So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  It’s impossible to miss the O. J. Simpson-like overtones to the plot in Whitegirl, but still, to dismiss it as a cheesy roman à clef is to miss the subtle way in which Manning—who is white and who, as far as I know, has always been married to a white lawyer—understands how race pervades every aspect of a relationship, at least as much for the “majority” partner as for the minority one. Even when the couple is famous and rich—or maybe because Charlotte and Milo are famous and rich—their every problem is underwritten by race, a situation that seemed very familiar to me. The major criticism of the book has been that Charlotte comes off as too much of a cipher, a nonperson—and that she’s stupid. And while I admit that I heard a false note when Charlotte confuses Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, with Saks Fifth Avenue, the department store—no one could be that dumb, not even a model!—her lack of distinctive personality is, in a way, the point. When your own story is so benign compared with that of someone whose ancestors were slaves, or interned in detention camps, even, it’s easy to be swallowed up in his story at the expense of your own.

  I hadn’t figured all this out that pre-vacation night, of course. All I knew then was that I needed to get a couple of chapters under my belt, the better to ensure I wouldn’t end up on the plane with a book I hated and, thus, with nothing to read. At ten o’clock, with Charley safely in bed, I sat down to read a bit. Except that I couldn’t put the manuscript down after Chapter 3. Or Chapter 5. Or Chapter 10, for that matter. It was two, then three, then four in the morning as I lay on the living room couch, awkwardly manipulating the bulky manuscript bound in plastic and punctuated by spindles up the side, like the kind we used to use in high school. I was so enthralled that I barely noticed the paper cuts and back strain. There’s no other way to say it: I fell in love.

  Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and a book to someone who’s never experienced it is like trying to describe sex to a virgin. A friend of mine says that when he meets a book he loves, he starts to shake involuntarily. For me, the feeling comes in a rush: I’m reading along and suddenly a word or phrase or scene enlarges before my eyes and soon everything around me is just so much fuzzy background. The phone can ring, the toast can burn, the child can call out, but to me, they’re all in a distant dream. The book—this beautiful creature in my hands!—is everything I’ve ever wanted, as unexpected and inevitable as love. Where did it come from? How did I live without it for so long? I have to read and read and read, all the while knowing that the more aggressively I pursue my passion, the sooner it will end and then I will be bereft. A young boy I know felt that way about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; having finished it in a sixteen-hour marathon, he wandered his house in something approximating despair. Book lovers simply have no choice: we can’t tear ourselves away from the beloved.

  And oh, the things I’ve done for love. I’ve lied (“No, honey, I got tied up at the office,” when in fact I was staying late to squeeze in a few more pages); cheated (skipped gym class in favor of the at-home StairMaster, which is not only an easier workout but one that lets you read as you sweat); and stolen (once, having mistakenly left my book at home, I ducked into a bookstore to read a couple of chapters for free). Even sacred family rituals are fair game: I recently heard about a woman who instituted a weekly Soup Night because she figured out that she could stand at the stove all afternoon, stirring with one hand and turning pages of the latest Mary Higgins Clark with the other.

  Who will be hit with the thunderbolt, and during which book, and why, is as magical as love itself, and probably as unanalyzable. It’s predictable that I’d fall for, say, David Gilmour’s How Boys See Girls, a Canadian novel about a down-and-out journalist who reminded me of any number of people I know—my aha moment in that book came when Gilmour described a character’s eating style as “turning [food] over in his maw like laundry in a dryer”—but who knew I’d be so crazy for Ron Hansen’s Atticus that I’d be sneaking glances at it, hidden under my notebook, during a business meeting? Like those stories in women’s magazines that ask you to guess which man looks as though he goes with which woman, how books and people mate remains, forever, a mystery.

  That said, it’s not surprising that I knew, pretty early on, that Whitegirl and I would have a future together; there was Liza’s recommendation, and the interracial marriage at its core. But I didn’t really know it would take hold the way it did, until I started reading that night, and arrived, on page 11, at Charlotte’s first glimpse of Milo, in which she unabashedly remarked, “Strange, to see a black man carrying skis.” Wow, I thought, Kate Manning’s going to take some flak from the PC police for that! It was the first of many times in this otherwise traditional “women’s novel” that I was stopped short by the author’s bravery.

  Whitegirl is not a perfect novel, of course. The central question—did Milo attack and disfigure Charlotte, or was it someone else?—is a little hokey, and there are those moments when Charlotte seems too dumb to be true. But Manning’s ancillary characters, like Milo’s sister, who educates Charlotte in the ways of the Robicheaux family, and Darryl Haines, the friend who openly disapproves of Milo’s marriage to a white woman, are great. So, too, is the way Manning conveys the walk-on-eggs quality of Charlotte’s choices and the chauvinism that lives on both sides of the racial divide. This novel was more than I expected, and the perfect choice of an intelligent, consuming novel to take on vacation.

  Except that Whitegirl never got to Key West with me that day. By the time I had to leave for the airport, I’d slept for three hours and had about fifty pages of the manuscript left to read. What to do? It clearly wasn’t worth lugging the whole thing now, but it was too late to decide on a proper substitute. Besides, I couldn’t leave Whitegirl at home anyway. Cannot separate from the beloved, remember? Instead, I did something I never would have done with a published book, or even a galley: I ripped open the plastic cover, removed the remaining pages from the spindles, and tucked them in my bag.

  Those, of course, I read in the cab to the airport.

  And that’s how I ended up wandering to the gate, feeling like that ninth-grader who’d just finished Harry Potter. I looked plaintively at the rack of paperbacks at the newsstand. Could it be you? I’d think as I fondled The Blind Assassin. Could you be my next true love? But I wasn’t getting the vibe. I finally gave up, bought a couple of magazines, and boarded the plane, looking for all the world like a person who’d just lost her best friend. Which, of course, for that day at least, I had.

  February 13

  92 in the Shade

  To arrive in Key West bookless is only slightly less jarring than finding oneself hatless in Dallas. A famously literary community—Hemingway lived (and drank) here, as have authors from Annie Dillard to Thomas McGuane to Edmund White—it has a year-round population of just over 35,000 people but supports half a dozen independent bookstores. Only in Key West can you go from a small bookstore signing for Ann Beattie to a poolside paperback Grisham festival: it’s that kind of bilevel, bifurcated place.

  Key West would be the perfect place to double-book, in fact, because tastes here run from the highest of the highbrow (Michael Ondaatje, who’s a regular visitor) to the lowest of the low (I see lots of Signet romances at the beach). But I’ve blown it this time: with Whitegirl finished, I’m not even prepared to uni-book.

  I’m also going to be alone with Mom for a few days.

  There was a popular TV show in the mid-1980s called thirty-something that I generally found treacly and embarrassing. But I remember it fondly because of one particular scene that came early in the show’s run. Two women friends are talking—I think their names were Hope and Ellen—about an impending visit from one of their mothers. “I love my mother, I really do,” the soon-to-be-visited one says. “So how come after ten minutes I want to kill somebody?”

  “Ten minutes?” her friend replies. “What’s your secret?”

  There’s nothing wrong with my mother; in fact, I think she’s a gre
at woman, having lived eighty-four years, raised four of the not-easiest children in the world, and managed, defying the suspicions of those ungrateful children, to create a full life for herself after my father died twelve years ago. In her “dotage,” as she calls it, she has refashioned herself into a poet and now gives readings around town. She has lots of friends, enjoys living alone, and is, for the most part, uncomplaining and grateful to have the money and good health to live as she does. We talk on the phone several times a week, just kibitzing, as she’d say; when I was little, she’d routinely predict that I’d be the joy of her old age and I hope and believe that in some ways that has been true.

  So why, after one evening in her company, do I start to feel like one of those women on thirtysomething? Maybe we know each other too well. Between the continual criticism—“Get your hair out of your eyes!” she says repeatedly, proving once and for all that certain remarks don’t lose power after adolescence—and the relentless observation and discussion of her, my, and everybody else’s weight, I start feeling nasty.

  What I want to say: “Oh, will you please just shut up!”

  What I do say: “So Mom, got anything good to read?”

  I may have come late to passionate reading, but I caught on pretty early that a book can be the perfect shield against potentially piercing situations. Not only is reading a distraction during difficult times—whether they be sitting in the waiting room at the lab while the technicians and doctors are conferring about your mammogram or, yes, spending a few unchaperoned days with a well-meaning but colossally annoying parent—but it’s a highly socially respectable means of social avoidance. You can’t tell an obnoxious seatmate on a plane, for example, that his obstreperous pontificating about the virtues of saccharin over NutraSweet is driving you batty, but you can tell him you’re in the middle of A Tale of Two Cities and you simply must get back to it. He may think you boringly bookish, but if you do it right, he probably can’t call you rude.

  There are people who take their socially protective reading to an extreme, of course, like a woman I used to know who would regularly bring novels to cocktail parties and sit in the corner turning pages while everybody else milled around her. (I say “used to” because after a while I stopped inviting her to my house.) But I can understand why she did it. Especially for people whose daily lives and jobs and worlds require them to interact with other humans all day, a book can be a savior. A book is a way to shut out the noise of the world. It’s a way to be alone without being totally alone.

  Growing up in the middle of four kids and two parents of various degrees of rambunctiousness, I learned two life lessons: (1) You have to talk loud to be heard, and if you can develop a sense of humor and insert it into much of what you say, you’ll be heard even better. And (2) You need escape. You need a place to go—actual or mental—where no one can bother you, where your sports-loving older brother and his noisy friends can’t reach you, where your sister’s superiority can’t touch you, where your sweet but annoying little brother can’t embarrass you. When I talk to Leo about his childhood household—which, with ten siblings, was only about five hundred times (these things are exponential) more chaotic than mine—he tells me he used to retire regularly to a closet to draw and paint pictures of himself as a “dog in space”: a little kid with glasses shut up in a soundproof capsule. A place, in other words, where nobody would get to him.

  My situation was a lot less dramatic, and as I’ve said, I wasn’t one of those kids who never learned to ride a bike because I was intent on finishing the complete works of J. R. R. Tolkien by the time I was ten. But I knew early how to protect myself from too much attention and unwanted noise: tell Mom and Dad you had to read a book. Not only did it please them—“My daughter, the reader!”—but it got them off my back. Never mind that my mother would often come in the next hour or day and ask for a mini book report; at least for the moment I needed it, I could get away.

  So here, in my mother’s apartment, I had hit on the exact right means of escape from conversation about my brother Jon’s recent bad run in the market and Charley’s worrisome appetite for candy. A frustrated writer throughout much of her life, my mother has always positioned herself in her group of friends as the intellectual, and the reader, and she does, in fact, have quite a collection of what, in the thirties, forties, and fifties, was important contemporary literature. She collected the works of Hemingway, for example, and prides herself on some rare pieces: a first edition with the cover of For Whom the Bell Tolls that, when you open it, turns out to be the text of A Farewell to Arms. And she loves to talk about her experiences with certain writers and their books (clearly, some things are genetic). I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard the stories of her brief correspondence with Philip Roth and about the time, most famously in our family, that she goaded my father to follow Hemingway into a bar’s men’s room in Cuba in the fifties to catch him off guard and get him to sign her (anatomically correct) copy of The Sun Also Rises.

  But what would I pick? Fresh from Whitegirl, I was still harboring the illusion that I could fall madly in love all over again with something I’d never considered before. But a quick root through June’s shelves suggested I’d have trouble being surprised by anything here; I already knew most of these books. Usually, I love browsing in someone else’s life, especially if it’s a stranger’s, because you can tell so much about a person by the kind of books they read. A few years ago, when Leo and Charley and I began to rent a house at the beach in the summer, I compiled an impression of the owner, whom I’d never met, based on the titles she stocked. All I knew about her, going in, was that she was an older woman who’d once been married to a well-known TV producer, so I wasn’t surprised to find a complete collection of anchorman Tom Brokaw’s work. But the fact that she also had, on the top of the pile on the coffee table, the memoir Leading with My Heart, by Bill Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, told me she was probably sprightly and mouthy and not all that conventional. And I loved her, sight unseen, for her copy of one of my favorite books—The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman; not only was it there on the shelf, but it was obviously well thumbed and there were a lot of pages with the corners turned down.

  But what my mother had done, for the most part, was transplant the books from our Pennsylvania home to this apartment, when my parents moved here in 1984. There were the Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins novels that she must have unearthed from under my adolescent bed, the few books my father—like Leo, not much of a reader; how Freudian is that?—read for pleasure, and of course much of the Hemingwayana, including A. E. Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway, which June regularly quoted from back in the day. One of my mother’s and my favorite pieces of family lore is the fact that, as a kid, I looked so much like her that even a blind stranger in a crowded theater would be able to pick me out as “June Nelson’s daughter.” That’s the way I felt going through her shelves. Even if I’d never been to this apartment before, and had never been told who lived here, I’d know in seconds that it was June’s house just by looking through the shelves. They tell her whole life’s story.

  And, of course, a good portion of mine. Remember how I said I fell in love with Marjorie Morningstar when my mother gave it to me as an adolescent? Well, here it is, in all its tattered 1950s glory, on a shelf under her living room TV. Just picking it up takes me back thirty years. I remember her handing it to me and me going off into my overdecorated (with pink flowers, no less) suburban bedroom and staying up all night to read it. By morning, I was at my mother’s door—and crying. “Why didn’t she marry him?” I cried, referring to Marjorie’s ultimate decision not to run off with her prince charming, Noel Airman, a songwriter whom the adults had deemed not right for her because he (a) didn’t have any money and (b) was a self-loathing Jew who’d changed his name from Ehrmann (and taken “Noel,” which means Christmas, for God’s sake) and sneered openly at Jewish middle-class life. “I don’t get it.”

  J
une’s reaction is lost to history, but if I had to guess, I’d say she probably wasn’t pleased. Of all the books she could have given me—and soon did—books like A Bell for Adano and A Farewell to Arms and Of Human Bondage, she had chosen this one. Looking back, I can see why: We were an aspiring Jewish family in a rapidly assimilating world. I was becoming a rebellious daughter who regularly hung out with kids from outside the proscribed community—which meant, in those innocent times, boys who went to public school, weren’t Jewish (Brett Friedman had long given way to someone named Dugan), and were, by her lights, “wild.” If I was not so pretty and nowhere near as self-assured as La Morningstar (as she called herself; the family name was Morgenstern), like her I wanted to be an actress, swore I’d never again live in the suburbs, and most important of all, believed that love should conquer all. My despair at what I saw as Marjorie’s “selling out”—marrying an unglamorous Jewish lawyer and moving to Scarsdale—could not have made June happy.