A grey day, never quite hot enough for air conditioning but too unsettled to do without it. I was tired in the afternoon, partly from the weather and partly from an approaching cold. The day was not wasted, but I spent a good part of the later afternoon and early evening reading Colum McCann’s Letting the Great World Spin.

This isn’t a book that I planned to read; I bought it because Crawford Doyle had a signed copy. Thick, really. But I was a different reader then. I was a different reader until a few weeks ago, when I realized that I don’t want to read so much new fiction anymore. I want to re-read books that I’ve loved. The idea of keeping au courant because I keep a blog no longer requires piling up so many shiny new books.

So this is different: this isn’t a decision to buy fewer books. The buying fewer books will take place naturally, because what I’ve decided is to read less new fiction. And to wait until it’s not so new. In any case, I wouldn’t buy a signed copy of a book that I hadn’t been planning to read, not any more.

I didn’t like Mr McCann’s book for most of the first section. There was a faint, almost occult streak of the Celtic sentimentality that put me off Irish fiction as a matter of course for over twenty years, making me come late to Colm Tóibín’s table. The second section — the one about Claire, the reluctant Park Avenue matron who has joined a support group of bereft Vietnam mothers — was even harder going: the last thing I want to read about now, with my little grandson nestled in my heart, is senseless war. But the third section filled my sails, and I was sorry when it ended.

Mr McCann writes very well, but he doesn’t write about the things that interest me. For example, I find his descriptions of a Bronx housing project, in which a number of lives intersect, disappointingly impressionistic and even somewhat lifted. He seems to be relying on a pool of common knowledge, gleaned mainly from the movies but also from novels such as Underworld, to set the scene. Not that I want to spend time in a housing project! But if that’s where a novelist takes me, he’ll have to provide a full tour. Instead of which I sensed anxious discussions with friends and perhaps even editors and agents about how little descriptive passage-work might suffice, all in the interest of keeping readers amused.

What I am not interested in is reading about bodies. We all occupy bodies during our time on earth, and nothing can be done without them, but of course what I’m talking about is the sheer physical activity, say, of tightrope walking, in which the brain plays an important but subsidiary (“integrated”) role. When I think of the time devoted to acquiring acrobatic expertise, I want to cry: if you must do something with your body, at least make beautiful music! I know that physical activity brings great satisfaction to many people. It has never done so to me — never brought more than short spasmodic states of lighthearted vacation that compare unfavorably with the rapture of a relieved itch — and I have certainly never enjoyed thinking or reading about it. Now I’m going to stop.

And sex! Reading about sex was ruined for me by Philip Roth, in an excerpt from Sabbath’s Ghost that I’ve never forgiven The New Yorker for publishing. In it, the protagonist masturbates upon a rival’s grave. I was amazed that this gesture, by any literary accounting, could be summed up as anything but deranged and disgusting. I’ve been heartened to find a new warning on the Internet lately, reminding readers, before they click through, that dire images cannot be “unseen.” The idea that The New Yorker would print anything that I’d be sorry to have read never occurred to me before that episode. In any case, I’m going to bail before the old ban on “plumbing” becomes absolute, and novelists take to describing their characters’ colonic upheavals.

While I’ve been writing, the clouds have broken, and a quantity of rain has fallen, but the air is still thick with wet and anything but refreshing. My favorite childhood song is the one about the old man snoring through the pouring rain: I think that I always wanted to grow up to be that guy. But I would never want to sleep through rainfall. Rest, perhaps, but held on the edge of sleep like a leaf upon a grate. (22 June 2010)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 11:31 pm.