So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  And so, one Saturday, the three of us trekked off to the sporting goods store to buy a brand-new aluminum bat and a handful of balls. (If it had been up to me, I might have borrowed some, or used any old thing, but maybe Leo was right: Charley wouldn’t perceive the extravagance as pressure so much as he would delight in the specialness of the occasion.) Then the two of them went off to an empty field to practice and I went home to see if Dunow had any advice for nervous mothers. He doesn’t, particularly; in fact, his wife, Wendy, seems pretty absent in this story.

  An hour later, they were back. “I had five really great hits!” Charley crowed.

  “That’s great!” I said. “Ready for lunch?”

  “Oh, we had lunch,” he said. “We went for pizza.”

  Never mind that they’d been gone a total of an hour, which meant that they couldn’t have spent more than thirty minutes on the field. The next day, as God is my witness, Charley got up to bat twice, and hit both times: a single and a good solid line drive to center field.

  “I don’t know what you did,” I whispered to Leo. “But whatever it was, it really worked.”

  “You know what, Mom?” Charley said to me after the game in which he’d redeemed himself. “Dad showed me how to play better.”

  From his mouth, as they say in Yiddish, to Henry Dunow’s ear.

  May 20

  Baseball, Part II

  No doubt about it: baseball has become a huge subject in our house these days, what with the family’s obsession with Little League and the fact that Hazel, our babysitter, is the kind of enormous Yankee fan that only a transplanted New Yorker can be. Still, if you’d told me, the least sports-oriented person in the world, that baseball would draw me to yet another book, I’d have looked at you the way Charley did when I explained that sleepaway camp was a place where you stayed in a cabin with a bunch of other boys and didn’t come home to your parents for weeks at a time. “Why would somebody want to do that?” he said. The expression on his face, had he been a couple of years older, would have translated to “What are you smoking?”

  But that’s what happened: baseball drew me to another book. Sort of.

  I was foraging for grub at the bookstore last week, having finished The Way Home and having that full-refrigerator-but-nothing-to-eat feeling, despite the bedside stack that never seems to get any smaller no matter what I read. At the top of a Quality Paperback row sat a book called Facing the Wind, by Julie Salamon.

  This is not a book I would ordinarily ever read, despite the good reviews I remember it getting last year; despite my admiration for The Devil’s Candy, one of Salamon’s previous books, about the movie biz; despite the fact that Salamon lives in my neighborhood, patronizes the same hair salon I do, and is the mother of a little boy Charley plays with sometimes. It looks like a book about sailing. There’s the title, for one thing, and the cover: a plain white front with a little postage-stamp-sized photo of a man and two kids next to a boat. Just in case you haven’t surmised this by now, sailing ranks just above baseball—but a little below golf—on my snooze-o-meter.

  But maybe because of all those despites above, I read the cover copy. Uh-oh, I thought: it’s true crime, usually another skip. Why read that genre—or for that matter, watch reality TV—when there’s plenty of real-life violence in front of you every day? Even worse, it’s true crime of the most disturbing kind, the kind that involves inflicting pain or abuse on little children. (I had to walk out of the first movie Leo and I went to see together after Charley was born. It was Grisham’s The Client. In the opening scene, a little boy is rendered mute—probably for years—by his witnessing of a brutal murder.) Facing the Wind is a book about a guy who cracks under the pressure of raising a handicapped child and one day picks up a baseball bat and kills his whole family.

  It was the baseball bat that got me.

  Maybe if Rowe had killed his by all accounts impressive wife and three children with a gun, or with a kitchen knife—or if the jacket copy hadn’t mentioned the choice of murder weapon—I’d have passed on Facing the Wind that day. It was definitely the baseball bat that impelled me to get out my $13.95. I hadn’t thought much about this consciously—and I guess I blocked this out when thinking about The Way Home—but I’ve always been oddly aware of the weapon potential of sports paraphernalia. That must be because I remember so clearly the time a kid down the street in my hometown got accidentally hit with a golf club and had to have a metal plate installed in his head; he lived, but the gossipy neighbors always blamed the accident for his under-par performance in school and later life. I’m compulsive about Charley and his new bat, too. I insist we keep the big bad thing next to our back door, and I’ve more than a hundred times chided him for swinging it around as we walk to the field. And just the other night when Leo was out of town and I heard a strange noise in the back of the apartment, I tiptoed out of bed and grabbed the bat to use as a weapon on the imagined intruder.

  Maybe Julie Salamon, the mother, after all, of a Little League- aged kid, has the same kind of bat awareness, because she begins her meticulous recounting of the Rowe murders and their aftermath with a history of that bat. Here’s her first line: “In the summer of 1977, baseball was the only thing that mattered to Bobby Rowe and Jeffrey Mond [his neighborhood pal].” She then goes on to explain how the two teenagers, in an act of friendship, exchanged bats (Mond’s was larger and lighter) and how, a few months later, Jeffrey Mond watched from his window as police entered the Rowes’ house and left with his bat in a plastic evidence bag.

  In any case, it’s a brilliant beginning to a brilliant and complicated book that is, of course, not about baseball at all, but about such enormous subjects as mental illness, the justice system, forgiveness, and renewal. The facts in the case are grisly, but straightforward enough: Bob Rowe, an attorney, and his wife, Mary, were raising their three children—one of whom, Christopher, was born visually and neurologically impaired—in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Successful and well liked, they were literally models of patience, good humor, and faith, particularly to a support group for parents of damaged children that Mary had joined. But Bob was suffering: in the fall of 1977, he began acting strange and hearing voices. He went to a therapist, who prescribed drugs, which he soon stopped taking. He killed his family later that winter, was sent to a mental hospital, and was released after three years. Eventually, he married a much younger woman who knew all about his past, and he had a child with her. He died of cancer in 1997.

  So far, so typical true crime. But what makes Facing the Wind compelling is its psychological complexities: Does the mental health community deserve some blame for not understanding how dangerous Bob was and “allowing” him to live at home without his medication? Since he was technically found “not guilty” and released back into society, should he have been allowed to reclaim his law license and practice again? (Rowe lobbied hard, but ultimately unsuccessfully, for this right.) And most important, did he deserve to have another family and another life?

  I got caught up in those questions, of course, and I was particularly riveted by the climactic scene in which the members of Mary’s old support group agree to meet with the new wife, Colleen, to try to “understand” how a good, religious woman could forgive a killer and trust him enough to marry him and have his child. But that baseball bat was never far from my mind: during the week I was reading by day, by night we’d watch the ball games on TV and read in the papers about the continuing feud between Mike Piazza and Roger Clemens over the throwing of a baseball bat. The magazines that week were also full of another innocent-implement-turned-weapon story: the case of Michael Skakel, finally convicted of murdering his teenage neighbor with a golf club. When Leo and I went to see Charley’s final Little League game of the season—his team won, and he made two hits and one spectacular catch, by the way—I was unnaturally, even for me, focused on the aluminum bats the kids use. If the game had been a movie, the camera would have moved in on the bat
s and turned everything else into background, to make my point: These tools of play have a secret life. They can turn violent in the wrong hands.

  I know this sounds slightly demented, but there’s a larger message here: What draws a particular reader to a particular story can be completely idiosyncratic. (Note to publishers: Pile on the details in your jacket copy. You never know what will attract someone.) Reading is highly personal and often revealing. Readers have superstitious preferences and irrational dislikes. You can be drawn to a book because a character has your mother’s name, for example, or because she has red hair like your beloved third-grade teacher. You can get turned off to a story because the hero looks like the last man who broke your heart. Readers, in other words, can be as superstitious as writers, or at least as superstitious as Julie Salamon admits she is. Nervous about meeting Colleen Rowe for the first time, she writes, “I noticed that we dressed almost identically, in the uniform of New York professional women: black pants suit. For some reason, this gave me hope.” When I read that, I (a) liked Salamon for her humanness and honesty and (b) felt a little less ridiculous about my own.

  Besides, I wasn’t so alone in my bat fixation in the first place, to judge from the number of times Salamon writes about it. In addition to the opening scenes, there’s a later heart-wrenching one at a showing of the movie The Untouchables, when Bob and Colleen watch De Niro, as Al Capone, use a bat to crack open the head of one of his hapless lieutenants. “That was life with Bob,” Salamon writes. “Ordinariness mingled with horror.” Fixating on the potential destructiveness of such an innocent household item can even be intuitive. When, after Bob’s death, Colleen Rowe finally told her daughter about her father’s first family, that they’d been beaten to death, the little girl had just one question: “Was it a bat or a hockey stick?” she asked.

  June 1

  Summer Reading

  True or False:

  In the summertime:Public schools close.

  Public pools open.

  Many offices go into computer-sleep mode, granting employees half-workday or no-workday (or at least major dress-down) Fridays.

  Families plan one, or if they’re lucky, two, or if they’re headed by very, very powerful executives, three or more weeks’ worth of vacation.

  Everybody has more time to read.

  If you said “True” to all, you’re in sync with most Americans. If you said “True” to all but 5, you’re more like me.

  Maybe because reading, for all its pleasures and delight, is my work, I find it harder, not easier, to do when the temperature rises. Summer’s supposed to be a time you do all the things you never do all year, not a busman’s holiday. And then, for me and maybe for others with small, only children, 1 plus 2 renders 5 obsolete. Yes, I have more time away from the office in the summer, but that time is taken up with more activities of the kiddy-adventure kind, like weekend visits to family friends and trips to amusement parks and other places where you’re less likely to whip out a book and read.

  You know how I know my summer has officially begun? Charley and I went away for a sleepover weekend at the beach with a group of his friends and their moms, and I didn’t read a single word. Oh, I took a book, of course. Being me, I actually took two: Diane Johnson’s biography of the writer Dashiell Hammett, a hardcover I’d found ages ago on the Web, and a yellowed old copy of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that had been sitting quietly on the cherry shelves for years.

  I’ll spare you some of the details of how I made those two particular choices, but by now, you’ve probably gotten the picture. I ran around like a maniac. For a few minutes on Friday, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping—supposedly a feminist landmark—looked like the perfect thing to pull out of my beach bag in front of a group of smart, educated professional women. But I was also drawn by the one-big-book-and-one-book-only philosophy, which meant I should finally settle down with The Brothers Karamazov. But oh, there was also this new biography of Abigail Adams, which a few minutes of bookstore skimming suggested might break me of my aversion to reading history. But Housekeeping started off slowly, I no longer own my college edition of The Brothers (which I somehow got a B.A. without ever reading), and the Adams biography was just too historical. Like the narrator of Geoff Dyer’s hilarious Out of Sheer Rage—in which the author dithers for chapters about whether to pack the notes of his as-yet-unwritten novel or the research for an assigned biography of D. H. Lawrence—I shuttled around the apartment, putting one book, then another, into my bag and taking them out again. Leo said my insane scrambling reminded him most of my behavior at a Barneys designer shoe sale. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked. “You’re only going for two days!”

  “Yeah,” I said, forgetting for a minute that I was about to join a group of three adults and four children who’d move en masse from living room to beach to restaurant and back again. “But two days of vacation: that’s prime reading time.”

  While to me, they’re oxymorons, the term “summer reading” and its close cousin “beach reading” are staples of magazine and newspaper articles from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Practically every publisher touts one “big summer book” in the hopes (often accomplished) of making big sales. The year Scott Turow’s first blockbuster, Presumed Innocent, came out, I dutifully toted it to a long weekend with friends at Martha’s Vineyard; by Saturday, I noticed almost a dozen strangers with book in hand, many of whom would wander by with opinions about who murdered the randy D.A. (“It’s the judge,” I told my host, knowingly, although I’d only gotten about halfway through. “Hmm,” he said, clearly knowing it was, in fact, not. “How long did it take you to come up with that answer?”) Never mind that the summer book of choice varies according to the socioeconomic, education, and literary level of the vacationers, there’s usually at least one blockbuster, and it had better have page-turner qualities, which probably means it should be part thriller.

  Some people, on the other hand, see the summer as the time to read all the things they were “supposed to” read weeks or months or even many dozens of semesters ago. Back in my Jackie Collins days, my mother would occasionally point out to me that Liza had spent her three months before tenth grade reading Proust. A couple I know who will be vacationing near us this August say they plan to spend their month reading, simultaneously, War and Peace. I’ve got big “classic” plans for our August vacation myself. But as Charley has taken to saying, “That will be then, Mom. This is now.” And for now, I’ve got Hammett and Kundera.

  I realize that neither of my choices meets the big-beach-book criteria—neither is current, particularly long, or as far as I can tell, about murder, a corrupt legal system, or adultery. And neither is sufficiently “classic” in the sense that they’ve both been written in this century. But they’re both just out of it enough that their very obscurity seemed appealing. I liked the idea that my friends would think me unusual and sophisticated; I have a lot invested in people thinking I don’t just run with the herd. And since the first question just about everybody asks me these days—at least as frequently as most urban professionals hear “What do you do?”—is “What are you reading?” I liked the thought of offering up titles these smart, educated professional women might know, but would most probably not have read.

  Besides, while I wasn’t riveted by the first chapters of the Hammett bio, I figured I might be able to use it to work up a discussion of well-known novelists’ rare nonfiction adventures. (Diane John-son almost got a National Book Award for Le Divorce, which is one of my favorite fish-out-of-water novels, and while she has written four books of journalism, she’s barely remembered for them.) And the Kundera: well, if it were half as darkly sexy as the author’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (an opinion I based on the Daniel Day-Lewis movie, not on the book, which I have never read), I thought I might get something out of it. That, and it’s a very short book. My tote bag was already pretty heavy.

  As it turned out, I should have devoted all t
his thoughtful energy and corresponding bag space to something really useful, like an extra bottle of wine or the kind of toothpaste Charley will actually use. Because for forty-eight hours, none of us smart, educated professional women got through anything more complex than the newspaper—and even that was a sunscreen-blemished, sand-stained stretch. What we did instead was swim and bake and talk and drink and watch the kids jump waves and eat ice cream. Sure, I could have pulled out Hammett or Kundera around ten P.M., when we’d all retired to our respective beds—and I did think about it. But what would be the point? I hadn’t brought those books because I particularly wanted to read them, I realized. They were more like upscale accessories, which, on Fire Island (as opposed to, say, the heinous Hamptons), are about as important or appreciated as stiletto heels and diamonds at the beach. Besides, all any smart, educated professional women cared about by then was sleep.

  June 22

  A Million Little Pieces

  Things have not been good here.

  Last night, Leo and I had a terrible Fight, the kind of Fight we don’t have too often anymore, I won’t tell you the details, but it started over something very minor and escalated fast. Words were used, by me and more loudly by him, the kind of words that Charley gets a quarter for every time we speak them, which thankfully doesn’t include this time because he was already asleep.

  After he screamed at me for a couple of minutes that of course seemed much longer, I went down to my office and I cried and I called a friend and I complained and I whined but because she is a good Friend and because she has heard all of this before, she didn’t give me Advice, she just listened.

  I was so keyed up and exhausted and mad and sad I didn’t think I was going to be able to do anything but talk and cry but somehow after she and I hung up the phone I managed to pick up the book I’d been reading which was A Million Little Pieces, about a twenty-three-year-old guy who wakes up on a plane without any idea how he got there. He has four missing teeth and a hole in his cheek and he’s pouring blood from every orifice and during every bodily function and he doesn’t know who put him there or where he’s going but it turns out he is going to a rehab center in Minnesota and his book is a stream-of-consciousness story of the time he spent there and the struggle he goes through to first decide whether he wants to get better and see his twenty-fourth birthday or whether he would rather just let what he calls the Fury take over him. The Fury is the little voice inside him, he says, that turns into a roar and tells him to drink and smoke crack and turn violent. The Fury has been with him all his life, but as he goes through rehab he insists on not being a victim and not buying into all that twelve-step, addiction-is-a-disease bullshit and he insists to his Parents who are nice upper-middle-class people who love him but have never known how to deal with him and to the Counselors at the Hospital that he is going to get straight without all of that traditional crap in other words on his own terms. And apparently he manages it because at the end of this book when he tells you what happened to all the people he met there including the young crack-addicted whore he was in love with he also tells you that he has not relapsed and it has been almost ten years. It is an amazing Book that is written in this run-on style with weird Capitalizations and Punctuation that is annoying at first but which you sort of forget about after a while but which I suddenly appreciate is hard to pull off.