Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (22 page)

One of the advantages of looking back on Asimov’s work from the remove of several decades, not to mention the turn of a century, is that one can see how deeply enmeshed he was in the history of his own time. He was the child of Russian emigrants who left the Soviet Union for America in 1923, just three years after their son Isaac was born; and one can, if one chooses, view his whole science-fiction oeuvre as a recapitulation of the Soviet experiment and the Cold War reaction to it. Yet these novels, although they wear their antitotalitarian garb as prominently as Orwell’s ever did, are unlikely ever to be kidnapped by the right, for the simple reason that all the individualistic, novelty-mongering American virtues are countered in Asimov’s work, and sometimes outweighed, by their opposites: that is, a belief in collective effort, a passion for the past, and an ineradicable pessimism about the prospects for human progress. For Asimov, super-civilization and technological achievement always go hand in hand with a general softening or weakening of the human spirit, and it is only by getting back to basics (or intuition, or felt sensation) that people can continue to move ahead. It is an essentially nostalgic view, and as such it is deeply Russian, however much Asimov may have felt himself to be a fully fledged citizen of his new country.

The note on the author attached to the 2010 reissue of
The End of Eternity
tells us that Isaac Asimov, in addition to writing vast quantities of science fiction, “taught biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine and wrote detective stories and nonfiction books on Shakespeare, the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, biochemistry, and the environment. He died in 1992.” But if we time-travel back to 1984, when the Ballantine paperback of
The Robots of Dawn
came out, we can picture ourselves at a moment when the author himself was still alive. In the author’s note to
that
book, we learn that “at the present time, he has published over 260 books, distributed through every major division of the Dewey system of library classification, and shows no signs of slowing up. He remains as youthful, as lively, and as lovable as ever, and grows more handsome with each year. You can be sure that this is so since he has written this little essay himself and his devotion to absolute objectivity is notorious.” If you are one of those people who, like myself, are still committed to the primitive, cellulose-based habits of reading, you will find that the pages on which you read this are yellowed and flaking. But the voice they transmit, though it belongs to someone gone from this world for twenty years and more, is as strong and as vitally alive as ever.

SEVEN

INCONCLUSIONS

I am not fond of inconclusive endings, and I would not subject you to one if I didn’t think it necessary. I believe as firmly as the next reader that the writer undertakes to deliver as promised, even if the promise is merely implied, and I too get annoyed when the delivery goes missing. Just the other night, for instance, I finished reading a mystery novel (not a very good one, so I won’t bother to tell you its name) and was appalled by its author’s cavalier attitude toward conclusions. We had reached the final page, with the serial killer safely tucked away in the police station, and one of the two detectives who had apprehended the murderer casually asked the other to hazard a guess about motive. What, she wondered, had caused the killer to commit his crimes in the first place—and why, having committed them, had he voluntarily sent in the obscure piece of evidence that in the end allowed him to be caught? “I doubt he knows the answer to that himself,” the other cop replied, and that was all we ever learned on the subject.
This
was an ending? Clearly the author had just decided to pick up his check and go home early.

But in this case, I don’t feel I am breaking even an implied promise. I never said we were going to get somewhere definite with this investigation. In fact, I recall suggesting that we were only going to go around in circles: glorified circles, perhaps, rising one upon the other in a pleasing spiral shape, but circles nonetheless. Like literature itself, this book does not make progress. It was never intended to. Yet it does hope to satisfy, and with that in mind, I will do my best to draw some tentative conclusions.

Certain patterns emerge only in retrospect. I said at the beginning that there were no essential subjects to be covered, no crucial facts to be conveyed, and yet I do seem to have zeroed in, in the course of the book, on many of the things that are central to my own motives as a reader. As I look back on this series of loosely linked chapters—this ring of circus elephants, you might say, each holding in its prehensile trunk the tail of the elephant in front of it—I notice that every chapter title answers, or at least attempts to answer, the question of why I read. This is a purely grammatical observation I’m making: each title fits syntactically into the blank space in the sentence “I read to find _______.”

Yet the titles, though they are true enough, are inadequate to their task; or perhaps I mean that they are too much bigger than their task, too liable to encompass more than a single chapter’s material. To give but one example: Consider that curiously intense yet impossible-to-pin-down relationship between the mirroring figures who occupy just about every work of literature I cite here, those twins or pairs separated by only the thinnest sliver of imaginary space. These pairs include not only the explicit “you” and “I” of a book or a poem, but also the novelist and his fictional protagonist, the essayist and her on-the-page self, the living reader and her dead author, even the literary character and his most salient, detachable characteristic. I have called this relationship “the space between” and located it in a chapter of that title, but it does not reside neatly there. It floods over into every other subject, surfacing when I refer to Norman Mailer’s approach to novelty, or J. M. Coetzee’s version of authority, or Dostoyevsky’s brand of intimacy; it persists even up to the last sentence of “Elsewhere,” when I am talking about Isaac Asimov’s beyond-the-grave voice. And this flooding, this overflowing, is true of every other subject I treat: character is everywhere, and so is grandeur, and so is plot. So perhaps it is not a ring of separate elephants we have here, but just one big elephant wearing multiple disguises, one elephant standing in for the whole idea of Elephant and trying to be them all. No wonder a sense of incompletion is inevitable.

I still think it’s possible, though, to make certain statements about literature that will hold true at least for a while, and one of these statements is about the truth. I hope it is clear to you by now how much this matters to me. If there is anything I hate when I am reading a book, it is the sense that I am being lied to. One can get this sense from fictional works as well as nonfiction ones, and even with nonfiction it is not entirely a matter of factual discrepancies. Lying can be done through tone, through omission, through implication, through context. Lies, as one twentieth-century writer notoriously said of another, can inhere even in words like “and” and “the.” I do not understand why anyone would
want
to lie in a work of art—what is the point of giving up your most valuable privilege, in the one place where you are freely allowed to tell the truth?—but I suppose it has something to do with shame, or greed, or ambition, or some other extra-literary motive. The compulsion to lie, which is personal, has nothing to do with making good art, which must on some level be impersonal. Art needs to rest on truth, even if it does so counterfactually. The satire of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” the allegory of Asimov’s
The End of Eternity
, the impossible longing expressed in Javier Marías’s “When I Was Mortal” or Thom Gunn’s “Death’s Door”—these are all examples of counterfactual truth.

I am obviously parting company with Plato here, if he meant us to take literally his assertion about poets being liars. What I am
not
doing, though, is breaking ranks with those of my contemporaries who make a firm distinction between fact and fiction. Given the constant and purposeful blurring of these categories in the literary world these days, I should stress that I belong with those who still believe in the difference. These include not only newspaper editors, libel lawyers, and scientific watchdogs, but also many, if not most, writers and artists. We who struggle to establish the truth do not want the cavalier liars diluting our efforts and blackening the names of memoir, essay, and nonfiction. This is not to say that everyone needs to get everything right all the time. One is allowed to make factual errors through a combination of negligence and good intentions—even the blinkered law permits that. And not every document that contains factual errors is a full-blown lie. (Several of my favorite novels, and many of my favorite poems, fall into this category.) But an author who self-righteously proclaims that there is no real boundary between fact and fiction is not someone you should trust regarding either.

The subject of truth and untruth brings me, tangentially, to the question of the unreliable narrator in literature. It is not, I must admit, a mode I generally care for. I’m not talking about the narrator we can learn to hate—that is a different matter entirely, as Roberto Bolaño’s
By Night in Chile
and Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” both beautifully illustrate. The truly evil narrator who revels in his own wickedness can be a great pleasure, if sometimes an uncomfortable one. No, the fellow I’m objecting to is that foolish, pathetic guy who thinks he’s telling us the whole story when we and the author are obviously meant, at least eventually, to see around him. This kind of irony is always too broad and at the same time too clubby to be satisfying. A sensitively intelligent author does not need to make himself, or us, feel brilliant at the expense of his duped character. Instead, he is likely to make us feel that we are all part of the same collusive process (as Henry James does, for instance), so that sometimes the characters seem to know more than we do, and sometimes we know more than they, but no one comes out firmly ahead. I hate that nudge in the ribs we always get at the end of an unreliable-narrator novel, which is why I so strongly prefer Ford Madox Ford’s
Parade’s End
to his more famous
The Good Soldier
. This is not the worst form of authorial lie, this misrepresentation of what the narrator understands or fails to understand, but it is indicative, to me, of a generally cavalier attitude toward the truth. I mind lying whether or not it applies to people who don’t exist.

How do I know when the author of a fictional work is lying to me? Or rather, how do I
think
I know, since it is all finally a matter of feeling, and nothing could ever be proved in court? My response has to do, in part, with that notion of authority. An incompetent writer can fail to tell the truth even when he is telling us about something that really happened—for instance, when he was in second grade—and an authoritative writer can tell the truth even when he garbles some of the facts: witness
War and Peace
. Part of what I am listening for, in such cases, is a voice that convinces me from the start. It is a voice that comes into being on the very first page, as I am entering the world of the literary work, and it must inspire enough confidence in me, right there at the beginning, so that I am willing to depend on it to carry me through whatever we are about to experience together.

But the author’s risk of losing me never disappears entirely. I could begin to mistrust her at any time, so she needs to keep assuring me—subtly, implicitly, without any strong-arming or defensiveness—that at each particular juncture we have not parted company or opinions. It is not an easy thing to pull off. I have found myself twenty pages into an excellent short story, only to discover, at that late date, that the writer had betrayed her main character. I have enjoyed hundreds of pages of a fine novel, only to learn that I and the characters were to be abandoned by the author at the very end. This happens even to brilliant writers. They are all capable of spoiling their own work.

Which is not to say that a flaw, even a very visible flaw, will necessarily bring the whole structure down. The poet Randall Jarrell once defined the novel as a prose narrative of some length that had something wrong with it, and while one might feel this is just a poet’s way of taking aim at prose, it is not. Here’s what Jarrell actually said, in explaining what happened whenever he loaned out one of his favorite novels, Christina Stead’s
The Man Who Loved Children
: “I have lent it to many writers and more readers, and all of them thought it good and original, a book different from any other. They could see that there were things wrong with it—a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it—but they felt that, somehow, the things didn’t matter.” As the flaws in the books we love never do matter to us. (And I venture to say this can be as true of poetry as it is of prose—long poems, at any rate, and maybe even some short ones.)

For my own part, I cannot think of a book I have loved that is completely without imperfections of any kind. These shortcomings may be as glaring as the false, tacked-on, Tom-Sawyer-ish ending of
Huckleberry Finn
, and as pervasive as the sentimentality of Dickens’s attitude toward young women, dying children, orphans, and poor people. The problem can involve a reliance on the patently unconvincing (as, for instance, in Sonia’s religious redemption of Raskolnikov at the end of
Crime and Punishment
), or the simple omission of something essential (such as the chapter about Stavrogin’s past misdeeds that was cut by the censors from
Demons
). I think I may even love these books not in spite of their flaws, but because of them. The imperfections offer the necessary space between—that gap which I need to leap over or that crevice into which I can insert myself to become an active part of the literary work’s world.

The problems, in fact, are what seem to make the books I love not only inviting but discussable, with myself and with you. It is in worrying at the knot of a question, a question no doubt suggested to me by those little wrinkles and flaws, that I come to realize exactly what I think about a written work. A theater director once said to me, “When I’m reading a play that I’m about to put onstage, I read it over and over until I find the problem. It can be a little problem, such as how characters get from one room to another, or a big problem, such as why a certain character exists at all. But the problem is essential to my thinking. It’s only when I find the problem that I begin to understand how I’m going to stage the play.” I suppose the same is true of the books I write about.