Reading in Bed, Updated Edition

by Brian Doyle

  The Dark Joys of the Book Review

  We skim and scan and peruse them, we note the ones that glow, we grin at those that snarl, but I bet you a pint of excellent ale that no one really thinks of the book review as a genre itself, a shapely form, a unique and peculiar corner of literature; but maybe we should.

  Consider the difficulty of composing a brief piece, both graceful and pointed, that must juggle many tasks: assess the feats and flaws of the book at hand, its place in the works of that writer, its place in books on that subject, its general substance or silliness, and — most of all — whether the book is worth cold cash. Additionally a good review should sketch the subject of the book itself in such a way that the reader gets a quick lesson in Antarctic exploration, beekeeping, Guy Fawkes, Tom McCall’s fishing waders, etc.; one subtle kick of a book section in a newspaper is that it is fully as informative and stimulating as the rest of the paper (indeed usually more so), whether or not you immediately shuffle to the bookstore to lay your money down.

  And it is a form with masters, like John Updike (whose book reviews are literary essays of exquisite grace and erudition, far more interesting and pithy than his novels, with far less neurotic lusty misadventure) or Christopher Hitchens (whose reviews are energetic, opinionated, bristly, tart, and often hilarious essays), or James Wood (who is almost always startlingly perceptive and who, bless his heart, coined the happy phrase ‘hysterical realism’ to describe much modern fiction). And like any form it has its charlatans and mountebanks; what is more entertaining, among the dark pleasures of reading a newspaper, than realizing that the reviewer has not actually read the book in question, and is committing fizzy sleight-of-hand? Or reading a review that is utterly self-indulgently about the reviewer, not the book? Or a review that is trying desperately to be polite to a book with as many flaws as the New York Knicks? Or reading a reviewer, like Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, who must spend hours every day sharpening razors with which to eviscerate the books she reviews, and has liked, as far as I remember, only two books in the history of the universe, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish?

  Ah, low humor, a venial sin. Sorry. But there are great gifts in the book section too. Has not every one of us been introduced here to writers and books that subsequently mattered immensely to us? Have we not all heard here snatches of the voices of sage elders like Ursula Le Guin and Peter Matthiessen and Eduardo Galeano? Have we not been reintroduced to men and women of real vision and piercing holiness, like Abraham Lincoln and Flannery O’Connor? Have we not discovered writers and books we might never have encountered in the normal chaos and hubbub of our days — Alan Furst’s haunted war novels, David Duncan’s spiritual essays, Stewart Holbrook’s resurrected loggers and thieves? In one sense the review section is a digest, a distilling, of the vast ocean of books (there are more than a million books published every year, one every thirty seconds, says the Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid) into those that might matter most; and in a nation and culture in which ideas and debate and story still supersede the gun and the lash, we might take a moment to ponder the book review as a quiet inky pillar of the body politic.

  There are still more quiet pleasures in the book section. To discover a terrific writer’s excitement about other writers, say — Barry Lopez singing William deBuys, Cynthia Ozick celebrating Amos Oz, Margaret Atwood applauding Alice Munro. Or the arrival, with a tremendous splash, of a ridiculously gifted young writer grappling not-quite-smoothly with a capacious talent — a Zadie Smith, a Jonathan Safran Foer. Or meeting a writer of startling grace and power whose stories stitch and braid into your heart — a Helen Garner, a Haruki Murakami. Or meeting again, with a shiver of warm recognition, writers who mattered to you once and who leap right back to the top of that teetering pile of books on your bedside table: Willa Cather, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell, Eudora Welty. Or, another grinning low pleasure, reading a review and recognizing that brassy pub-argument voice, cocksure about writerly rankings — a voice I drift into myself, I confess, when I insist, banging my tankard, that Twain is the greatest of all American writers, and Bellow the greatest of modern ones, and Stevenson the most broadly masterful of all.

  It is an odd genre, to be sure, the review, and every bit as chancy as its literary cousins — many times a superb book was panned on first appearance, many times reviewers turn out to be laughably wrong about a book’s staying power, many times a very fine writer of something else turns out to be a terrible reviewer, and many times a bad review leads to bickering and wailing — would the letters page of The New York Times Book Review be any fun at all without the moaning of offended authors and the icy sniffy replies of reviewers?

  In the end the book review seems to me every bit as laudable a form, when in good hands, as film and theater reviews have become when sculpted by such as, say, the hilarious Anthony Lane and the perceptive John Lahr. To sit on Sunday morning and flip open the papery halibut that is The Oregonian and peruse the reviews is to be in a village green of voices, learned and light-hearted, erudite and exuberant, snarling and singing. It is to be in a sea of stories. It is to be in conversation, in a real sense; and it seems to me these days that listening attentively to each other, and speaking honestly of that which is foremost in our hearts, is the essential duty of both national and spiritual citizenship. We are ourselves stories, sometimes shapely and sometimes stuttering; and the more we tell and hear stories, the more we trade tales of grace under duress and courage against the dark, then the more we keep reaching for what we are at our best, and remain leery of arrogance, and remember that there are many roads to light.

  So why, if well-made book reviews are so important, do such lowly ink-stained wretches as me attempt them? Well, you get to keep the book you review, which is pretty cool, and you get to scribble in it, which is really cool, but most of all for the simplest reason of all — books are fun, and poking into new books is more fun, and discovering and celebrating great books is the most fun. It’s the reverse of that feeling we have all had as readers, of slowing down as you approach the end of a great book, because you’re reluctant to leave that world you can only enter for the first time once; the grail for reviewers is the dawning realization that the book in your hand is extraordinary, something that matters, something that will hit hearts. Now that’s cool.

  Auto Correct: a Note

  Recently a Rigorous Peer-Reviewed Academic Journal Not to Be Named Here accepted a small headlong essay of mine, and the elephantine process since then has been entertaining — a series of incredibly intricate maneuvers, all accompanied with the most amazing stern tart commanding cover notes. This morning’s note, for example, says “Please check that the author surnames have been correctly identified by a pink background… Occasionally, the distinction between surnames and forenames can be ambiguous… Please also check all author affiliations…”

  This sent me into immediate reverie, of course, and I will happily spend an hour tonight in Auto Correct, just for fun… “The author’s surname is of course a fiction adopted seven generations ago to survive under the cruel and murderous English empire under which Dubhghaill, Gaelic for dark stranger, was changed by imperial fiat to Doyle…choice of surnames is referred to editor as something of a moral dilemma; if we use the Anglicized one, does that not entail support for murderous regimes, and utter disrespect for aboriginal peoples? As regards forename, author has been called Brian, Brain, Byron, Bryan, Beak, BD, B, Hey You (by grandmother not sure which small crewcut grandson he was; there were a lot to choose from) Idiot, Liar, Meathead, Self-Absorbed Buffoon (former girlfriends), Buster, Bud, Yo, and Freak-Flag (New York City policemen), etc. Also family legend has it that had I been born female I would have been named Virginia, for reasons that elude me and send my dad into hysterics, so in the spirit of respecting all genders and possible permutations of same, choice of forename referred to editor; if you choose the male forename, does that indicate marginalization of the feminine in a
ll of us? And let us not even tiptoe into the affiliations problem. Does that count Boy Scouts, from which I was ejected (politely)? The Catholic Church, bless its motley chaos? The Saint John Vianney Seventh Grade Boys Basketball Team? The Fellowship of Christian Athletes, to which I belonged for half an hour, until I discovered there was no beer as promised? Boston, where I loved for many happy years but now do not? The worldwide community of Jewish men — do I belong to that if I was once dragooned into attending a bris with my brother because a Jewish friend of ours could only scrape up eight Jewish males and he made us stand in, which my brother and I remember for our outright and outspoken horror at what then happened to the poor defenseless baby? Do I still count as a Knick fan if I stopped liking the Knicks in 1974 and now detest them with a deep and abiding detestation? I refer these and further questions if necessary to the editor…

  Selling Stories

  I remember the moment I realized I was not a journalist but a sales and marketing man. This was in Boston, many years ago. It was March, the muddiest month. At the time I worked for an excellent Catholic university, hammering away at stories for the alumni magazine, and I thought of myself as a writer, a collector of tales, a portraitist in prose, something of a minor inky artist, but one slushy afternoon, as I thrummed my keyboard, it suddenly came to me that I was in advertising — that I was promoting a product, soliciting attention for it so as to recruit purchase, inviting investment, establishing brand identity and affiliation, doing my utmost to lure cash into the coffers of the corporation.

  I stopped typing and sat there gaping. For twenty years, since I’d been a boy of ten aping my newspaperman father and learning to type fast while cracking wise, I had dreamed of being a journalist, working for a magazine, walking in the footsteps of E.B. White and A.J. Liebling and S.L. Clemens, smelling and shaping stories, offhandedly gathering my essays into ballyhooed books, wandering the highways and byways of this bruised and blessed land, charming and chaffing testy editors, singing and celebrating the grace and humor and idiocies of the Americans, such a glorious and foolish race; but there I was, on a sleeting afternoon on the edge of the city, a salesman. I had so wanted to be William Faulkner, and at age thirty I was Willy Loman.

  And yet, and yet, I began to think, what was the product? Wasn’t it epiphany and opportunity, opening and elevation? Wasn’t I selling an ocean of new chances, or at least the chance at those chances? Wasn’t it a village of stunning ideas and shivering moments? Wasn’t it the electricity of an awakened mind and a startled soul? Wasn’t I, in fact, selling, to young men and women and the parents who loved those children with all their humming hearts, the possibility of finding a riveting self they had never even imagined?

  And the product itself, I realized, was delightfully ephemeral, it could not be touched or tasted, boxed or regulated, it was a verb of a product, remarkably different for each consumer, an experience, an emotional country; it was not a shoe, a truck, a plastic disk stamped with labyrinthine code, it was not even a service, a tour, an expedition complete with guides and goblets. It was, simply, An Education, something that some would explore to the deepest caverns of their souls and others would breeze through beerily, and no one, not even the all-powerful vice president for student affairs, could dictate its shape for each student.

  This cheered me up wonderfully, and I began to realize too that I was a crucial actor in the play, a critical cog, for if no one told stories of what it was like to be educated there, of the salt and spice of that intellectual and cultural and spiritual and social village, soon no one would enter it, and it would wither and die, reduced to shreds of memory and acres of archives, yet another college that used to be, alive only in anecdote, not in the tumultuous hearts of teenagers, the furnaces of the future. The stories there swam in the air by the millions, every student and professor and staffer and alumnus and alumna and parent and neighbor and donor had a hundred, and without story farmers like me to cull and harvest them, to mill them into meals for the curious world, there was, in a sense, no college at all, for if we have no stories we have nothing; that being the cruelty of diseases that rob memories and leave only the fruitless body yearning for its salty spirit.

  Twenty years later I still sell stories, though now I have graduated to a Holy Cross university, from which height I tease my Jesuit friends about their admirable order being banned by the Vatican for forty years. But all the rest of my days I will remember that moment when I first saw what I was, and what it meant; and I have been singing ever since.

  Shoshana

  I have had the inordinate luck, in 30 years as a writer and editor, of meeting and conversing and corresponding with many of the finest writers of our time; was there ale enough between us, I could tell you entertaining stories of Peter Matthiessen (who once spent an hour regaling me with his experiences in the Navy in Hawaii during the Second World War, when he ran the military baseball league), and Barry Lopez (a genius, and one of the wittiest men I ever met), and Ivan Doig (who loves to talk about the craft of writing, the linguistic carpentry of it), and Mary Oliver (the single best reader of her work aloud I have ever seen, in many years of listening to writers try to connect to audiences), and Australia’s Helen Garner (who is utterly fascinated in her work by “the ragged hole between ethics and the law,” as she says), and Annie Dillard (a genius with a startlingly deep gravelly amused voice), and Ursula Le Guin (who is tiny and brilliant and we ought to admit right here that she is one of the finest writers in American history), and the late Andre Dubus the Second (the best Catholic writer since Flannery O’Connor and J.F. Powers, I believe), and Allan Gurganus (who is gentle and hilarious in person), and Jan Morris (who writes the most graceful lucid limpid prose of anyone alive, I think), but this morning I would like to celebrate one smiling brilliance among many: Cynthia Shoshana Ozick, of the Borough of the Bronx, where she was born on April 17, some years ago.

  I once shared a stage with her, during which my role was to choose and ask questions from the audience, a task I immediately flubbed, for I could not resist asking this deeply devout Jewish mystic an ancient Catholic Boy Question, ‘If God is all-powerful, can he make a rock so big not even He can lift it?,’ to which she gave the right answer, which is giggling.

  But before and after that moment (yet another selfish moment for me, amusing only myself), I was transfixed by her wit and erudition, her lack of arrogance, her silver intelligence, her soaring insistence on story as the crucial act of reverence, civilization, community — all the things that fill her work to overflowing. So this morning I send us all back to the work of one of the finest writers ever born in our rich and blessed country; in fact, I assign homework. Read the terrific essayist — choose any one of her alliteratively titled collections Art and Ardor, Metaphor & Memory, Fame & Folly, or Quarrel & Quandary. (As an editor I would have pushed for her to complete a set of 22 more collections along those lines.) Read the fictioneer: start with her searing brief masterpiece The Shawl, and then read The Messiah of Stockholm or the wry and haunting Puttermesser Papers. Or, for a greatest-hits leap into her work if you have never read a page of it, find the excellent Cynthia Ozick Reader, and open it anywhere.

  And let us conclude by joining together, in every office and den and subway and breakfast table where you are reading this note, by briefly humming happy birthday to Ms. Ozick, and wishing her health and peace, and thanking her for her gift to us — unforgettable, graceful, sinewy, honest, blunt, lyrical stories. Madame Author, you used your capacious gifts to wonderful effect, for which we thank you, most sincerely.

  The Poem Is Everything Else Except the Lines on the Page

  I have a friend who calls himself a poet because he published a poem in a magazine once, but then for fun he published the exact same poem in another magazine, just to see if he could, and ever since it’s been the deluge. By his count he has published the exact same poem in eleven little magazines and journals and reviews and webzines so far. He has published no other poem in his po
etic career than that poem, which I have to say is a pretty good poem, although reading it over eleven times, as I have, dilutes the salt and song of it a little — I know where the surprises are, the twists of phrase, the way he cracks his lines so they have a little extra pop and swerve in them. Still, though, as he likes to say, it’s a pretty good poem, serviceable, sturdy, not too self-absorbed and self-obsessed and self-indulgent like so many poems are, and as there are no sudden phrases in French or Greek, which happens sometimes in arty poems, and when that linguistic crime occurs, as he says, you want to get a serious baseball bat and have at the ankles of the arty poet for being such a pretentious doofus, although cracking poets on the ankles for being such narcissistic dolts is frowned upon, even by editors, some of whom actually do have baseball bats in their offices, in case of emergencies.

  I have asked my friend why he is so intent on publishing this one poem over and over again and he pretty much has a different answer every time I ask the question. Sometimes he says he thinks it is a damned fine poem and the more times it appears the better, on principle. Sometimes he says it’s an indictment of our culture that so few people read poems that no one yet has noticed that he publishes the same poem over and over again. Sometimes, on dark days, he says I guess I am not much of a poet, because it looks like all I have is the one poem in me and I am wedded to it until death do us part. Sometimes he says he is playing a shell game with poetry magazine editors, and he does not feel bad about that because it’s not like he is getting paid anyways. Sometimes he says his calculus is that poetry magazines are read by so few people that each time the poem is published it is read by a maximum of seven people and therefore the poem has been read by 77 people to date, excluding him and me, and he will quit when he gets over a hundred readers total, including him and me. Sometimes he says that the poem is actually different each time it appears because it is printed in a different typeface or on a different weight of paper or different electric screen, and context is everything in poetry, and therefore the poem is by definition a new poem, given its new context. Sometimes he says that the poem is actually different every time because we are wrong to think that we know anything certain about something we have read before; for one thing we immediately forget most of what we read, and for another the whole point of a poem is to have layers and hints and intimations and subtexts and shimmers and suggestions of other meanings and depths, so each time you read the same poem it is not the same poem because you are reading it a different way, on a different day, and of course you are not the same person you were when you read it before either, so how could the poem be the same if you are different when you read it?