So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  I looked up and realized that I’d been reading for an hour and that I had actually been attentive to what I was reading and, more amazing still, that I was no longer sighing those big sighs I’ve always sighed for hours after any kind of crying jag. I was riveted by the author James Frey’s story and I only occasionally got annoyed at him. He’s awful and mean and disgusting and more screwed-up than anybody I have ever known but I think because he is so not victim-y and because his struggle is so real and palpable I found myself liking him and rooting for him. And I started to think about the fight Leo and I had and all the mean things he said to me and how frustrating it is to deal with somebody you love who has his demons and how even when he might be right about the specific things he’s complaining about, the way he tells you about them makes what he says impossible to hear or deal with. And suddenly, this book which I’d liked plenty before last night was starting to make even more sense. It was starting to make me feel a little more sympathetic to myself and more important to my Husband, who has the same kind of Fury voice inside him. It doesn’t tell him to smoke crack, thank God, but it’s an angry voice and it makes him explode and stomp around and yell a lot and he has been struggling with his Fury for as long as I have known him. When I read Frey’s descriptions of his Fury I know just what he means because I have seen Leo’s Fury and seen him trying to battle it into submission and failing more than he succeeds, but trying again nonetheless. He calls his Fury “My Anger” and after it goes back to wherever it hides most of the time we talk about it as if it were the fourth person in our family, a creature who’s away at college or something and only comes around every couple of months when it needs attention or money or to do its laundry. And I see him lose patience with himself a lot. And yes, I’ve seen myself lose patience with the endless cycle and the inevitable morning-after discussions and I have wanted to slap him across the face like Cher did to Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck and shout, “Snap out of it!” But last night, thanks to Frey, I was more tuned in to the incremental improvements we have made over the years, improvements that don’t necessarily lessen how upset I get and how wrung out I feel for days after one of Anger’s visits but do remind me that Anger is an ongoing struggle for him—and for us. And that if it’s a struggle that is not ever going to be entirely winnable, it is a live thing and it grows and it changes and it’s there and it’s ours to deal with.

  I couldn’t stop reading A Million Little Pieces partly because it is a big, fat train wreck of a book and everybody, I think, gets some sort of perverse pleasure or solace, at least, from watching someone else’s mess of a life, especially if it’s worse than theirs. That’s also the appeal of, say, Betsy Lerner’s Food and Loathing, about her compulsive eating problem; it’s also part of why I loved Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story, which has become all the more poignant to me since Knapp died, not of alcoholism but of lung cancer. It’s also satisfying and hopeful to a person like me when, like Frey’s, the wrecked life gets fixed—or because Frey doesn’t tie everything up in neat little bundles, I should say partially and incrementally fixed. In a completely unsmarmy, un-Hollywood way (though, of course, a “major movie deal” for the book is in the works as I write), it is a positive and uplifting book. But the real value in A Million Little Pieces is that it explores and illustrates what it’s like to struggle with a demon, any demon, whether it’s drugs or anger or greed or food or something else that for some reason is a powerful force in your life. And that gives me pause. And patience.

  At the very least, last night it gave me the nerve to turn out the light and go back upstairs, where, I had a pretty good idea, based on recent past experience, Leo would be sitting in the living room, spent by Anger. And we sat and we talked and by the time the sun came up we’d decided, yet again, to pick up the million little pieces of our marriage and try to put them back together, one piece and one day at a time.

  July 6

  The Time Machine

  You can’t eat pizza while reading The House of Mirth.

  Some other things you can’t do while reading Edith Wharton’s classic about the beauteous, doomed Lily Bart: ride the subway, particularly if you need to look up every three minutes to check for your stop; sneak in a few pages between moves in a game of chess with your obsessive eight-year-old; try to open it anytime said eight-year-old (or even an eight-plus-something-year-old) is watching TV in your room.

  You have to have long stretches of uninterrupted time to read The House of Mirth. You also have to have quiet. A long, rainy weekend afternoon would work. So would a couple of luxuriously sleepless nights in a well-appointed, comfortable bed.

  I figured this out last week—okay, maybe it took me two weeks—when I set out to read the 1905 novel in my usual manner: here and there throughout the course of the day, during slow periods at the office, over Lean Cuisines long after Charley had gone to bed and Leo was safely ensconced at the NBC studio, while listening to the morning and/or late-night news. But I kept getting stalled: the phone would ring, or some pressing piece of business would seize my attention. It’s not that I wasn’t immediately riveted by Ms. Bart’s plucky but ultimately sad descent into poverty and death as a victim of the sexist society. I was. It was just that Mrs. Wharton’s book isn’t meant to be read in fits and starts. She writes in long sentences, long paragraphs, and long chapters, and if you lose the thread, you sometimes have to go back several pages to remind yourself whose story you’re hearing.

  The House of Mirth was written in a time when reading was the entertainment of choice, when women like me didn’t have bosses to placate and TV shows to keep up with and hungry kids wanting dinner. (Okay, maybe they had the kids, but they also, most of them, had servants to make them the dinner.) It was written by a rich woman about rich women for rich women who had nothing but the time on their hands to read it.

  The House of Mirth did not, in other words, anticipate the reading habits of the multitasking, attention-span-deprived MTV generation.

  Which is interesting, since I chose the book on the suggestion of a half-dozen people smack in the middle of that age group. It was, in fact, one of several books passionately recommended by Roxanne Coady, the owner of the R. J. Julia bookstore in Madison, Connecticut, at a special meeting in her store to talk about perfect book-club books. (Roxanne is one of the few people I know who, like me, uses books as her litmus test to judge new friends and acquaintances. Somebody else might check out a newcomer’s hairstyle, or outfit, or taste in jewelry to determine whether she’s bonding material; Roxanne and I became what I suspect will be lifelong friends when I mentioned, in passing, that Bernard Lefkowitz’s Our Guys is one of my favorite books.) “It’s a big old soap opera,” added my friend Ruth. “Oh,” said one woman I had lunch with a few days later—a thirty-something writer of a contemporary novel of manners not fit to wrap Wharton’s masterpiece. “Have you got a treat in store for you!”

  The House of Mirth is a treat—a long, detailed, funny, depressing, meaningful story about a hollow society and the way it ruins a beautiful young woman who is, to quote the scholar and professor R. W. B. Lewis, “admirable, touching, exasperating, forlorn, sturdy, woefully self-deceptive, imprudent, finely proud, intuitive . . . [which is to say] humanly adorable.” Lily Bart is a twenty-nine-year-old orphaned beauty who lives with her punitive but reasonably well-off aunt in New York at the turn of the nineteenth century. She is a “smart” girl in the sense of the word that means witty and charming, a welcome “extra woman” at dinner parties and country weekends. Lily has no dearth of suitors, but she is particular. She knows that to improve her station—and, not incidentally, to pay off the debts she has incurred by keeping up all the appearances required of girls on the marriage circuit (lucky for Lily: she and the world were too young to know about Botox)—she must marry “well” (i.e., rich). But she is also vain and self-obsessed and almost knowingly naïve: she’s too smart to get sexually involved with men, but she gets close enough to some dangerous ones so that s
he suffers the same fate she’d have suffered if she’d been promiscuous: she gets investment help from a man who tries to exact the usual sexual payment for his efforts. The victim of gossip and blackmail, a ruined and despondent Lily dies a horrible, lonely, and self-imposed death.

  Everybody and her English teacher has by now weighed in on The House of Mirth; the Modern Library edition I read last week includes essays by the poet and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, as well as reviews of the book at the time it was published, and snippets of commentary by such lit luminaries as Professor Lewis. In fact, I’m starting to think I’m the only person over the age of twelve who has never read it: I’ve noticed that there are at least a dozen Web sites that discuss the book, my favorite being sparknotes.com. That’s one of those sites at which people (they sound like high school students) send in questions like “Help! I have a paper due on this book; can anyone tell me its themes?” Or a more sophisticated version, also clearly from a young reader: “Would Thoreau like the world that Wharton depicts, one depenant [sic] on performance and image? Why or why not? This is really important. I need a thesis. I am stuck.” Obviously, the book has long been required reading for everybody from precocious ninth-graders to prisoners on the college-equivalency track to professors seeking tenure.

  I’ve never been in a book club, but I have seen them on TV. And I can understand why The House of Mirth is a very popular choice. It raises so many universal questions about subjects—like love and money—of interest to everybody. How much responsibility should Lily bear for her own demise? Is she a victim of her own avariciousness, or is she simply a naïf? I can just hear the forks coming to a screeching halt on the dessert plates when one book-club member offers up evidence that Lily Bart, in many ways, c’est moi! Everybody knows or has been someone as vain but self-aware as Lily. Who hasn’t shared a meal or an apartment or an office with a single woman who, in Elizabeth Hardwick’s words, has “been on the town too long”? Who has never experienced or encountered Lily’s peculiar mixture of desperation and pickiness when it comes to love? We just talk differently today, that’s all. Lily declares a suitor unsuitable because his bank account is too small; my friend Margaret rejects a guy because she once saw him in his apartment wearing yellow sweatpants. Wharton writes that “Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest, and that to convert it into success other arts are required.” Here’s a magazine-cover line I heard screaming from the newsstand the other day: “Beauty Is Not Enough!” it announced. “10 Ways to Work with It!”

  So it doesn’t surprise me that The House of Mirth remains, almost a century after its publication, the kind of book people still talk about and want to read, even if, unlike the students on sparknotes. com, they are not going to be tested on it later. There’s the feminist element, of course—“Man, that woman got shafted!” was the single comment of an aggressively PC male friend of mine—and then there’s the sheer joy of meeting a character who is a curious yet common combination of contradictory traits: self-knowing but naïve, ambitious yet at the same time pure of heart.

  What does surprise me, though, is that for all its universality, The House of Mirth is not an easy or a quick read, and it requires a kind of concentration the common wisdom holds people won’t apply to books anymore. And this, I realize, is also part of its appeal to book-clubbers, who, I’m told, sometimes need some deadlines and incentives to keep on reading. Even I, with whole days to turn pages and ruminate, had to make myself some rules for The House of Mirth, rules like setting the clock for five-thirty A.M. instead of six, so I could get in some quiet reading time before Charley got up. Rules like no more than one glass of wine at dinner so that I could concentrate on Wharton’s stately prose without dozing off too early at night. Rules like absolutely no distractions, which means no peeking at other books, and absolutely no double-booking.

  For a while, I’m proud to say, I stuck with the program pretty well. But then midway through my first Wharton week, a friend sent me a copy of the couldn’t-be-more-different How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. It’s a memoir by journalist Toby Young about his stint as an editor at Vanity Fair. (Hmm. A title stolen from another old book. Coincidence or kismet? You decide.) Cursing myself, I put Wharton aside for a bit of Young, vowing to read just a chapter or two before getting back to the Real Thing. There’d be no conflation problems, I was sure: Wharton was too good and Young too glib: they didn’t even live in the same century.

  “Toby Young’s book is surprisingly sweet,” I told a friend with whom I was lunching one day that week. “And he really understands our shallow, celebrity-obsessed culture.” Then I went home and picked up my book and read a passage about “a world in which conspicuousness passed for distinction and the society column had become the role of fame.” But for the different typeface, I would have sworn I was reading a line from the oh-so-modern How to Lose Friends. But no: this wise observation was quietly buried in my homework assignment: it comes directly from The House of Mirth.

  I’m just glad I stuck with the book long enough to find it.

  July 20

  Reading Confidential

  For a few days last week, I wanted to be just like Anthony Bourdain. I don’t mean that I wanted to cook in a famous Manhattan restaurant like Les Halles, where Bourdain is executive chef. Or to wear way too much jewelry for my age and gender, as Bourdain does, or to chain-smoke my way through life. (I’ve just given that up, in fact. But check back with me next week.) I was thinking I wanted to be like Bourdain when I grow up (never mind that we’re within a couple of years of each other) in the sense that I want to have his energy, his irreverence, and his nerve. I want to write a book like Kitchen Confidential.

  Kitchen Confidential, which lots of people read when it came out in hardcover in 2000 and/or when it was excerpted, several times, in The New Yorker, is Bourdain’s memoir of becoming a chef; it chronicles what really goes on in the kitchens of restaurants that make you wait weeks to get reservations. It’s an upscale tell-all with attitude, a Fast Food Nation on steroids.

  I’d heard of the book, of course, but I hadn’t read it, partly because almost immediately after publication it became something of a phenomenon, and you know by now how I feel about publishing phenomena. Besides, I’m not much of a foodie, preferring instead to think of myself as a typical contemporary American woman, which is to say one who has a love/hate relationship with food. You can’t have grown up the way I did—the chubby daughter of an extremely weight-conscious mother—and be anything else. Thanks to years of being told that sauces, sweets, and anything else that tastes good should be off-limits—and seeing the proof of same on my hips and thighs—my relationship with what I put in my mouth is, at best, fraught with trauma. I remember, for example, reading an article years ago in New York Woman magazine in which the author quoted a woman as saying her therapeutic goal in life was to stop seeing a bowl of noodles as the enemy. “But it is the enemy, isn’t it?” I remember thinking.

  Consequently, I don’t read cookbooks, and when I inadvertently stumble onto something about food or foodies, I have a weird take. In Stuffed, for example, a charming memoir by Patricia Volk about growing up in a family of restaurateurs, I found myself much less interested in the anecdotes about the relative who was the first person to bring whitefish to America than in the all-consuming (to me) question “When your business is food, how do you keep from getting fat?” Volk doesn’t talk much about the food-fat connection, but the one anecdote I remember best, all these months later, is about how she kept a precious piece of paper in a locked box. Was the note about a favorite family recipe or some other delightful heirloom? No, the paper had a number on it—143, I think it was—which turned out to be the most she had ever weighed.

  Needless to say, I don’t cook either, although I do know that a number of women with my pathology do, probably on the theory that “those who can’t eat can at least feed others.” Cooking is Leo’s department, and while I often do ask him questions about
what he’s making, they’re usually the kind guaranteed to make him crazy. “You put butter on the vegetables?” I’ll say. When he nods casually, I respond as if he’d said he’d put Charley to bed in the washing machine.