MINI BOOK REVIEW: Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose (Yes, That's Really Her Name)

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I can pinpoint the moment when I more or less gave up on "serious" American fiction.  Probably about 15 years ago.  The book was Susan Minot's Evening.

The book was hugely praised, as had been her previous short stories and novels.  Raves from all quarters.

I overcame my negative reaction to the photograph of the author on the back cover -- I'd purchased it in hardcover -- which struck me as self-satisfied and somehow unserious for an author of serious fiction:



All right, it's unfair.  But I didn't judge the book by its cover.  I bought it and I started to read it.

In fairness to Ms. Minot, I had been souring on serious American fiction for a long time.  By "serious" fiction, I mean fiction that aspires to be literature, to be art.  This would exclude most modern crime and "best-seller" romantic fiction, although some would call (for example) what Elmore Leonard does "literature," and I would not entirely disagree with them.  Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald, absolutely.   I'm talking about fiction that explores fundamental human issues like love, freedom, power, sexuality, family, memory, God, gods, truth, beauty, and what to do with one's damned life.  I had been reading American literature, past and present, for a long time, before I had to start reading law texts and since I was able to stop, and there was a time when I loved much of what I selected. 

But sometime in the early-to-mid Nineties, I started hitting some clinkers.  Novels and short stories both.  I blamed the academy, notably the Iowa Writers Workshop, whose graduates were turning out dull, solipsistic fiction about extremely uninteresting humans.  And of course there was that old villain, the New York Literary Establishment, a bunch of people who all went to the same parties and who reinforced one another's judgments about the Bright Young Things that were emerging amongst the baby boomers.

So maybe I was unfair when I stopped reading Evening about a third of the way into it.  I thought I might be able to pinpoint the page.  Sometimes when I put a book aside, which is not often, I'll leave a bookmark in there, thinking I might come back to it.  I just went to my library -- nope, apparently I did not think it could be salvaged.

My memory of it is vague.  A woman was dying.  There were recollections of love affairs, betrayal of friends and lovers, I think.  There was not an appealing or affirmative character in the bunch.  Mostly women, as I recall.  Nothing wrong with that; they just weren't interesting or likable women.  Their thoughts were pedestrian, their urges dully sexual.   (I admire many female authors:  Willa Cather, Grace Paley, Flannery O'Connor, Jayne Anne Phillips, to name a few.)   I think there was a sister or best friend involved somehow.  I don't remember what I thought of the writing, but I can tell you that during this period, the Minimalists (Ann Beattie and the like) had seriously infiltrated American fiction, misunderstanding the appeal of Hemingway and writing in prose so plain that it had the unintentional effect of revealing with great clarity that the authors had little of interest to convey.  This book was like that.

So I stopped buying new serious fiction.  My next read?  Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and that was that -- I began devouring crime fiction and never really went back.  (Two marvelous exceptions:  Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest -- both leading candidates for Great American Novel -- really, Martin Amis has so nominated Augie March.)  And I started reading poetry. 

I was in a bookstore at Logan Airport recently and my eye rested on Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer.  If there is one thing I like as much as reading fiction, it's reading about writing fiction.  I probably have forty books about writing reposing in my library. 

I loved it.  It consists of very close readings of excerpts of word use, sentences, paragraphs, narrative, dialogue, and other literary devices mostly taken from classical literature -- interestingly, comparatively few examples from modern English-language fiction.  Her readings were convincing and themselves delightful reading.   It made me remember the pleasure I took (and still take) from great writing, from careful prose no less evocative for being careful. 

It also made me remember that I had a book sitting on my shelf that had been a Christmas gift two years ago from a reader whose intelligence, taste, and judgment I trusted:  Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award and lavishly reviewed everywhere.  Oprah and Obama both raved about it.  Although you may remember Franzen from his dustup with Oprah when he declined to cooperate with Oprah's selection of his previous smash hit, The Corrections, for her Book Club.  Apparently, she had no hard feelings.

It's next on my list.

I'll give you a report.

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N.B.:  I just checked Susan Minot's Wikipedia entry.  Evening was published in 1998.  She published one other novel (Rapture, 2002), and that was it. 

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Just Between Us, We Each Need to be Alone -- PART 2

Riddle me this: Have you ever made an important decision, or solved a difficult personal or professional problem, when you were not alone? Certain decisions, of course, are made collegially – on the eve of my tenth anniversary with The Memsahib, I’m thinking of marital decisions – but the decision to get married?

In Part 1, I regretted (more curmudgeonly than I had hoped to appear) the oversocialization of society – wow, there’s an oxymoron. Let’s make it “the oversocialization of members of society.” I regret it most keenly among the generation addicted to email, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other technologies that they cannot leave alone, and which, in turn, cannot leave them alone.

It turns out that some recent studies have identified several material advantages to people of all ages – but particularly young people – to spending time alone. They’re summarized in this article ("The Power of Lonely") from the Boston Globe.   Here’s an excerpt:

"But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone."

Some of the specific results:

"One ongoing Harvard study indicates that people form more lasting and accurate memories if they believe they’re experiencing something alone. Another indicates that a certain amount of solitude can make a person more capable of empathy towards others. And while no one would dispute that too much isolation early in life can be unhealthy, a certain amount of solitude has been shown to help teenagers improve their moods and earn good grades in school."

My own experience is that I don’t have any notable insights, and solve very few problems, when I’m not alone. Solitude is the time for synthesizing the massive data inputs we all experience, the time for puzzling things out. Some years ago, I stumbled on a problem-solving technique which I later discovered was very close to Zen, and which a former boss of mine called my “zero-based thinking.” Whenever I had a difficult problem that seemed to have no solution, whether personal or professional, I’d examine every assumption, including the assumption that the problem was a problem to begin with. This is solitary work. Maybe not sitting on a rural bluff and staring into space, but paying attention only to one’s own thoughts – not considering the impression one is making on another, not processing one’s impressions of another, not formulating expected responses to what one is hearing or reading or seeing. Just plain old thinking. Here’s the thing – it’s fun. And you can’t do it while you’re social networking.

There’s a skill to being alone. It must be cultivated. Witness the young man or woman who discovers to her horror that she has some time on her hands. What does she do? Chances are slim that she’ll pick up a serious book or take a walk or even doze and dream. (Blogging only half-counts – it involves organized thinking (good) but it’s not private and anarchic (bad, at least for realizing the benefits of solitude).) More likely, she’ll pull out her iPhone and make a call, check Facebook, tweet a chirpy tweet. She equates aloneness with loneliness and fears it, and so obsessively socializes. (Example could have as easily have been male.) No easy fix; just do it. For young ‘uns, parents can enforce social-networking-free times and zones. Assign some reading. Require the lad or lass to keep a (non-online) diary, with assurances of privacy – you can call it an analog blog, if that will help.

An anablog, if you will.

I understand that not everyone can find time to be alone. Families exist for a reason. Children need their mothers and fathers, and vice versa; husbands and wives need one another. Employers demand that everyone work in teams. So it’s a struggle for many to find that special time to communicate solely with what’s in one’s head.

Do it anyway.

Just Between Us, We Each Need to Be Alone -- PART 1

In the days – make that “decades” – before the Memsahib entered my life, I was alone a lot. I don’t know if I was alone more than most men of my generation, occupation, and location, but I believe that I was. Oh, I had some good friends and a girlfriend now and then, and if I had invested all of the money I spent in bars and nice restaurants during those years, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about the Obama administration. But while I was no Trappist, I’ll bet that I fell on the more-alone end of the scale.

The reason is pretty simple – I liked being alone. Within the borders of my commitment to the Mem – which will have its glorious tenth anniversary next week – I still do.

The reason isn't too important to the point I want to make somewhere in the next post, but I think it may have been because I was an early reader. Children these days can read by the time they get to first grade, but when I showed up in Mrs. Duvall’s classroom at Belleaire Elementary able to read at speed anything they put in front of me, I was unique (except for one other kid, Bryan Jack, a certifiably brilliant kid who grew up to be a certifiably brilliant adult, and who was tragically killed on 9/11 – another story). Not to say that I understood everything that I was capable of reading out at speed and with expression, but for a little kid I put on a pretty good show.

So, I read. I read everything – classics, kid’s books (Hardy Boys, Tom Swift Jr.), science, history, biography, modern literature, popular fiction, current events, the newspaper, magazines. Reading and the thinking it requires is done alone. It was pleasurable; I liked it, and finally grew to need it. Among my life’s highlights are, and will be, the solitary driving vacations I would take to the American West, almost always making sure that Death Valley was somewhere on the route – the best place in the world to be alone. I kept a microcassette recorder on the seat beside me, and when I had a Great Thought, or saw something interesting, I’d compose into the recorder and transcribe it later.


Not me reading; I was, however, black-and-white in those days


Was I ever lonely growing up and growing older? Oh, yeah. But I didn’t feel it very often, or very keenly, or for very long.

Of course, it is true and quite well known that excessive solitude is not good for us social human creatures. Kids need to be “socialized” through play, interaction with their parents, and group studies at school. Being alone too much can make us lonely, depressed, make us feel unattractive and unwanted. Make us be unattractive and unwanted.

In fact, the point of view that values social interaction above solitude has carried the day. We accept that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” (Don’t think about that lyric too hard – it doesn’t make much sense – but you know what it intends.)

I accept this, but also regret that so few of the last generation or so, and fewer still of the present generation (which is what? the generation that makes the biggest nuisance of itself at any given time?), spend much time alone. And by “alone” I mean “not actively communicating with or being in the presence of another person known to one.” Cell phones; email; Facebook; Twitter; Skype; there will be more to come. I feel sorry for the young men and women, mostly young, who spend enormous amounts of time and mental energy communicating the most banal trivialities with no corresponding enhancement of their social skills, useful knowledge, intelligence, or any other noticeable human characteristic. 


Of course, humans derive independent pleasure from the act of communicating and receiving communications – communicating is better than not communicating.  Got nothing against any of these technologies; we're demonstrably better off for each of them.   It’s the amount of time spent on communicating for its own sake, the communication of crap, that makes me wonder whether these folks ever have the opportunity to think, to learn things of value, to form intelligent convictions.  (Yes, I understand that this assumes that some communications are crap-heavy and some aren't, and that some learning is more valuable than other learning.  This assumption is correct.  I'll get to it some other time.) 

In short, I'm concerned that the pleasure of easy communications is robbing us of time that we need to be alone.

In my next post I’ll review some recent work on the benefits of solitude, and my own experience. Up in a few.