Lethem's Fortress Fanboy

For all of my interest in difficult writers such as Beckett, Bernhard, or Barthes, pardon the alliteration--I can honestly say that my goal as a reader is to be thoroughly entertained. A lot of this turns into a negotiation with myself about whether I might be up to the task of writing the book I’m eagerly devouring. There’s often a reckoning that, maybe I can’t do it quite so effortlessly seeming as what I’m reading, but I’d like to imagine I can. Sometimes a book strikes those right notes and it restores my faith--even in the face of all the dire predictions for fiction’s posterity, let alone for any personal creative writing production--that there is some brave and talented soul doing the very thing I dream of.

So to be entertained. Though I was trained to pursue the careful and deep study of rhetoric, it’s usually not what I read for, or is only part of it. Though my entertainment does involve discovery: catching resonances, parsing well-turned sentences, discerning layers in fresh word choices and turns of phrase.

How many other writers are guilty of this behavior? Though you present your bold face, wary of giving undue praise, sometimes you conclude, hey, I could write this. I see I’ve said this--in regard to Jonathan Lethem, and here I'll admit to bad faith--before I’d ever read him. I’ll admit Lethem is one of those writers I truly thought was full o’crap. I even saw him at the JCC one year and didn’t give a lot of thought to what he was saying, just spent most of the time denying he had anything to say worthwhile to me. And now, approximately eight years after The Fortress of Solitude was published, I’m reading it and doing double and triple takes. For as imperfect as it is, I’m only halfway through the novel and realizing Lethem’s about as real the deal as there is. A writer to emulate, aspire to, kick myself about.

Lethem has dazzled me with the prose in Fortress. He’s made me jealous, doubtful of my own capacity to wrest such assured detail and scene for my own stories. How I ever doubted him!--I’m now a full convert. He takes a meandering, Dickensian stroll to even get to the key action of his novel; though you are flummoxed and enthralled, you are equally unsure: is this the novel I’m reading, really? For the ability to conjure in these pages feels effortless, that he could kind of go on forever and you’d probably keep reading just for the surprises. Granted, I didn’t even think I could be interested in the story of two kids, one white and one black, wanna-be superheroes and graffiti taggers growing up in Brooklyn in the seventies. Now I’m ready--I’m committed--to read every word Mr. Lethem wants to put to paper.

As if reading (and writing?) is to attain greater and greater highs, just when I’d almost given up on contemporary authors . . . but yet another bar has been set; I’d say it’s a crime this book didn’t win all the awards available. Such an effort reminds me of the dazzle of Augie March that can make a fiction writer wonder if they should rather take up surgery instead.

I always need a soft introduction anyway, unmediated by fashions or tastemakers (I know this can be argued re: Lethem), but I only wanted to read him based on the first story of his I’ve ever deigned to read, "The Empty Room", which is in issue #197 of Paris Review. I thought, I get it, clever, ah ha, I’ll have to check out . . . Like everyone else, I started following the dustup about Lethem’s take on critic James Wood’s take on this novel (credit to Wood, his review seems rather laudatory), and the analysis and growing comment thread at The Millions, I thought it might be time to delve deeper into the Lethem chronicles.

If past experience is any indication, I may find the rest of the oeuvre lacking. But with this novel, at least, Lethem broke the mold.

Books Once Loved

The idea that I can’t love a book forever feels despairing to me. Or formative.

There are a handful of books I claim to love. So it’s odd to go back to them. Does the love fade, or did my taste change, or is a book love good only for one brief moment in time? Mating, by Norman Rush, is feeling like that. When I first read the novel in 2001 or so, I remember feeling a lot more giddy with the book--the classic recognition that the book was written for me. That idea is fast approaching a cliché--but this is how I feel when I find a book I can’t wait to keep reading--only hoping it won’t end. Re-reading Mating now, though I can see what is compelling in the writing, I also find the first person narrator too self-conscious at times, the writing clever in the manner that I’ve been criticized for, and am now, post-MFA, overly conscious about.

As much as I enjoyed and was sucked into Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, at the end of the book, I wasn’t as in love. The prose is crafted but doesn't attain an untouchable category for me. The novel is certainly well plotted, and masterfully executed, but the prose is largely getting from point A to point B. There isn’t much that I take away from the characters or the prose that will stick with me.

And maybe that’s the point: the love has to take hold from the start. At the end of Chaon’s book, I thought, it is good, perhaps even brilliant. I could learn from this book. But do I want to re-read it again? Doubtful.

The beloved category books work a magic that is maybe from a combination of where I was in my life when I read it, and as much from what I brought to the work.

For awhile now I’ve been disabusing myself of the notion that I can go back to the books I once loved and feel the same frisson all over as if I hadn’t read dozens if not hundreds of book since, enough to have altered my tastes and views (as well as what time will effect) so that I could never go back and find the same experience again of a book.

But as I’ve been finding fewer new books I’m eager to read, I’ve become so desperate that I’ve even gone back to ones I read a year or two ago and really liked, if not quite loved, and re-reading them. The trouble with this practice is that I still know the story too well, and so I have to look for something else to draw me into the narrative. Often then, I get caught up in the surface (having glided across it, perhaps, initially). Because if the surface isn’t smooth, or is reflecting something I didn’t notice before, suddenly that’s all I see. I might forget the depth I easily found in the first read through.

This is not a definitive list, but among the handful of books I’ve gone back to and found richer and more rewarding the second or third read--and that I loved from the start--would be The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and The Sea by John Banville. (I eagerly await Banville’s The Infinites, which is being touted as a return to form, which I welcome.) I’d add to this Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre, and Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. Most of Beckett’s novels I can re-read forever, too.

Still, maybe the idea that that book love is unchanging is one best jettisoned. Why would I ever need to keep trying to find the next one, otherwise? I may say, “This is a perfect book,” or, “I loved it,” but maybe that’s just infatuation.