A while back, I announced a rather ambitious project in these–not pages, exactly, perhaps–pixels. I had intended to make a reading pilgrammage across a shelf of one of our bookshelves of fiction in an attempt to educate myself better about current writing and the state of fiction. In other words, I was attempting to carve away a tiny chip from the great block of ignorance that I call a brain. Now, I started out in good faith. I was rereading Travels with Charley then, and I did just fine with that book. The reading project started to fall to pieces when I set myself to reread the next book, Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Everything that had delighted me on my first reading grated on me the second time, so I put it aside. Next, I picked up The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, which I had never read before. By the end of Chapter Three, I had set it aside as well.
At that point I began to suspect that the problem lay more with me than with the texts. And the problem was that I now, being a novelist myself, approached the works of other living novelists as competitors, almost as enemies. I couldn’t read a sentence without recasting it in my mind, without searching it for flaws, without scoffing at its techniques and meanings. All of which is patently unfair to these authors and their works. What a dreadful world it would be if everyone wrote the way that I did, and how much harder still would it be for me to progress in my chosen profession if my works were no more unique than a paperclip or a house in a subdivision.
And so, I have decided to lay off living authors. They’ve got a right, and reading somebody’s work in that way does me no good either. There’s just no percentage in it at all.
All of which has led me to come up with a new plan. I will, from now on, concentrate on the works of the dead. The classics. All those books that I should have read and, with depressing frequency, haven’t. I’ve begun by rereading another book of Steinbeck’s, Of Mice and Men. In part, I am reading it because my son just finished it. In part, I am reading it because I haven’t read it since I was 14, and I wanted to make its acquaintance again. He’s currently reading The Red Badge of Courage, which I’ve never read, so that will be next on the list. Beyond that, I’m not sure. We’ve picked out some of the shorter classics for him, so I may just continue, as the suckerfish to his shark, to shadow his reading and survive on his crumbs.
But we’ll see. Plans have a strange way of evolving.
