by Floyd Skloot
If I behaved like this only with Sophie’s Choice, then I wouldn’t have needed to devote an entire shelf to novels I keep trying and failing to read, keep disposing of, and keep repurchasing. Finally recognizing the pattern, I dedicated the bottom shelf of a small bookcase in my writing room to these books. So now I retain them after quitting on them, making it both easier and cheaper when, hopeful and determined, I need to start one again.
A couple of years ago, I bought a new copy of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Beverly and I had watched a rebroadcast of the 2002 Masterpiece Theatre production, starring Keira Knightley as Lara, had reminisced about the 1965 Julie Christie version, and, fired up by the love story, I thought I’m ready to try that novel again.
Highlighting my way through its opening chapter, I was moved by young Yuri Zhivago sobbing at his mother’s fresh grave in the lashing cold and rain, then by his spooky first night in Uncle Nikolai’s care. How could I have disliked such a vividly told story? But by the time I reached page 50, “the time of the Presnia uprising,” I was done. Not a very thorough attempt, but enough to bring back all the reasons why I can’t read this novel: a rickety, time-shifting structure; sketchy characterizations that border on caricature and include incredible personal transformations; sentimentality and mushy romance conventions; ridiculous coincidences; clunky symbolism; dull polemics. The author was far more present than his characters, his touch heavy, his style self-consciously poetic.
My first encounter with Doctor Zhivago took place in the winter of 1959, a few months after it appeared in English translation. Despite beginning with serious intention, I could only make it through about half the first chapter, stopping where Yuri’s Uncle Nikolai has “gone through Tolstoyism and revolutionary idealism” as he “passionately sought an idea, inspired, graspable, which in its movement would clearly point the way toward change, an idea like a slash of lightning or roll of thunder capable of speaking even to a child, or an illiterate.” This stuff was a little hard for me, and way too boring. I was eleven at the time.
I’d decided to read Doctor Zhivago in 1959 to save my father’s life. A few months earlier, when he’d been critically injured in the car accident, I’d been told repeatedly that he might not survive, then that he might not walk. I wasn’t permitted to visit him because hospital policy in those days assumed that a germ-riddled child might contaminate the entire ward, and my family wanted to spare me sight of his suffering. Unable to help, terrified by all I’d heard and imagined, I seized upon an opportunity when someone sent him a copy of Doctor Zhivago as a get-well gift.
I knew my father would never read it—all I’d ever seen him read was the evening newspaper as he sat in his easy chair and consumed butterscotch candies—so I decided reading Doctor Zhivago for him would be my job. After all, it was about a physician, a healer. Maybe I’d pick up some important medical information. On the flyleaf the gift-giver had drawn a cartoon of my father, glasses and characteristic cigar in place, standing with his trousers sagging around his ankles, his buttocks being examined by a doctor with a stethoscope who says, “You’ll be good as new in no time, Mr. Skloot.” It was as though the novel carried some sort of magical powers I might release by reading it, thereby making my father good as new.
But I couldn’t, no matter how often I picked the book up and stared at its cover, that white dust jacket with purple and sky-blue squiggles meant to represent clouds looming above a snowy Russian landscape. There was a sleigh approaching a small house where bare trees and a rickety snow fence stand guard. The image was cold, threatening, a depiction of dangerous forces that don’t care who you are, and of home as someplace very fragile. I put it safely on a shelf beside my World Book Encyclopedias.
I tried reading Doctor Zhivago again in the summer of 1965, during a three-month limbo between high school graduation and freshman year at college when I was eighteen and confined to bed with a reactivation of mononucleosis. My father had been dead for almost four years. While I knew my failure to read Doctor Zhivago hadn’t really led to his death, I was always aware of the novel’s presence, of a duty I felt toward it and my father, an enduring connection between them. I’d often taken the book down and set it beside my bed, knowing it was absurd to think this brought my father closer, not really intending to read it. But when I was sick, with little to do other than read, having completed the books assigned for freshman orientation and the gift books from my aunt (The Man with the Golden Gun, Hotel, Up the Down Staircase), no longer interested in the Hardy Boys, having few other books available in my mother’s apartment, I thought of trying Doctor Zhivago.
What I remember most from that attempt was feeling horror that so many characters experienced sudden losses of, vanishings by, and partings from loved ones. Yuri’s mother dies, his father commits suicide, he’s yanked from his familiar life to travel with his uncle, and soon placed with yet another family, the Gromekos, all in the first two chapters. The heroine, Lara Guishar, has lost her father, and Yuri’s new friend Misha Gordon is abandoned by his family. Even the country is coming apart, turning against itself as its various factions generate mayhem. Echoing all this mayhem is the way Pasternak introduces then discards so many characters and situations.
Though I identified with loss, and experienced the first parts of the novel in an intensely personal way, I think what thwarted me was a feeling of being manipulated. Sure, the story had some compelling elements, but it was also cluttered and felt overwrought, the emotions bogus. I hated the feeling that I couldn’t trust the author, that in vast Russia you would routinely bump into people you knew, just like in my apartment building, and even people he told us were dead would come back later, utterly remade. My still-unformed aesthetic sensibility rebelled at the way this writer behaved, at the obstacles he placed in the way of credibility.
I think this was the period when my reading taste began to coalesce, and I clearly didn’t like stories that struck me as feverish or melodramatic. I wanted emotional authenticity, no doubt prompted by witnessing my mother’s hysteria close-up. And, especially in the case of certain books like Doctor Zhivago, which bore an almost talismanic significance for me, I took things personally.
Later that summer, a family friend named Sylvia, who also happened to be my doctor’s wife, brought over a copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. She told me it was about being sick and being cut off from your normal life because of it. Bam! Another special, talismanic book. The novel was thick as a brick, as was its prose, but I tried hard to get into the story because I didn’t want to disappoint Sylvia or my doctor. I thought it moved as stiffly as Frankenstein, each sentence lurching along, the speeches awkward, the characters scarcely human. It looked and felt like a novel, it was made up of a novel’s components, but I thought it was a fake, and it kept putting me to sleep. Maybe that was Sylvia’s intent, via her husband, who kept saying that the best treatment for me was rest.
Four years later, having recovered from yet another recurrence of mononucleosis, having graduated from college as an English major and working toward a master’s degree in English, I felt that my reading still had huge gaps, especially in foreign language literature. Between my first and second terms in grad school, I decided to start filling in those gaps, and found Sylvia’s gift still on my shelves.
By this time in my life, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and had chosen Southern Illinois University in order to study with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. One evening at his house in Carterville, he asked what I was reading during the upcoming term break. When I said The Magic Mountain, his expression softened—a rare occurrence—and he said he envied me my first exposure to it, adding that he’d taught himself German as a young man in order to read the novel in its original language. Holy smoke! I decided not to tell him I’d tried and failed to read it before. In English.
Nor did I tell him later that I couldn’t make it past the third day of Hans Castorp’s seven-year stay at the International Sanatorium Berghof. If he asked how I
was doing with the novel, I was prepared to say that I had so much other work to prepare for the next term’s teaching and study, and was also working on a long poem, so I’d put The Magic Mountain aside. All of which was technically true, though I’d have kept reading it anyway if I hadn’t hated being in the presence of Thomas Mann’s voice.
Distant, formal, haughty, soulless, the narration pushed me away rather than lured me in. Mann seemed to condescend toward his characters, particularly the protagonist, the twenty-three-year-old engineer Hans Castorp, who comes across as a dull, limited presence. In a description that illustrates in style and attitude what bothered me most about his novel, Mann writes, “Castorp was neither a genius nor an idiot, and if we refrain from applying the word ‘mediocre’ to him, we do so for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with his intelligence and little or nothing to do with his prosaic personality, but rather out of deference to his fate, to which we are inclined to attribute a more general significance.” Mann can barely muster interest or empathy for his protagonist, but uses him to illustrate larger issues. This offended me, perhaps because it rendered illness, with which I was already intimately familiar, as less personal and real, as emblematic, a symbol for society’s sickness. Castorp’s mediocrity—and certainly a novel can focus powerfully on a mediocre main character—wasn’t the problem for me; Mann’s disdain and the imposition of his grandiose designs were. Of course, I understood that Mann’s approach might be an exercise in irony, in satire, but that didn’t alter things for me at all. He was messing with one of my sacred subjects, illness, just as I felt Pasternak was doing with his sappy handling of emotion, love, and poetry in Doctor Zhivago. The very things that shape The Magic Mountain as significant—its gravity, its subject, its tone and objectivity, its metaphoric intention—are at the heart of its failure for me.
Early in the novel, the deaths of Castorp’s parents feel literary, not real, setting a pattern for how Mann presents illness itself. And whenever he seeks to be light and humorous, he sounds like the sort of person holding forth at a cocktail party who is far more entertained than his audience is by his wit. Everything that happens in the novel happens because Mann determines it, not because it flows from the characters’ or the narrative’s own lives. “A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries.” Well, to me, Mann neglected to give his characters those credible, individual personal lives.
Yet in 1996, when a paperback edition of The Magic Mountain appeared in a new translation, I bought a copy. This despite the familiar dismay I felt, standing in the bookstore aisle, just reading Mann’s foreword, which takes six paragraphs to say that the story takes place before World War I, and includes this alarming, pompous statement about the novel’s length and level of detail: “Unafraid of the odium of appearing too meticulous, we are much more inclined to the view that only thoroughness can be truly entertaining.” After all, maybe my earlier problems were related to the translation, and besides, I had been sick again for nearly a decade with neurological damage caused by a viral attack. Maybe I was ready.
I wasn’t ready in 1996, and I wasn’t again in 2008, when I bought my last copy. This time, I failed to get past Castorp’s first breakfast at the sanitarium. As with Sophie’s Choice and Doctor Zhivago, The Magic Mountain is a novel that calls to some deep place in me as a reader, where desire and duty and need and personal experience all come together, repeatedly and at different times in my life, to override, at least initially, my aesthetic demands and expectations as a reader and writer. When I return to them, I return with a feeling of pressure, a yearning that outlives the conviction that a particular book will disappoint me.
Something else is going on with me and John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues. I knew Gardner, who was teaching medieval literature at Southern Illinois University when I arrived there in 1969 to study with Kinsella. This was before John Gardner became JOHN GARDNER. His first novel, The Resurrection, had been published to limited attention three years earlier, and the novels that were to make him famous hadn’t yet appeared. On a shelf in his home office, Gardner had a series of black springback binders containing the completed manuscripts of Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, Nickel Mountain, and other books. Though none had been accepted, he continued writing new books, confident that publication would come.
That confidence was probably the most important thing I learned from Gardner. Well, also how to drink martinis. His eventual success, which began with the 1971 publication of Grendel, felt personal to me, something essential that I’d been permitted to witness though we were not close, a vindication of the sort of faith I was struggling to find for myself as a writer after leaving graduate school in June 1972.
In January 1973, a few months after The Sunlight Dialogues came out, I returned to southern Illinois to visit Gardner and ask him to inscribe a copy of the novel. Then I tried to read it, getting about two-thirds of the way through, to chapter XIII, which contains as its epigraph a line of poetry from Thomas Kinsella (“I only know things seem and are not good”).
The Sunlight Dialogues was never a story toward which I felt irresistibly lured, that drew me emotionally, personally, the way Sophie’s Choice, Doctor Zhivago, or The Magic Mountain did. Its cluttered, sometimes cartoonish account of a small-town police chief and his mystical prisoner, of upstate New York family agony, moved too slowly and unconvincingly at the police procedural level it had chosen for itself. It was marred by overwriting, sentence after sentence festooned with similes and metaphors that add nothing, that build toward nothing, are often inapt, and thrust the author into the foreground: “He took a long, slow drag on his pipe, casting about like an old woman in an attic for the meaning.” Or, on the same page, the description of a police car starting up “clean and precise as a young child’s tooth.” Occurring multiple times on nearly every page, the almost random figurative outbursts create a kind of noise that drowns out story and character. Similarly, the effort at enchantment, the intrusive mythologizing and complexifying and magic just get in my way as a reader, as do the repeated use of Jewishness as a marker of unpleasant qualities (“He talked a great deal, in a way that at times made you think of a childlike rabbi” or, on the next page, he “opened his hands like a Jewish tailor” as though a Jewish tailor opened his hands differently than a gentile tailor). The Sunlight Dialogues is also too distracted by talk talk talk, as even the main character, Chief Clumly, notes, in a speech typical for its own interrupted flow: “‘I don’t listen much,’ he said. ‘A lot of—’ He searched his mind. ‘Lot of talk.’”
Yet I’ve tried to read the novel once every decade since that first attempt. In 1982, after Gardner died, I picked up The Sunlight Dialogues as an act of mourning. In 1993 I took it to Germany on my honeymoon, having told Beverly how much Gardner’s example, and his occasional encouraging letters, had meant to me. And three years ago, when it came out in a New Directions reprint, I tried again, feeling that in some sense I still somehow owed it to his place in my memory to finish and even admire the novel that’s considered his masterpiece.
A similar sense of obligation has led me to read no more than two hundred pages of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift four times since 1975. I know I’m never going to accept the preposterous strand of Bellow’s plot involving Chicago gangster Rinaldo Cantabile. I’m never going to deal with all the babble about the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner and the central impact of his work on protagonist Charlie Citrine. But Bellow’s fiction has meant so much to me, particularly Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, and Herzog, all of which I read as an undergraduate and which helped form my sense of what a prose writer might do, particularly with language; and I was intrigued by Bellow’s use of the poet Delmore Schwartz as a model for the character who gives Humboldt’s Gift its title; and I was living and working in Illinois at the time this very Illinois novel appeared. Plus, a writer and critic I admire, Sven Birkerts,
wrote in his book Reading Life: Books for the Ages that Humboldt’s Gift is his favorite novel, that it fills him “with the greatest covetousness” and inspires him to emulation. When he thinks of it, he immediately wants to write. I really wanted to like Humboldt’s Gift, four times so far, but I know I won’t ever. It’s the only Bellow novel I’ve failed to finish.
Though it takes place, like Sophie’s Choice, at a time and near an area where I lived, I can’t finish—can barely read a dozen pages of—Jay Cantor’s 2003 novel, Great Neck, which I’ve bought three times already. I can’t read more than fifty pages of James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, despite the fact that it’s his Big Book, despite having lived in southern Illinois where he too lived, despite being compelled by his life story and having enjoyed several of his novels. I’ve got a copy I bought two years ago after having given away two previous copies. Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini? I’m 0–4, having just this week set aside the last copy I will ever purchase, having broken my previous record by getting through eighty-eight pages before being exhausted by the caricature of its protagonist, whose lack of feeling for anyone, whose soulless programmed responses, fail to sustain my interest fully enough to find out how his family and his character might grow. I’m also 0–4 with John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and William Goldman’s Boys and Girls Together.
Loyalty, homage, repayment, or admiration for the author, despite being insufficient motivations for finishing a particular piece of work, are obviously powerful draws for me when I consider what to read. But they are lesser draws than the deep, abiding connection I feel for crucial elements in such novels as Sophie’s Choice, Doctor Zhivago, or The Magic Mountain. My finding that these lasting, canonical novels are unreadable, for me, is clarifying about the nature of my literary taste, perhaps also about my flaws as a reader. But the fact that over nearly four decades I’ve reacted so strongly as to discard and then replace copies shows something else, I think. In the presence of certain material, whether subject matter or style or emphasis or structure, I read with a combination of eagerness and avidity, of need and hope, that defines aspects of my essential self. I’m a reader, I’ve discovered, for whom the stakes can be absurdly high, and who—however experienced and trained and knowledgeable—is vulnerable to almost inexplicable passions and responses to the books that get most deeply under my skin.
