Let’s start off this year with a word or two about reading routines. We’re all so attentive to our screens and platforms and the apparent interactivity of the Internet that it can make actually sitting down in a chair with an honest-to-goodness analog book feel pretty quaint. Those of us with jobs that require us to read all day sometimes simply want a few hours away from the relentless drilling of glyphs on paper (or electrophoretic ink on electronic paper).If you spend your days reading and editing, it can be difficult to read anything for enjoyment.
More than 30 years of writing about books has made it difficult for me to relax into purely recreational reading. I’m always weighing word choice and parsing sentence structure; deconstructing authorial intent as I go along. It’s a bad habit and one that leads me to give up on a lot of perfectly good books five or 20 pages in. Sometimes I catch myself composing paragraphs about the work as I’m reading; there’s a kind of color commentator in my head accompanying the play-by-play of the novel. It’s annoying - though to some degree, professionally useful - and certainly not the best way to receive a book.
I generally read every night, just before going to sleep. I read in bed with a book light while my wife, Karen - who reads a good deal more than I do - has a table light. When she turns it off, I read for another half hour, maybe a little longer. I can finish a good size novel in a week this way, but I usually have several books going at once. I’ve been reading Arthur Herman’s The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization (Random House, $17.99) since early October. I don’t plan to write about the book, so I’m in no real hurry to finish it. In that time, I’ve probably finished off half a dozen novels, and read parts of maybe a dozen more. I’m really enjoying it.
I read a couple of Scandinavian crime thrillers, Jo Nesbo’s Police (which I finished) and his earlier novel The Bat (which I haven’t but still may), as well as Lars Kepler’s (the pseudonym of a Swedish-writing couple) The Hypnotist (finished it) and The Fire Witness (didn’t finish). I read these books to get some perspective on the Scandinavian crime novel phenomenon. I was not a fan of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy - maybe it’s just reading in translation, which is always a little like reading through a scrim (except with Haruki Murakami, whose work I suspect is at least as rich in English as it is in Japanese). I found Larson’s prose dull and his characters flat. I loved the movies. I liked the Swedish originals better than the English language Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but David Fincher’s movie was well made. So now I think I have at least a couple of points of reference - my education continues.
I’m also rereading Bernard Malamud’s novels. Next month’s column will be about a new anthology of his work that’s being published by Library of America. I’ve also started a couple of novels that won’t be published until April. I’ve read a couple of stories in Ben Marcus’ new collection Leaving the Sea (Knopf, $25.95), but while I love it so far, I need another couple of weeks to think about what I want to say. If I write about it, it’ll probably be on the blood, dirt & angels blog.
So maybe you understand why I’m not prepared to write a full-on review of Robert Gates’ Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Knopf, $35), even though it’s the big book that’s out now.
First of all, it’s almost 600 pages long - the acknowledgments and index push it out to 618 pages. It showed up on my desk last week - so I’m on page 41. So far he hasn’t mentioned the Obama administration. I have serious doubts as to whether I’m going to finish what is likely to be one of the biggest books of the year.
To tell you the truth, I’m not sure a lot of the “reviews” of Duty are based on close reading. A lot of the pieces I’ve seen seem to lean heavily on index-scanning, which is probably the sort of review a book like this deserves.What’s important is how far Gates is willing to pull back the curtain, how much he’s willing to dish about the commanders-in-chief for whom he worked. Some people are going to read the entire book and some are going to enjoy it. But it’s not a readers’ book - it’s a wonk’s book, a book a lot more people will buy than will ever read. While I understand that Duty is on some level important, it’s not my sort of book. I get enough of that sort of current affairs fiber in my diet already (and I’m not convinced it’s even that good for us).
What is my kind of book is Drew Perry’s Kids These Days (Algonquin, $14.95), which reads like a low-key iteration of a Carl Hiaasen novel in that it’s about Florida craziness and criminality. It’s also - like a lot of Hiaasen’s work - a meditation on growing up and what it means to assume an adult role in a world that’s neither entirely coherent nor particularly concerned with whether or not you survive it. It’s a gentle novel about a banker, Walter, who, having lost his job in Charlotte, N.C., amid the upheavals of 2008, finds himself and his pregnant wife, Alice, living rent-free in her recently deceased Aunt Sandy’s Northeast Florida condo, which is now owned by Alice’s sister Carolyn. Walter finds himself dragooned into working as a go-fer/chauffeur for Carolyn’s husband, Mid, a real estate speculator and dabbler in businesses both licit (sea kayak rentals, pizza shops, ice machines) and illicit (he apparently allows his various legit businesses to front for less wholesome enterprises).
It’s not long before the dazed Walter - who can’t quite imagine himself a father - finds himself attached to a real (if not exactly violent) criminal. There’s a kind of plausible horror that underpins the rather mild plot. I understand how a brother-in law who thinks he’s smarter than he is can get in the sort of trouble Mid does. Most people, even most lawbreakers, probably aren’t awful people all the time. I understand Walter’s self-doubt and the irritation it causes Alice.
And I also understand why some people would find Kids These Days an underpowered vehicle and that they might resent that Perry leaves some major issues unresolved. But life rarely resolves. While some people prefer art that rewrites the narrative of the way we live, I admire stuff that gets close to how it really feels. I think that’s kind of brave.
So I end up liking a lot of small-scale things - movies like Short Term 12 or The Spectacular Now or, in its way, Inside Llewyn Davis. I didn’t, partly because newspaper real estate is precious and so is my time, get around to writing a piece about my favorite books of 2013, but I want to mention Neil Connelly’s The Midlife Crisis of Commander Invincible (LSU/Yellow Shoe Fiction, $23), another small book that strikes a similar chord as Kids These Days. It is about an aging superhero who has grown dependent on painkillers and seems to be sliding toward a second divorce. On the blog, I said it was in some respects a deeper and more honest treatment of the traditional superhero’s bifurcated self than Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen; I stand by that.
I am skeptical of the idea that critics sell books (though, to revive an old joke about record reviewers, they probably sell books back) but I hope some of you will consider Kids These Days and/or Commander Invincible. I don’t like telling you what you should read, but I feel a duty to say that.
Style, Pages 49 on 01/19/2014