So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  I’ve thought a lot about Marjorie Morningstar in the intervening decades. I remembered it as the ultimate book about growing up, about good-girl rebellion, about pursuing your dreams. Most of all, I thought of it as a grand love story—or as the jacket copy on the beat-up edition I held in my hand put it: “An intimate picture of a girl growing into womanhood through the stresses of passion.” (Don’t you love that fifties-speak?)

  “Maybe I’ll reread this?” I say to June now.

  She just laughs. “Again?” she says.

  It’s always dangerous to reread the pivotal books of your youth. Like discovering poetry or journals you wrote as a teenager, revisiting your adolescent feelings about books can be at best embarrassing and often excruciating. I still cringe, for example, when I remember my response to Zelda, which is the second grown-up book June ever gave me. I was so captivated by Nancy Milford’s portrait of F. Scott Fitgerald’s doomed wife and so convinced that poor Zelda had been a victim of a sexist society that didn’t recognize her gifts as a writer that I decided, then and there, to read every scrap of poetry, journalism, and flotsam she ever wrote (luckily, a complete works had been published around the same time) and to boycott Fitzgerald homme altogether. That Zelda propelled me to read more of anything is, of course, the good news. And I might still argue that The Great Gatsby gets too much praise and attention. But what must my lit professors have thought when, as I was forced by curriculum requirements to read Zelda’s husband, my papers veered off into harangues about how Scott wasn’t the real writer in the family and that—did you know?—he wasn’t such a very nice guy?

  So I knew I was taking my youth in my hands to reconnect with Marjorie—and at Mom’s, no less—but I was desperate. And curious. Would I end up feeling that I’d scheduled a lunch with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years only to discover that five minutes in, I couldn’t think of a thing to say and had to get out of there right now? If I was lucky, I figured, the worst that would happen was that I’d feel the way I felt when I revisited my old dorm room during a college reunion a couple of years back: Everything was more or less as I remembered it . . . but could it have always been this small?

  “I’ll report in tomorrow,” I tell June.

  Sure enough, I was at her door by eight A.M. the next day.

  “Did you cry?” she asks.

  “Not this time,” I tell her. “But it did seem different.”

  I started reading to her from some scribbled notes:

  Then: When Marjorie’s father’s garment business falls on hard times, the family is forced to give up their Central Park West apartment and move to less tony West End Avenue. This embarrasses the upwardly mobile Marjorie.

  Now: When garment businesses—or any businesses, for that matter—go belly-up these days, the CEOs often go to jail, from which West End Avenue is one very far cry. Even if Mr. Morgenstern survived the inevitable SEC probes into his accounting practices, he still probably couldn’t afford West End Avenue, where apartments today go for millions. They’d all probably end up in Brooklyn. With roommates.

  Then: Marsha Zelenko, Marjorie’s poorer, crasser, and fatter best friend off and on throughout her life, is a true original and Marjorie is right in aspiring to be more like her. (Secretly, when I wasn’t being Marjorie, I was being Marsha.) But when Marsha “settles” for a nerdy, older businessman, she is revealed to be the pathetic striver Marjorie’s parents always said she was. Like Marjorie, I liked her a lot less then.

  Now: If they were remaking the movie today, Marsha would be played by Janeane Garofalo (Winona Ryder would probably be Marjorie) and would come off as the standard wisecracking, less attractive best friend we’ve seen a million times. But she’d become a spokesperson for Weight Watchers, thereby eclipsing Marjorie as a celebrity, and probably end up marrying Noel. I still don’t like her, but now it’s for different reasons.

  Then: The book gets boring toward the end, when Marjorie takes a long boat trip to see Noel in Europe and meets an American guy who is probably working with the Resistance against the Nazis. (Actually, I’m surmising here. I don’t remember that part of the book at all; I must have skipped it to get to the love scenes.)

  Now: How can Wouk write a 500-page book about Jews in the late 1930s and not even mention the brewing Nazi threat until well past the middle?

  But here’s the thought that really got June laughing—and I have to say, gave me a bit of pause, too.Then: Marjorie Morningstar was a talent, a free spirit, and the only thing that held her back was her impossibly uncool parents and their bourgeois values.

  Now: Marjorie Morningstar is a self-involved twit who doesn’t begin to appreciate the advantages that her long-suffering parents work hard to give her. She could have saved herself a lot of heartbreak if only she’d listened to her mother.

  February 20

  More About Mom

  There’s a picture that sits on a shelf in my home office that I have always loved, but it has particularly interested me this past week, as I spent hours on my couch there devouring Katharine Graham’s Personal History. It’s a shot of my parents, Charles and June, taken, my mother thinks, outside some European airport, where they’d just landed for a vacation. She can’t remember the exact year, but it’s clearly the early 1960s, to judge from her Jackie Kennedy-inspired hairstyle and shades and princess coat. My father is characteristically dapper: his shoes match his belt (it’s a black-and-white photo, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if both of those were white or, spare me, a kind of canary yellow). He’s looking slightly down as he opens his sunglasses with his incredibly long, patrician fingers, and a cigarette hangs from his lips. It was clearly a good time for them, as it was for a lot of Americans: both the family furniture business and their four children were healthy and growing, a young, cool guy was in the White House, and as my father would surely have said in the imitation hipster-speak he used to borrow from his idol, Frank Sinatra, the world was their oyster.

  It’s a picture, in other words, of well-fed optimism. There is no hint that in a few years, everything they thought they knew would change. That young, cool guy would be dead, we’d be at war, and every social rule they’d lived by would be de facto repealed. If you’d told my mother then that her daughters would work as hard and make as much money as her sons, or that she might one day have any kind of career herself, she’d have laughed. Though college-educated and reasonably well-to-do, she knew her place: at the country club, at the bridge table, and maybe—just now and then so that she’d always be available to throw dinner parties for my father’s business associates—at a continuing-education philosophy course at the local college.

  I was thinking about my mother while reading Personal History, because it seems to turn on the exact moment I see crystallized in the photo of Charles and June. The mid-sixties were both an end and a beginning for women born in the early part of the twentieth century. It was the moment just before the world turned over for them and their entire generation.

  Katharine Graham was born into extraordinary circumstances class-wise, but there was little that differentiated her from other well-born women of the time. The bright daughter of wealthy businessman Eugene Meyer and his wife, Agnes, she went to the tony Madeira School and to Vassar, but in those days, those choices were often more about social pedigree than education. She was expected to—and she did—marry a bright and interesting guy and learn to run a household, raise children, and be a pillar of society. The only unusual thing, early on, was how close she was to her father and how he chose her, not her male siblings, to carry on at The Washington Post. But had Eugene not liked Phil as much as he clearly did, even that might not have happened. As with most women of her time, everything that happened to Graham happened because she was somebody’s daughter and/or somebody’s wife.

  But then the whole production derailed when Phil, who’d been spiraling into mental illness for years, committed suicide at the family’s weekend home in the country. Suddenly, Katharine Graham had tw
o choices: she could sell the company her father had built for her, or she could, as they used to say in those days, roll up her sleeves and go to work. Though she had virtually no real experience of the newspaper business, she chose the latter. The rest was, literally, history.

  My mother is no Katharine Graham. The advantages she started with are Lilliputian compared with Graham’s, for one thing. For another, her beloved husband, while often ill, lived into his seventies and did not die by his own hand. My mother never inherited a company (my father’s business was more or less defunct by the time she was widowed) and never held down an actual job. But I’ve been thinking of my mother a lot—and talking to her a lot—while reading Personal History, because I had a sense (correct, as it turns out) that she thought of herself as a kind of Katharine Graham lite. Like Graham, she was the adored daughter of a hard-driving father; like Graham, she liked associating with the smart and powerful members of her world; although she was one hundred percent Jewish while Graham was only half Jewish, my mother had, like Graham, an ambivalent relationship with the religious part of her religion. One of the things I discovered in my near-daily phone calls with June this last week was that she had almost total recall for the book she read several years ago. (In recent years, an eye problem has forced this lifelong reader to rent and buy books on tape.) “You know that period when she was in Washington going to a lot of parties and dating Phil?” she asked me the other night. “That reminds me of the six months between college and when I married your father.”

  Never mind that the section that looms so large in my mother’s legend is all of about twenty pages long and was, I bet, glossed over by most readers, including me. That’s the great beauty of Personal History: because it is so long, and because Graham played so many parts in her life, there is something here for everyone. As far as my mother is concerned, the book is about Graham’s childhood and her marriage and maybe a little about her fascination, apparently shared by all women of the time, with Adlai Stevenson. Meanwhile one of my journalist friends refers to the whole memoir as a “story of Watergate.” Others see it as a kind of feminist anthem, proof that a woman can do anything she sets her mind to. No wonder Personal History has sold millions of copies and is cited as a model by every famous woman who sets out to write her memoirs. (I’m thinking of Queen Noor of Jordan and Senator Hillary Clinton, both of whose publishers have compared their memoirs to Graham’s.) As Nora Ephron, once the wife of Graham’s star reporter Carl Bernstein, said in The New York Times Book Review: “[She] had not two lives, but four, and the story of her journey from daughter to wife to widow to woman parallels to a surprising degree the history of women in this century.” But a great life—or even two or four great lives—does not necessarily a great memoir make. First of all, it’s not so easy to expose yourself the way Mrs. Graham does, to portray yourself, simultaneously, as both a product of history and a creator of it. It’s even harder to write frankly about painful and controversial things and keep everybody admiring you in the process.

  As I was finishing Mrs. Graham’s very long but almost never draggy account, I got the idea that I would wait to write about it until I’d also read the newly released A Big Life (in Advertising), Mary Wells Lawrence’s memoir of being the first woman to own her own agency in the male-dominated advertising business. Lawrence, while half a generation younger than Graham, was the same kind of strong woman, I thought, and it might be interesting to see where their experiences and attitudes overlapped. And yet I only had to skim through Lawrence’s book to see that the most significant thing the two had in common was—here we go again—a fascination and affection for Adlai Stevenson. (What was it about that guy?) While A Big Life is engaging, and Lawrence’s world and accomplishments are very great, it doesn’t begin to approach Graham’s book in either readability or universality. It’s not that Lawrence didn’t live through difficult times; it’s not that she didn’t fight and beat odds; it’s not even that as a journalist I have the uppity idea that the advertising world is inherently less noble than the world of newspapers. (Well, maybe I do, a little.) Mary Wells Lawrence, as a memoirist, simply lacks a couple of qualities that Graham has in spades: she’s not nearly as reflective and she doesn’t come close to being as honest about her insecurities and failures. Later, as I lined both books up here on my desk, I noticed something else: Graham’s memoir is slugged “Memoir/Women’s Studies,” while Lawrence’s is called “Autobiography/Business.” A friend in publishing told me that these distinctions are functionally meaningless, that they’re merely suggestions from marketing departments, and many stores ignore them when deciding in which part of the store to shelve and display books. But still, I found the categorization interesting for what it implied. A Big Life is one American woman’s story. Personal History is the story of American women, my mom included.

  February 27

  The Clean Plate Book Club

  I’ve been feeling pretty smug these last couple of weeks because I’ve done what I set out to do: to read books in real time and report on what I’ve read and why and what it means. And this week, I was all set to talk about James McBride’s Miracle at St. Anna, the author’s first novel, coming six years after his huge success with his wonderful memoir, The Color of Water.

  I was planning to discuss “sophomore slump” and how a great reception for a first book can be a mixed blessing for a writer and his readers: said success is unlikely to be repeated the next time out. I so loved The Color of Water that I was sure I’d be writing that McBride was the exception to that rule.

  Except that after a weekend of trying to slog through this novel about the 92nd Division, the only African-American regiment during WWII, I had to come to a painful conclusion: It’s an amalgam of history, myth, and politics—and it just doesn’t work. I kept trying, because I liked McBride so much. I didn’t know him personally, but his memoir was so powerful and rich that I, along with 1.3 million other readers, felt as if I did. Saturday: an hour in bed telling myself that lots of great books start off slow (The Corrections, anyone?) and that I owed it to him to keep trying. So after a perfect winter lunch of soup and bread, I tried again. By page 60, I still hadn’t latched on to any of the characters. By page 70, my mind wandered to the words of that song in A Chorus Line: “I feel nothing.”

  So I did something I have only in my maturity learned how to do: I stopped reading. Right there, on page 71, right after the hero, a brain-damaged soldier, encounters the little boy who will change his life. I might pick it up again, I told myself. And I might. But I doubt it.

  Allowing yourself to stop reading a book—at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end—is a rite of passage in a reader’s life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.

  In this, I was a late bloomer. As a reviewer through much of the 1990s, I was constantly asked if I finished every book I wrote about, and I could honestly say that I did. I felt very strongly that if I was going to devote precious magazine space to a book—particularly if I was going to say anything even a little bit negative—I needed to have read every word. If something was so unappealing to me that I couldn’t get past, say, page 50, I’d suggest to my editor that he find another reviewer, the book was just not for me.

  In real life, too, I felt obligated. Perhaps I’d paid upward of $20 for the book, or maybe it had been lent to me by someone I respected, or maybe it was the book of the moment, the topic of cocktail chatter all over town. Besides, I used to figure, someone has spent years and in some cases decades putting this prose on paper; the least I can do is give it a couple of hours. Maybe it was a girl thing, the same pleasing gene that makes me buy a weird asymmetrical sweater in an overpriced boutique just because the saleswoman went into the stockroom and brought me a couple of sizes.

  Now, thanks to maturity, or psychotherapy, or the simple fact that as I get older I have a lot less tim
e and even less patience, I have given up my membership in the book equivalent of the Clean Plate Club. If I don’t like it, I stop reading. While I admit it’s harder to throw in the towel on page 200 of the average 300-something-page book, say, than on page 50—“But I’ve made such an investment!”—I make myself do it. My only rule: I can’t write a review of it, nor can I opine about it at a cocktail party, should it become a bestseller and/or the talk of the town. Even if, by that time, I have read all the reviews.

  Letting myself off the hook has been beneficial in any number of ways, not the least of which is that it gives me more time to devote to the books I actually do like. And, I suppose, knowing I don’t have to finish everything I start makes me braver in making out-of-the-mainstream choices in the first place. If I were still laboring under the assumption that an unfinished book would screw up my reading GPA, I might never have tried to fathom Václav Havel, for instance. (Never mind that that “tried” comes with an elliptical but understood “and failed.”)

  But I still feel bad about McBride. The only consolation I can offer him is that he’s in very good company. There are lots of other “big” and “important” and “buzzed about” books I never got all the way through, books like Charles Frazier’s much-lauded Cold Mountain (it left me, well, cold). Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (interesting, but about three chapters from the end, I realized I didn’t really care about the people). And Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (I wasn’t in sympathy with the Ayatollah; I just didn’t get it).

  And in every case, the sun came up the day after I bagged these books. There was no quiz in the morning, no Reading Police at my door. Not to mention that the books themselves went on to greatness and comfortable spots on the bestseller lists.