others. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I found myself trying my hand at writing a novel. The words seemed to fly from my imagination. On one memorable day I chalked up 18,000 words. Within two months I had completed a crime novel. I spent the next several months rewriting it over and over again. I gave it a bit of a mainstream sheen, hoping it might appeal to fans of Paul Auster’s literary thrillers. Even the title of my book, The Music of Last Resort, was a nod to Auster’s The Music of Chance. When it was in tiptop shape, I mailed it off to Auster’s agent at the time, Carol Mann. The manuscript was rejected. I mailed it out to several dozen others agents but all of them rejected it.
By now my wife was 48. She had been the primary breadwinner in our household throughout the entire eighteen years of our marriage. The Clinton Era economy had boosted her earnings as an escrow officer and we were finally able to purchase another house (our first, remember, had been foreclosed on). For $85,000 we bought a 1,000-square foot cabin on two acres in rural Placerville, California. Our bills were relatively low. I felt guilty because my wife had been working hard for practically her entire adult life (she had been married and had her first child at sixteen). An old acquaintance of mine offered me a job at a Sacramento title-insurance company at a salary that would allow my wife to quit her job and spend some time just taking care of our new house and its grounds. I hated like hell to put my writing on hold, but I also hated asking my wife to continue subsidizing my remarkably unremunerative literary “career.” So I took the insurance job and told my wife to quit her escrow job. About two months later I was at the title-insurance company when I got a call from my wife. It seems a New York literary agent had just called the house looking for me. He had worked for the Carol Mann agency as an assistant when my novel had arrived there over the transom. He had tried to talk several of the agents into representing my manuscript but none of them would agree to do so. Now he had left the Mann agency and was starting up his own. He wanted to represent my manuscript. He thought the book needed a little work, but he assured me that with a month of rewriting I could have it ready for submission to New York publishers. He also thought I ought to start working on a second novel.
Once again it seemed as if Karma was playing a role in my life. A month or two after I had given up on ever finding an agent for my novel, I was being solicited by an agent whose path my manuscript had crossed in New York. My wife and I talked it over. We both decided that I needed to seize this opportunity. She would go back to work and I would quit my job and focus full time on writing novels. My wife had had a nice two-months-long rest. She was ready to go back into the escrow business. With any luck, my novel would sell, my writing career would take off, and my wife could cut back on her hours, maybe take a part-time job or do some work out of the house via the computer.
I spent a month rewriting the manuscript with some helpful input from my new agent. Then I mailed it off to him in New York. This was in the early days of the Internet. I had just signed up for my first email account. For a few months, I got an email from my agent every couple of weeks, telling me what publishers and editors he was showing the manuscript to. After a while, I started getting emails from him only about every other month. I didn’t want to be the kind of pushy wannabe novelist who bugs his agent for updates every other day or so. Thus I tried never to contact him. But eventually three or four months passed without a word. I sent emails that generated no responses. Finally I called his number in New York. It was no longer in service. My agent, apparently, had gone out of business. I never heard from him again. I think he had sincerely tried to represent my book. He certainly wasn’t a scam artist, because I never gave him a penny. I think he just found himself unsuited for life as a literary agent. A few years later I discovered that he was writing record reviews for a startup website. I harbored no ill-will towards the guy. Thanks to his encouragement, I had already written a second novel. Now I had two books to try to market. My optimism remained high. I was reading well again, devouring books of all sorts: classics, biographies, story collections, genre works. I was writing well also. I was no longer taking on any freelance assignments for local publications. I was determined to sell a novel. I wrote three crime novels in a row. Then I wrote a fantasy novel dealing with invisibility. I began setting difficult challenges for myself. In the early aughts I wrote an epistolary novel told entirely in emails (which has since been done many times by many writers). I fell under the spell of Joseph Moncure March’s two crime novels in verse, The Wild Party and The Set-Up and wrote a 300-page supernatural crime novel in rhymed and metered verse. I wrote two young-adult novels in the same vein as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little (the protagonists of my books were all talking animals). In the early days of the internet I self-published two of my books with Xlibris under a pseudonym. I might as well have just stuffed the manuscripts into large bottles and tossed them out to sea for all the attention they garnered. My epistolary novel was serialized in five installments at The Vocabula Review, an online magazine for which I wrote a regular column for several years. To date I have written ten full-length novels and two shorter novels for children.
In 2007 I returned to writing for the local market and began producing a monthly column for a local magazine. I also returned to writing short stories. I managed to sell crime stories to both Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine about 35 years after I first began submitting to those publications in the mid-1970s. Also in 2007, I had an essay of mine accepted for publication in the New York Times’ Modern Love column. No sooner had the essay appeared than the Times began forwarding me queries from movie producers who wanted to know if the film rights to the story were available for purchase. Throughout the summer of 2007 it looked as if my story might actually be optioned by a Hollywood producer. But no such luck.
There has been a lot written lately about “grit,” a term used by researcher Angela Duckworth and others to describe a combination of moxie, stubbornness, and good old-fashioned stick-to-itiveness. Duckworth has authored a book called Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, which argues that a refusal to quit is the main thing that separates the world’s failures from its successes. If this were so, I would be a sterling example of success. Despite near unanimous indifference from the literary world, I continue to try to succeed as a writer. I may lack the brains necessary to be a writer. I may lack the talent necessary to be a writer. But I certainly don’t lack the grit. The title of Duckworth’s 2013 TED Talk on the subject, which has been viewed online more than 8 million times, is “Grit: The Key to Success.” But sometimes, such as in my own case, grit is just the key to more failure.
So here I am, 60 years old, 45 years removed from my first taste of literary failure, that rejection slip I received back in the summer of 1973. That failure was followed by more than a thousand others. By now I have probably written around five million words and devoted roughly 30,000 hours to my craft. My wife is 68 years old and still the primary breadwinner of the household. I continue to publish locally. I work fifteen hours a week at a bookstore near my house, earning minimum wage. I have failed more than you can possibly imagine. I have almost certainly spent more money on postage and computer supplies and envelopes and the cost of writers’ conferences than I have earned from my writing. If failure is the key to success, I should long ago have opened every door in the mansion of triumph. But it hasn’t happened.
No doubt I sound bitter. But I’m not really. My only regret is that my wife has had to work so hard supporting me all these years. Knowing I would fail like this, I would gladly travel back in time to 1980 (the year we got married) and devote myself to some better-paying profession. Better yet, I might go back to high school and pay more attention in class, so that I could get into a good college and then establish myself in some more stable line of work.
But I can’t go back. It’s too late for me to get a medical degree or a law degree, even if I had the brains to do so, which I don’t. For better or worse, I am a writer and liable to remain one for the rest of my life. And I don’t really regret it. I love writing. I can remember the thrill I felt every time I found myself in the middle of a project that I was truly enamored of. I can recall plenty of nights, climbing out of bed after my wife was asleep and tiptoeing down the hallway to my writing room to make a few last tweaks to the work I had done during the day. I can recall how great it felt to finish the first draft of that first novel. I can recall how thrilled I was when I sold that first short story to The Crescent Review. I still get a rush every month when I finish the column that I write for that local newspaper. If I hadn’t been a writer, I don’t think I would have been such a voracious reader either. The desire to write well has inspired me to read widely and well. And next to my marriage, reading has probably brought me more joy than nearly any other aspect of my life. I love books. And I love being even a tiny, insignificant part of the literary life of my times.
Some might argue that the satisfaction I’ve derived from the writing life is in fact a sort of success. But that would be an abuse of language. I persevered through all the rejection because I was looking for a lot more than just the joy of writing well. I was looking for the joy of knowing that thousands of people will read what I have written and derive pleasure from it. I didn’t write all those novels for them to rot on my hard drive. It hurts me to know that the novels I worked so hard on are all destined to remain unread, probably forever. While writing my children’s books I was cheered by the thought of just how much pleasure the books would have brought me had I encountered them as a child, and I longed to bring that same kind of pleasure to some young reader out there in today’s world. And knowing that it is never likely to happen feels a lot more like failure than success.
So I am here to tell you that, although it can sometimes be an important detour on the road to success, failure is often just the road to more failure. On the other hand, good, honest failure, is nothing to be ashamed of. As Montaigne said, “To abandon one’s life to a dream is to know its true worth.” If you substitute the word “success” for the word “love” in this quotation from Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War, it pretty well sums up my feelings:
“He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that is was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.”
For me, failure has not been a detour on the road to success. It has been the entire road. My wife and I are staring down a future of impoverishment and want. When she can no longer work for a living, we will find ourselves living almost exclusively on her paltry social security payments. My monthly column pays only $175 per installment. My bookstore gig brings in about $500 a month. Meanwhile I continue to spend an unconscionable amount of time at my writing. Failing. Failing better, but still failing.
WORDS TO LIVE BY
I’m a fan of advice columns, especially those offering relationship advice. Dear Prudence, Dear Sugar, Dear Abby, Dear Polly, Dear Whatever – I’m a sucker for short pithy words of wisdom about how to make your relationship work. Today’s best advice columnists – people like Emily (Prudence) Yoffe, Heather (Polly) Havrilesky, and Cheryl (Sugar) Strayed – all strike me as gifted writers with plenty of keen insights into the human heart. I enjoy their work but lately I’ve begun to think that the answers to most relationship questions can be found in an ancient 70-word text that almost all of us are familiar with. Before I reveal what text I’m referring to, take a look at the following headlines (slightly altered by me) of various columns by my favorite advice givers.
My husband starts to brag after a few drinks.
My fiancé won’t let me have a man in my wedding party.
If my husband doesn’t put more thought into his gifts I’m going to cry.
My husband insists on my sexting him several times a day.
Someone told my boyfriend I was stealing from him, and he believed them.
The advice seekers whose questions inspired the above headlines were asking variations on the same old question: “Should I stay or should I go?” I’m not a religious person. I’m an atheist who has read every word of the Bible and found much of it uninspiring. But certain parts of the Bible are filled with wisdom. And if you are seeking advice about relationship matters, the first place you ought to go in search of answers is First Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verses 4 through 8. If you’ve ever been to a wedding (or watched a romcom) you’ve probably heard this Biblical passage, which begins, “Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous…” When seeking your soul mate, I suggest you employ a modified version of this passage. The love described in First Corinthians is a perfect love – it is NEVER this and ALWAYS that. Alas, people are not perfect, and therefore it is necessary, when seeking a soul mate, to replace absolute words like “never” and “always” with modifiers such as “seldom” and “almost always.” You are not likely to find a soul mate who is never jealous or unkind. But you should strive to find one who at least tries never to be those things.
Here is my modified version of First Corinthians (and, yes, I know that it takes great hubris to alter the Bible, but I beg your indulgence):
Love tries always to be patient and kind. It resists jealousy. Love tries never to be boastful or conceited or rude or selfish. It does not easily take offense and does not nurse resentments. Love takes no pleasure in the failures of others, but delights in the truth. It is eager to forgive, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever may beset it. Love never comes to an end.
Now think back to some of those advice-column headlines listed above. A boyfriend (or girlfriend) who becomes a bit boastful only on those rare occasions when he drinks too much, can be forgiven. One who brags constantly fails the Corinthians test. A boyfriend who insists that you send him sexts frequently even though it makes you uncomfortable is neither kind nor particularly loving. This type of person fails the Corinthians test. A boyfriend who wants to deny you the happiness you’d derive from including a beloved male cousin in your wedding party probably suffers from jealousy that borders on the obsessive. He fails the Corinthians test. A boyfriend who believes it when someone tells a harmful lie about you is neither trusting nor kind. He fails the Corinthians test. A husband who puts no thought into the gifts he buys you is not only unkind but probably selfish and impatient as well. He fails the Corinthians test.
As I said, people are not perfect. All of us at some point in our lives have been impatient, unkind, jealous, boastful, conceited, rude, selfish, quick to take offense and to nurse a grudge. All of us have probably taken pleasure in the failure of another. All of us have been slow to forgive at times, reluctant to trust, and quick to despair. Occasional lapses from the Corinthian ideal are to be expected. To pass the Corinthians test you don’t need to be perfect, but your lapses need to be genuine aberrations. If the man you are considering marrying finds occasion to display rudeness to others on a monthly basis, he fails the Corinthians test. If, once or twice a year, during a period of stress or exhaustion, he loses his temper or is quick to take offense at some minor slight, you should probably forgive him, lest you should be the one who fails the Corinthians test.
If you are not religious, you might want to apply a secular test when weighing the virtues of a potential soul mate. The late film critic Roger Ebert expressed his personal credo in these few words:
Kindness covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.
If the Corinthians test gives you the heebie-jeebies, simply apply the Ebert test to anyone you may be considering as a lifelong partner. Whenever you make the acquaintance of a potential soul mate ask yourself these questions: Is he/she someone who strives to make others a little happier? Is he/she someone who lives to contribute to joy to the world? If you think Roger Ebert would give this potential soul mate the thumbs up, you are probably wise to do so as well. (A friend of mine has condensed his approach to life into a single term “kindfulness,” which combines the mindfulness emphasized by Zen Buddhism with the kindness emphasized by First Corinthians and Roger Ebert; you could do worse than to make it your motto).
Throughout my adult life I have tried to live up to the standards of First Corinthians. I have also tried to live up to the standards outlined by Roger Ebert – I did this even before Ebert ever wrote them. Alas, although I think I have maintained a passing grade on both the Corinthians test and the Ebert test, I haven’t aced either exam. At this point my grade on both exams is probably somewhere between 68 and 72 percent. But every day we answer a few more questions on those exams and every day we have an opportunity to raise (or lower) our score.
How can I, a mere C student, talk so knowingly about both the Corinthians test and the Ebert test? That’s easy. Way back in 1980 I married an A student. Without her example to guide me, I’d probably never have gotten so much as a passing grade. When seeking a soul mate, you should look for someone you think will make a good study partner for all of the difficult tests that you’re likely to face in the school of life.
FAREWELL TO A WORD-LOVER
In May of 2016, one of my mentors died. His name was Robert Hartwell Fiske. He was a lover of the English language, a strict grammarian, and the editor of an online publication called The Vocabula Review, which was dedicated to the promotion of good writing in English. Beginning in 2007, I wrote a column for Vocabula every month for roughly seven years. Robert was a great editor who gave me the freedom to write about nearly anything I wanted to, so long as my column reflected in some way on the English language. I wrote columns about the use of language in old 1950s horror movies, the use of language in the sitcom “The Office,” and the use of language in a Victoria’s Secret catalog, to cite just a few examples. I wrote about profanity, I wrote about found writings, and I wrote about reduplicative words (like “higglety-pigglety,” “mish-mash,” and “hodge-podge”).
Robert was 68 years old when he succumbed to cancer. He had written (not “authored,” he hated that verb) numerous books on the English language. These were not dry scholarly tomes, nor were they upbeat “Write That Novel Now!” kind of books. These were crotchety screeds against bad writing and they bore titles such as “The Dimwit’s Dictionary,” “The Dictionary of Disagreeable English” and “The Dictionary of Unendurable English.” Robert was a kind, easy-going guy in person, but in print he could be an absolute nightmare for those he felt had abused or misused the English language. In an obituary/memorial written for the Wall Street Journal shortly after Robert’s death, noted essayist Joseph Epstein observed: “In monitoring contemporary language, Robert Hartwell Fiske was doing the Lord’s work. I only hope, that when he gets to the gates of heaven, St. Peter, in interviewing him, doesn’t split an infinitive or misuse the word ‘precipitous,’ and Robert, feeling the need to correct him, blows everything.”
Though I communicated with him frequently by email, I met Robert only once. Back in 2008, my wife and I were making plans to spend my fiftieth birthday in New York City. When I mentioned this to Robert he suggested meeting us in the city for a friendly get-together. He and his girlfriend at the time joined us for a performance of “South Pacific” on Broadway, and afterwards we dined at the Tavern on the Green, in Central Park. It was a memorable day and I still think of it whenever I hear the song “Some Enchanted Evening.”
The most memorable project I ever worked on with Robert was one that never saw the light of publication. Back in 2008 Robert and I got the idea of compiling a collection of unfamiliar quotations. The reference shelves are full of books that collect familiar quotations, but Robert and I were forever encountering in print fascinating observations and witticisms that, to our knowledge, had never been collected in a book of quotations. Thus, Robert and I created a joint Word document and whenever we encountered an interesting sentence or paragraph that we felt ought to be shared with a wider audience, we fed it into our document. Because Robert’s name was fairly well known in the world of lexicography, we were going to call our book Fiske’s Book of Unfamiliar Quotations. At one point, Robert even managed to snag us a publishing contract with a small reference-book publishing house. The contract called for us to share credit for the book and to share equally in any financial rewards. Alas, before we could get enough quotations to fill out a decent-sized book, our publishing house went belly up. Robert and I were undiscouraged. We continued to add to our collection of unfamiliar quotations, confident that we would someday find another publisher.
It never happened. As it stands, our word document is now 111 pages, and 45,300 words long. It contains a lot of gems culled by Robert and me during the course of our casual reading. Every now and then I like to pull up the file and browse through it for words of wisdom. Here are a few of the gems we culled during the course of the project:
From Peter DeVries:
The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.
The fastest way to know somebody is to lend them money.
What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
There is a point when life, having showered us with jewels for nothing, begins to exact our life’s blood for paste.
From Thornton Wilder:
No man can be a good father until he has understood his own.
The great persuaders are those without principles; sincerity stammers.
From Cormac McCarthy:
It takes very little to govern good people…and bad people can’t be governed at all.
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
If there ain’t nothing to be done about it it ain’t even a problem. It’s just a aggravation.
When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.
There is no god and we are his prophets.
From Tom Robbins:
Outlaws are not members of society. However, they may be important to society. Poets remember our dreams. Outlaws act them out.
In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.
From Elizabeth Bowen:
Love is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
From Jean Webster:
It isn’t the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh -- I really think that requires spirit.
From E.L. Konigsburg:
The only two ways to get to know someone are to live with him or play cards with him.
Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.
….
Robert wouldn’t allow me to include any quotations from his work in our collection. He thought quoting himself would make him look self-important. But, now that he’s gone, I find myself unable to resist offering up a few of his choicest observations:
Life is measured by its meaning, and a good deal of that meaning is inherent in the words we use. If so many of our words are superfluous – and thus do not signify – so much of our life is, ineluctably, meaningless.
Swear words are among the least expressive words available to us. They are boring and boorish at once. Using scatological phrases and swear words no longer shocks anyone and suggests only that you are not clever enough to think of better, more meaningful words. Very likely your writing is no more readable than you yourself are companionable.
Since how a person speaks and writes is a fair reflection of how a person thinks and feels, shoddy language may imply a careless and inconsiderate people – a public whose ideals have been discarded and whose ideas have been distorted. And in a society of this sort, easiness and mediocrity are much esteemed.
Be silent and all you neglected to consider, all you failed to feel, all you hoped to say will unfold before you.
Rest in Peace, old pal.
TOWER BOOKS – IN MEMORIUM
In 1994, at the age of 36, I found myself unemployed and in need of money. A downturn in the real-estate market had cost me my job in the title-insurance industry. Outside of that industry, I had few marketable skills. But Julie’s salary alone wasn’t quite enough to keep us afloat. To tide us over until another title-insurance job came along, I decided to look for work in a bookstore. I applied at a few local stores in Auburn and was rejected because I had no retail experience. Fortunately, I had a friend whose brother was a longtime Tower Books employee. My friend’s brother put in a good word for me with the manager of a Tower Books store in Sacramento, and I was hired. That’s how pathetic my resume was: I needed an insider to pull strings for me in order to get a minimum-wage job at a big chain store.
Each employee in our giant store was assigned to a different section of books. When you weren’t engaged in your three-hour shift at the cash register, you were expected to be in your section stocking books, neatening up the shelves, and answering questions for customers. Because I had spent almost all of my time in the literature sections of bookstores I never realized how many damn sections they had. Our store had an automotive section, sports section, children’s section, parenting section, cooking section, reference section, religion section, political section, history section, and at least a dozen others. I was told that I would have no say in what section I was assigned to. The manager would put me in whatever section needed me the most, and there I would stay for the foreseeable future. A day or two after I was hired, the manager gave me the choice of two options: the children’s section or the fiction and literature section. She told me that traditionally the fiction/literature section was the least desirable among employees because it was the largest in the store. It included the romance section where books were rotated on and off the shelves at an amazing rate. New romance titles hit the store every day and old ones had to be pulled from the shelves in mere weeks if their sales numbers didn’t justify a longer stay. The fiction section also included a paperback bestseller table upon which a hundred or so of the most popular mass-market paperbacks were displayed in a sort of pyramid-like arrangement. The books we had the most copies of went onto the middle of the table and were stacked the highest. As the books got closer to the edge of the table, the stacks became smaller. The size of the stacks changed all the time because, after all, these were bestsellers and people were constantly buying them. Thus the table was a nightmare to keep in order. Despite all these drawbacks I jumped at a chance to oversee the fiction and literature section. I figured that five hours of my workday would be spent among fellow fiction and literature lovers like me. I envisioned myself discussing George Eliot and Edith Wharton with other lovers of the classics. But I was living in a fool’s paradise.
I arrived at Tower a day or two after O.J. Simpson was arrested for murdering his wife and her friend. The co-manager of our store, a crusty veteran of the retail wars who had been with the Tower chain since the 1960s, told me to be ready to clear space for O.J.-related books on our paperback bestseller table. Since the sensational murder case had become headline news only a few days earlier, I figured I had at least a month or so before I had to worry about putting any O.J. books on display. Wrong. Within a week of the famous low-speed chase of Simpson’s white Bronco on the L.A. Freeway, paperback books about the case began pouring into the store. At one point we had at least a dozen books on the subject. Even more amazing was that people actually bought them. In droves. Oh, they smiled self-deprecatingly when they came up to the counter and chided themselves for buying such trash, but they bought them nonetheless. The books were so popular that I could never seem to keep the mass-market pyramid pointy. If I left it unattended for five minutes it would start to look like an ancient Egyptian ruin.
I figured that the O.J. Books were an aberration. The murders in question were being played up in the press as “the crime of the century” (considering that they occurred in the same century as the Holocaust, this struck me as at tad inflated, but that’s the media for you), and so it seemed as if people had been whipped into a frenzy of bad-book buying unlike anything ever seen before, at least not since the previous crime of the century. Surely, I thought, O.J. will quickly cop a plea and the hysteria will die down and our customers will return to buying serious, intelligent books again. But that didn’t happen. During the year or so that I worked at Tower, O.J. books dominated our bestseller list. And when Simpson’s own book, “I Want To Tell You,” was published, it seemed as if every African-American within fifty miles showed up at the store to purchase a copy. Frequently, entire African-American families would arrive at the store, dressed as if for church, and stand in line together to purchase a copy of O.J.’s book. Perhaps they were coming from a church where the pastor had advised them to get hold of a copy of the book and read it for themselves. Judge not lest ye be judged, might have been the theme of the sermon. I don’t know what, exactly, inspired this phenomenon. The cheap paperback quickies that came out in the immediate aftermath of the arrest were snatched up by no particular type of customer. Those books were purchased by old and young, blacks and whites, males and females. But white people, it seemed, had no particular interest in what O.J. himself had to say. People who had eagerly, if somewhat shamefacedly, rushed into the store to buy the early exploitative paperbacks now clucked in disapproval at the table on which we kept our eight gazillion copies of “I Want To Tell You.” “Why do you want to help line the pockets of that murderer?” they would self-righteously demand of me and my fellow clerks.
All this was very depressing to me. I came to Tower Books hoping to discuss fine literature with serious readers, to discuss the English language with fellow word lovers. Instead I spent much of my time discussing a celebrity murder case I had absolutely no interest in. Customers were constantly asking me and my fellow clerks, “Have you read any of the O.J. Books?” “Are any of them any good?” “Do they sell well?” “Do you have that O.J. book that was mentioned on 20/20 (or Nightline, or Barbara Walters, or whatever) last night?” There were times when I wanted to stand on top of my mass-market pyramid and start flinging O.J. books across the store like King Kong making his last stand atop the Empire State Building.
But it quickly became evident to me that, even if there had been no O.J. Simpson murder case, my job at Tower Books would have afforded me very few opportunities to commune with fellow literature lovers. During my time at Tower, there were about ten titles that, along with all the O.J. tomes, probably accounted for close to eighty percent of the store’s overall sales. And of those ten titles, not one was even remotely literary. My stay at Tower coincided with the explosive popularity of the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” by John Gray, Ph.D. (more about that doctorate in a moment). For a while we were selling about 100 copies a day of this relationship guide. We sold nearly as many copies of another relationship guide, “Are You The One For Me?: Knowing Who’s Right and Avoiding Who’s Wrong” by Barbara DeAngelis, Ph.D. Interestingly, the authors of these two schlocky relationship guides were once married to each other. Every time a customer laid one of these books down on the counter, I longed to ask her (men never bought these books): “If a relationship expert can’t even manage to stay married to another relationship expert, how can he or she possibly be much of a relationship expert? If either of them knew anything about making a relationship work, wouldn’t they still be married to each other?” In fact, as the long dreary months went by and these books continued to dominate our non-O.J. bestseller list, I did actually raise this question with a few customers. But it did no good. Gray and DeAngelis were being celebrated on TV as relationship experts and that, apparently, was enough to convince large numbers of American women that they couldn’t live without the advice of these two phony “doctors.” (According to Wikipedia, Gray’s doctorate was issued by Columbia Pacific University, a correspondence school that was notorious for being nothing more than a bogus-diploma mill and has since been shut down by the government. DeAngelis’s website states that she possesses a Ph.D. but doesn’t specify where she received it. It has always been my humble opinion that if a Ph.D. recipient’s official bio doesn’t mention where the Ph.D. was received, then there’s probably no need to refer to that person as “Doctor.”)
Another massive bestseller during my stint at Tower was a wretched tome called “Mutant Message Down Under,” by Marlo Morgan. Figuring that it was some sort of clever parody of tabloid journalism like Francine Prose’s “Bigfoot Dreams” or Arnold Sawislak’s “Dwarf Rapes Nun, Flees In UFO” (one of the greatest book titles of all time), I picked up and attempted to read “Mutant Message” on a slow workday. I’d like to describe it for you, but it is indescribably awful. It was self-published in 1990 and touted as the true story of an American woman’s spiritual awakening during a walkabout with some Australian aboriginals. The book became a bit of a cult classic and was republished in 1994 by Harper Collins, which promoted it as a novel. The author, however, continued to claim that the events described in the book actually occurred exactly as she described them. When experts on aboriginal culture pointed out her many errors, and when actual aboriginals began protesting that the book was an ignorant exploitation of their culture, Morgan issued an apology and retracted her assertion that the book was nonfiction. None of this seemed to have any effect on the book’s enormous popularity, however, and when the controversy blew over, Morgan once again began to claim that the book was autobiographical. She even wrote a sequel called “Mutant Message From Forever,” but, mercifully, I was no longer in the bookselling business when it was published.
Every bit as successful as “Mutant Message” was James Redfield’s “The Celestine Prophecy,” which was touted variously as a novel, a spiritual meditation, an environmental manifesto, and a self-improvement guide. What it actually was, however, was new-age claptrap. But while I was at Tower it sold a bazillion copies. It was so successful that the publisher brought out an accompanying workbook called “The Celestine Prophesy: An Experiential Guide,” which was aimed at “study groups” seeking to delve deeper into the nine truths revealed in the novel. A coworker and I used to amuse ourselves in the slow late-night hours by trying to think up book titles that were sure to become bestsellers. The object of the game was to combine elements of at least two or three current bestsellers into one godawful title. Eventually “O.J.’s Mutant Prophecy From Mars,” became our codename for all bestselling schlock. This coworker’s name was Dave. A 17-year-old high school student and book nerd who was singularly unsuccessful at getting dates, Dave told me he sought a job at Tower because he thought it would be a good way of meeting girls who were as bookish as he was. Whenever a teenage girl entered the store while Dave and I were working the registers together, we’d try to guess her literary tastes just by sizing up her appearance. If a particularly promising young woman came through the door, I might say to Dave, “Just watch, I’ll bet she’s here to buy Jane Austen’s complete works. Get ready, this could be your dream date.” But Dave was a glass-half-empty kind of guy. He’d usually shake his head and say, “Naw, she’s got ‘O.J.’s Mutant Prophecy From Mars’ written all over her.” Sadly, Dave was virtually always right. The women who came into our store were almost always there to buy some trashy bestseller. We sold little, if any, Jane Austen.
Dave, like almost all of my coworkers, was exactly half my age. I was accustomed to working in the insurance industry with a bunch of middle-aged, white-collar types, so it was refreshing to suddenly find myself surrounded by young kids with orange hair and torn jeans and baggy T-shirts. At night, I’d go home and regale Julie with stories about my coworkers. Body piercings were just becoming popular at that time, and every day some coworker of mine would be showing off a new piercing. This was especially true of Mondays, because most of the piercings seemed to have been acquired on weekends, after a lot of partying and illegal alcohol consumption. Although lip- and tongue- and eyebrow-studs are now fairly commonplace, they were unusual back then. I could always get a rise out of Julie by describing the tortured flesh of my teenage coworkers. I remember a cute young girl named Carly who, one Monday morning, went around to each her coworkers and lifted up her shirt to show off her brand-new nipple piercing. The piercing had occurred so recently that the nipple was still swollen and discolored, definitely not pleasant to lookout. Likewise, after a girl named Evie had her navel pierced, the skin around her belly button swelled up so badly it completely closed off the navel, making it look more like a small vagina than a belly button. And then there was the day a girl named Linnea showed up with an eyebrow that was swollen and crusted with dried blood. I thought maybe she’d been beaten by a boyfriend. But, no, that wasn’t what happened at all. Linnea, who normally wore small metal hoops that pierced the flesh of her eyebrow, had grabbed a comb in order to give her long coppery hair a quick grooming before coming to work. But the teeth of the comb had got caught in one of her eyebrow hoops and nearly ripped it out of her flesh.
But if I found my coworkers somewhat strange, they found me at least as odd. One of the things that amused them was my diet. On my lunch break, I would open up a brown paper bag and pull out various gourmet items that Julie had packed for me to eat. While my coworkers all snacked on fast-food burgers and tacos and shakes and fries, I would be dining on stuffed potato skins, strawberry yogurt pie with graham cracker crust, six-layer vegetarian lasagna, and other exotic dishes. Usually these were leftovers from the previous evening’s dinner. My teenage colleagues, who appeared to have never eaten anything that didn’t come from a drive-thru window, were fascinated by my meals. They asked for a list of the ingredients, an explanation of how it was prepared, a description of the flavor. But whenever I offered a bite to any of them, they recoiled in horror, as if I had invited them to share a bloody piece of roadkill with me.
Another thing that set me apart was that I liked to read on my lunch breaks. Most of the teenagers who worked at Tower Books had originally applied for a job at the Tower Records store right next door. Jobs at Tower Records were highly coveted by local teens, because record store employees got to listen to loud music all day and could take their pick of all sorts of free promotional materials: cds, posters, concert tickets, T-shirts, etc. Few teenagers ever applied for work at Tower Books, so the manager of the record store would send over his excess applications to the manager of our store. Thus, the bookstore was populated with employees who tended to be far more interested in popular music than in literature of any kind. My coworkers would ask me, “How can you stand to read a book after spending all day selling them and stocking them and tracking them down for customers?” I’d just shrug and explain that my love of books was the reason I took the job in the first place. To my coworkers, I must have seemed like an alien from outerspace. While they frittered away their lunch breaks chatting about TV and music and snarfing down Big Macs and Whoppers, I’d sit in a corner and dine on leftover grilled salmon with roasted-corn relish and read a novel by Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh.
But the thing that most fascinated my coworkers was the way I smelled. I didn’t wear cologne to work. What my coworkers liked was the smell of my clothes. I wore a freshly laundered shirt to work every day. This is standard practice in the white-collar world of the insurance industry. My clothes had the fresh linen-y smell of the fabric softener Julie and I used in the dryer. But apparently this was a foreign odor to my coworkers, who all dressed in T-shirts that they appeared never to wash. One girl, Meghan, used to come in every morning, stand beside me, and just sniff the shoulders of my shirts for a minute or so. Every now and then, she’d summon another 17-year-old coworker to join in the experience. “Come smell Kevin,” she’d say. “He smells so clean!”
Another phenomenon at Tower was the influence of Oprah Winfrey on book sales. I had never seen Oprah’s TV program and didn’t know anyone who watched it. At least I didn’t know any one who admitted to watching it. But by the time I arrived at Tower it was well known among the employees that once every week or so, at four o’clock in the afternoon, there would be a huge demand for a previously obscure title simply because it had been promoted on Oprah’s show that day. The Oprah show aired at three o’clock in the afternoon in Sacramento. When it ended, at four, our phones would be clogged by callers wanting to know if we had a copy of whatever book Oprah happened to have plugged that day (thankfully, she didn’t plug a book on every show). A few savvy customers were smart enough to call before the show actually ended. One day, shortly after I started working at Tower, I was at the customer-service counter when the phone rang and a customer asked me if we stocked a book called “Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees.” I believe it was a guide for parents interested in teaching their children about money. I looked it up in the computer and found that we had three copies of the book in stock. “Yes,” I told the customer, and then she asked me to place a copy on hold for her. A few minutes later another caller asked about the same book. By 3:55 p.m. all three of our copies were spoken for. Then at four o’clock the blitz really began. Never having experienced the phenomenon, I didn’t know what the hell was happening. I started describing it to Evie, but she just held up her hand to silence me and said, “Oprah.” Not being a daytime TV watcher, I had no idea who Oprah Winfrey was, but Evie quickly brought me up to speed. She told me that we would get a huge influx of phone calls over the next 24 hours. We would probably end up ordering 100 copies of the book for various customers. But, five or six days later, when the books arrived, few of the customers would bother to come into the store to pick up the copy they had ordered. By then, Oprah would be promoting another book and the whole phenomenon would start all over again. Eventually, I believe, bookstore owners became sophisticated enough to find out in advance which books were going to be promoted on Oprah and then order enough copies to satisfy the anticipated surge in demand. But when I first came to work at Tower, meeting the demand for Oprah-promoted books was still pretty much a hit-or-miss proposition.
If our store had been located in a university town, like nearby Davis, we would have undoubtedly been dealing with a more intellectual clientele and the influence of Oprah Winfrey might have been less profound. Alas, the store I worked in was located in a relatively lowbrow neighborhood. We sold a lot of gun and girly magazines, automotive repair guides, books of affirmations (“Life’s Little Instruction Book” et al), books about angels (for some reason these were hugely popular in 1994), and books by Rush Limbaugh and Tom Clancy. Generally, however, it was celebrity that seemed to influence book sales in our store the most. If O.J. Simpson had been an unemployed plumber, no one in our neighborhood would have bothered to read books about him, no matter what his crimes. But any whiff of celebrity attached to a book would generally guarantee healthy sales. One day I was standing at the customer-service counter when an elderly lady, perhaps 70, came into the store and looked around at all the books with a bewildered expression on her face. “Can I help you?” I asked. She was dressed very prettily in an out-of-date sort of way – a long, calico-print dress, white stockings, sensible brown shoes. I took her for, perhaps, a retired school librarian looking to reacquaint herself with some of the classics she had recommended through the years to her students. But she came over to the counter and said, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a bookstore before in my life.” This set off a few alarm bells in my head. God only knew what she might be looking for. She seemed too refined to be the “O.J.’s Mutant Prophecy From Mars” type. And it was too early in the day for her visit to have been inspired by Oprah.
“Is there a book I can help you find?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard that Tim Taylor has written a book, and I’d like to buy a copy of it.”
“Tim Taylor?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “the young man from that TV program ‘Tool Time’.”
I looked up both “Tool Time” and “Tim Taylor” in our computer and didn’t find what she wanted. Fortunately, I was enlightened by another of my 17-year-old coworkers, Linnea, who happened to walk by and see that I was at a loss. Linnea asked the woman what she was looking for and then quickly located a copy for her. The book turned out to have been written by Tim Allen, the star of a TV sitcom called “Home Improvement.” Apparently, on the program, Allen played a character named Tim Taylor, the host of a fictional home-improvement program called, you guessed it, “Tool Time.” Since the book was easily located and the customer satisfied, the incident hardly seemed worth commenting on for Linnea. But I delayed her and tried to point out just how seriously wrong the incident seemed to me. “Think of it, Linnea,” I said. “Here’s a woman who has been alive for probably seven decades – approximately four times your current lifespan – and the first time she feels the need to go into a bookstore is when she hears that the fictional star of a fictional TV show has written a book?”
Linnea seemed nonplussed by my amazement. “So?” she said, raising an eyebrow at me (or perhaps it was still just a little bit swollen).
“Come on, Linnea: no incident of the entire previous seventy years has ever inspired her to wander inside a bookstore, no curiosity about the Kennedy assassination, or Watergate, or even the goddamn O.J. Simpson murders has ever compelled that woman to walk into a bookstore. No big bestseller of the last fifty years, nothing by Stephen King, or Mario Puzo, or even Grace Metalious, for godsakes, ever managed to lure her into a bookstore before. But after 70 years of complete book abstinence, she decides to lose her literary cherry only because she heard that a fictional character named Tim Taylor, who sounds as if he is a thinly disguised version of Bob Villa and is played on TV by an actor named Tim Allen, has written a book – only then does she decide to finally take her first foray into a bookstore, to buy a book that even Tim Allen probably didn’t write much of, a book that was probably ghostwritten by some old-time gag-writing hacks hired by a publishing firm hoping to cash in on the popularity of a goddamn sitcom? That doesn’t strike you as a wee bit perverse, Linnea?”
Linnea didn’t bother to answer. She just laughed and moved on. Being younger than me and having worked in the bookstore longer I had, she had a better grasp of the connection between retail sales and pop-cultural celebrity than I did. No doubt, Linnea considered me a greater oddity than the “Tool Time” woman.
Eventually, though, I became as accustomed as Linnea to oddball exchanges with customers. After a few months they barely even fazed me. Once a woman (almost all our book buyers were women) of about thirty came into the store with a copy of Thomas Hardy’s novel “A Pair of Blue Eyes” in her hands. She laid it down on the counter in front of me along with the receipt. “I bought the wrong book by mistake,” she said. “Is there any way I can exchange this book for the right one?” The book was in good shape and the receipt was less than 30 days old, so I told her, “Sure. Go grab the book you want and I’ll handle the exchange for you.” She came back up to the counter with a book whose title was something like “How To Supercharge Your Harley Davidson Motorcycle.”
“Wow, you really did make a mistake,” I joked.
She nodded, embarrassed, but didn’t offer any further explanation. After she left the store I tried to fathom what might have inspired such an incongruous exchange of books. Perhaps she had a boyfriend who loved motorcycles. And maybe his birthday was rolling around and she had no money. And perhaps, being an avid reader, she had a lot of books in her house. So she grabbed her most recently purchased book and exchanged it for a gift to give to her boyfriend. Of course it was also possible that she suffered from some extreme form of dyslexia. I noticed that the letters T-H-O-M-A-S H-A-R-D-Y could be found in the title of the motorcycle book, so perhaps she really did just make a mistake. Eventually I gave up trying to solve the riddle and reshelved the Hardy novel. Ironically, it was probably the only Thomas Hardy novel purchased out of that store during my tenure as a clerk, and now it had been returned in exchange for a motorcycle manual. Talk about life’s little ironies. That pretty much epitomized the demand for serious literature in our store, which was practically zero.
One day I asked Glenn, the co-manager and long-time Tower employee, why the hell we bothered stocking literature at all. Every now and then there would be a mini-run on some classic book that the local high-school had assigned to its students (“To Kill A Mockingbird,” “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”), but that was about the extent of our literature sales (and the kids who bought those books usually did so under duress, arriving at the cash register looking as though they were reporting to the principal’s office for punishment). And yet the fiction/literature section was the largest section in our store. Granted, pop fiction, mystery novels, and romance novels, made up the bulk of the section, but we nonetheless carried an impressive number of literary titles that almost no one ever purchased. Everywhere you turned in the fiction aisles, you’d see the aquamarine spines of Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, the yellow spines of Penguin Classics, the black spines of Oxford World Classics, the copper-colored spines of The Modern Library Classics. Although I was happy the books were there, I couldn’t understand how a for-profit operation could justify carrying such dead weight. So I turned to Glenn for answers. He had started out working at a Tower Records store in the 1960s. In those days, he said, he and his fellow clerks used to go out into the parking lot and smoke pot during their breaks. If you wanted to be a record clerk at Tower in those days you almost had to be a pothead, he explained. No one would take record recommendations seriously from someone who didn’t at least look like he smoked a lot of pot. In those early years Tower Records was one of the first stores to stock albums by some of the more esoteric rock and roll acts. “We had lots of Frank Zappa records and Moby Grape and Captain Beefheart and Wavy Gravy and Country Joe and the Fish,” Glenn told me. “Not too many people ever bought that stuff, but we played it all day long on the sound system and we pushed it hard when customers asked for a recommendation. We never made much money on that stuff but we figured it was the kind of music a store like ours ought to be promoting. We made most of our money selling bubblegum pop-music shit, but we still kept Frank Zappa’s and Captain Beefheart’s entire catalogs on hand in the store in case somebody came in looking for ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’ or ‘Burnt Weenie Sandwich’ or ‘Trout Mask Replica.’ That’s just always been the Tower way, man. Sell ‘em the shit they want, but keep the good stuff on hand just in case. Nobody buys serious literature in this store, but we keep it out there for ‘em anyway. Who knows, maybe one of those pop-fiction junkies will pick up a Pynchon novel by mistake and start reading it and experience an epiphany right there in the fiction aisle, man. Maybe he’ll become enlightened. That’s why we keep the stuff around, man.”
It didn’t make any financial sense to dedicate so many expensive square feet of store space to literature that none of our customers seemed to be interested in, but from the perspective of a true booklover, the logic was unimpeachable. After my little pep talk with Glenn, I resolved to try to actually push the literary titles, to engage in the activity that bookshop owners refer to as “hand-selling.” If I saw a customer glancing at a Robert Ludlum novel, I’d sidle up to her and suggest that she might want to check out Graham Greene’s “Our Man In Havana.” “It’s a spy novel too,” I’d say encouragingly. If someone came up to the counter with Ann Rice’s latest tome, I’d tell her, “If you’re interested in Gothic fiction, you might want to check out Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” trilogy, or perhaps “The Monk” by Matthew Lewis. It never worked. No one ever wanted my unsolicited advice. Perhaps if I had looked more like a pot smoker…
Another strange phenomenon at Tower was the large number of people who came in and purchased books for incarcerated prisoners. We were always being asked to ship books to various jails and penitentiaries. We even had a list of prison addresses on hand in the customer-service department in case the customer wasn’t sure of the address of the prison her boyfriend/husband/whatever was staying in. As I recall there were regulations that made it difficult for private parties to send packages to prisoners directly. Apparently there was less red tape involved at the receiving end if the books were shipped from a bookstore rather than a relative of an inmate. At any rate, we shipped at least a couple of packages a week to various penal institutions. And then there were the so-called “ripped returns.” To save money on shipping, bookstores aren’t required to return unsold mass-market paperbacks to their publishers after their shelf life has expired. Instead the bookstore employees just have to tear off the cover of the book and return that for a refund or a credit. You’ve seen the little warning paragraph in countless paperback books: “If this book was purchased without a cover it was sold illegally…” Under their agreements with the publishers, bookstore owners are required to destroy the paperbacks from which the covers have been ripped for return. But, at Tower at least, these books were seldom destroyed. Usually they were divvied up among the employees. But we had so many ripped returns in our store that the employees couldn’t possibly have carried them all home. Instead, we boxed up the extras (after weeding out anything pornographic or otherwise deemed inappropriate) and shipped them off to various regional prisons and jails. According to my manager, this was a blatant violation of our agreement with the publishers. But nobody at Tower liked to destroy a book. And since we already shipped so many books to penal institutions already, sending our ripped returns to jailhouses seemed like a good way of killing two birds with one stone. We saved ourselves the trouble of destroying the books and we helped improve the lives of a handful of prisoners around the state. I still have a few dozen ripped returns left over from my days at Tower. Their titles and authors are written in felt pen on their naked white spines. In my little private library they constitute a distinct series of books, just like the Penguin Classics and Modern Library editions. I like to think of them as the spineless classics, although technically speaking, they are merely coverless, not spineless.
After about a year at Tower, I called it quits. I personally must have rung up about ten thousand copies of “O.J.’s Mutant Prophecy From Mars” and I just couldn’t take it any more. A local start-up magazine that was looking for freelance writers contacted me and promised me plenty of assignments. None of these assignments ever came through, but the prospect of legitimate writing work enticed me into giving up the bookselling gig. A few years ago, when the entire Tower chain went bankrupt and closed all its stores, I found myself reminiscing fondly about my days as a book clerk. For a brief shining while, Glenn and I and a few other true believers, like my nerdy teenage coworker Dave, tried, like the fictional bookseller in Christopher Morley’s “Parnassus on Wheels” to bring “salvation” to “stunted little minds.” We tried to give our customers artistic epiphanies, to bring them enlightenment. We tried to bring intellectual substance and literary sustenance into their lives. But for the most part all they wanted was the dirt on O.J. Simpson.
