[This piece appeared in Commonweal, June 20, 2003]
The Year of Reading Promiscuously
by Robert H. Bell
For the past year I've been on sabbatical, blessed with time for several joyous projects: 2002 was my year of reading promiscuously.
You must not think, however, that a sabbatical is without hazards. My sixteen-year-old daughter, to whom I was only recently (it seems) reading Greek myths, The Narnia chronicles, and The Secret Garden, now finds her father's passion for reading kind of weird. By the time she descends from arranging herself each morning, I'm usually ensconced in some book. One morning I heard her whispering to my wife, "He's reading Homer. It's seven A.M.!" "Well, yes, dear, that's what he does on sabbatical. He reads. He writes and runs, then he reads more." My daughter made an exclamation that sounded suspiciously like, "Dork! Dork! Dork!"
Undaunted, the Book Dork presents some of the books I particularly enjoyed and admired during the last year.
My most exciting venture was a month re-reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Published in 1996 by Little-Brown, Wallace's novel inspired critical acclaim and a zealous following. The narrative depicts life at a Boston tennis academy for gifted teenagers, the recoveries and lapses of pathetic addicts at a half-way house, and an international conspiracy involving avengers, victims, lunatics, lovers and lovers. Among a panoramic cast of hundreds, several characters come richly, radiantly alive. Vastly entertaining, searing, poignant, brilliant, hilarious and devastating, Infinite Jest is beyond category. Epic in scope and seriously demanding, Infinite Jest is an amazing achievement--the American novel of the last decade that most deserves to be read and re-read, and even compared to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Joyce's Ulysses.
A Ship Made of Paper (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2003) the just-published novel by Scott Spencer, is a beautiful, passionate, and heart-breaking story of a love affair between a white man, living with a woman and her six-year-old daughter, and a black married mother. As he has demonstrated since his astonishing story of adolescent passion Endless Love, Spencer is a writer of prodigious gifts: one of our most reliably smart, deft, and empathetic novelists; now he dramatizes the potent, irresistible, disastrous consequence of mid-life adultery. What makes A Ship Made of Paper so compelling, besides its uniformly limpid prose, is its sympathetic attention to all four of the protagonists.
The writing of William James is newly available in two recent volumes of the remarkable Library of America series. (One could do worse in this life than read nothing but Library of America volumes.) Perhaps James's most brilliant work is The Varieties of Religious Experience, truly an American classic, a model of "interdisciplinary" research and writing, imaginative and clinical, eloquent and moving. Three books about William James I found especially interesting are: Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (W. W. Norton, 1996) by Kim Townsend, A Stroll with William James (newly reissued by University of Chicago Press, 2002) by Jacques Barzun, and Poetry and Pragmatism (Harvard University Press, 1992) by Richard Poirier.
The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney published Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2002), a book every bit as illuminating and exciting as his Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar, Strauss Giroux, 1998). Heaney writes gorgeously, as one would expect, about the art of poetry and his favorite poets; he also writes magnificently about Ireland, history, politics, and culture--especially as they are entwined with the reading and writing of poetry. As Heaney writes, "On the playground the phrase 'finders keepers' probably still expresses glee and stakes a claim, so that in a sense it can apply as well to the experience of a reader of poetry: the first encounter with work that excites and connects will induce in the reader a similar urge to celebrate and take possession of it." Perhaps Heaney's most urgent conviction is expressed in one of the best of his essays, "The Redress of Poetry," when he says that "Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world." Inexplicably omitted from this splendid collection is Heaney's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, an address that should be savored, along with the Nobel speeches of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, by anyone who loves literature or despairs of modern art. Our best critic of contemporary poetry, Helen Vendler, has a lucid commentary on the poems in her study Seamus Heaney (Harvard University Press, 1998).
Movie fans got another treat, a newly revised and updated version of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf, 2002) by David Thompson. This is much more than a reference book or encyclopedia of cinematic information: it's a treasure trove of astute short essays on memorable films, directors, writers, and actors. He is massively informed, tart and cogent, a cornucopia of perceptive observations, speculations, and evaluations. Thompson's Dictionary of Film would be the ideal bedside book--if it were not so packed with disquieting arguments, such as his entry on Martin Scorcese: "But Scorcese does not get enough proper scrutiny for his ideas. And if he is our best [director], then his films need ideas and themes more lasting and useful than may have been acquired in a lifetime of watching movies . . . Scorcese's may be the greatest biography in American film since that of Welles. And the most painful.".
Another uncommonly insightful book, especially for anyone who cares about higher education in America, is a remakable memoir by Alvin Kernan, In Plato's Cave (Yale University Press, 1999). Kernan, long-time Yale professor, eminent scholar and literary critic, was also Dean of the graduate faculty at Princeton. In Plato's Cave is probing autobiography, pungent polemic, vivid social history, and compelling elegy. While Kernan regrets the decline of traditional humanism, his own work continues to instruct and inspire teachers, scholars, students, and readers.
Among the many other recent books that delighted, sustained, and provoked me last year were three novels, Ian McEwan's Atonement, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in Robert Fagles's vibrant new translations, with excellent notes and introductions by Bernard Knox seem to me even better than the versions of Homer by Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald. Another notable new translation of a classic is the masterly, overwhelming rendition of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (Penguin, 2002) by Richard Peavear and Larissa Volokonsky.
For lovers of literature and great writing, at least, it was a very good year.
Robert H. Bell is William R. Kenan Professor of English at Williams College, where he is founding director of the Project for Effective Teaching.