Books that murmur

Heather Cass White

Readers like to have books around because they continue to murmur after they have been read; they are living extensions of our minds into a space not wholly ours.

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

Let's examine that sentence phrase by phrase.

Readers like to have books around ...

This is not true of all readers. Many readers happily return books, even books they love, to the library. Or they give them to a friend or give them away. Heather Cass White seems to be writing about a different kind of reader, my kind of reader. These readers are the sort who can identify with the next phrase.

... because they continue to murmur after they have been read ...

Can books murmur? I think so, although it has more to do with memory than sound. The best books stick with us, just like the best movies do. We remember something about them — a character, a passage, a feeling. The fact that such books are still around in our homes can trigger these murmurs whenever we see them.

... they are living extensions of our minds ...

Books that murmur, in a sense, are still living, in a sense. Their ideas have become our ideas, even if our own minds have reshaped them into something different than what the authors intended.

... into a space not wholly ours.

White goes on to compare books to children's toys. She uses the psychology term "transitional objects." Children use toys to create imaginary worlds, not wholly theirs. Books work similarly for those who can read. They can take us on a raft with Huck and Jim or into a courtroom with Scout and Jem. Any book that's any good takes us somewhere.

The missing wife

Laura Lippman's standalone novels have been very popular in recent years, yet it is hard not to miss her outstanding Tess Monaghan series of mysteries featuring a female private investigator. One of those gems is By a Spider's Thread, published in 2004.

The Baltimore detective is hired by a Jewish man to find his missing wife and their three children. Tess herself is half Jewish, as well as half Irish, and so she has some understanding of what makes Mark Rubin tick — why he refuses to shake her hand, for instance.

So protective is Mark that he refuses to divulge to Tess key details that might help her find Natalie, his wife. One such detail is that Natalie's father  has long been in prison, and that she used to visit him there. Mark used to work with Jewish prisoners, which is how he met Natalie.

It turns out that Natalie has long been in love with Zeke, one of those prisoners. While waiting for Zeke's release, she married Rubin and had three kids with him. Now that Zeke is free, she runs away to join him. The three kids, however, are a surprise to Zeke and upset his plans.

Lippman gives us both sides of the story, alternating from Tess and Mark to Natalie and Zeke. One of the key characters is Isaac, the oldest son, who misses his father and works behind Zeke's back to make his life difficult.

It's a grand story that readers will love.

Unintended art

At the beginning of the twentieth century ... novelists began making a case not only that novels were art, but also that certain qualities of certain novels were more artistic than others.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

If Jane Smiley is correct in what she says above, and I believe she is, then some of the greatest novels ever written — Pride and Prejudice, Our Mutual Friend, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, etc. — were written before novels were considered art. Thus the likes of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were creating art without realizing it. They just wanted to tell good stories.

Folk art might made a good parallel. Unassuming people in isolated places make quilts or carvings because they find them beautiful or clever, not because they are trying to create art that one day might be on display in a museum.

Did the quality of novels become better after they were recognized as art? Maybe. Maybe not. Before the 20th century the quality of novels was measured primarily by their popularity. If people wanted to read them, they must be good. Since then popularity has actually been considered a detriment to art. If people like it, it must not be very good. Or so many in the literary field seem to think.

I am not making a case that a bestseller like Lessons in Chemistry is art. I haven't read it, and I have no idea. But not all books that were bestsellers in the 19th century are recognized as art today. My point is simply that something need not be obscure or difficult to be artful.

Further, some of the worst novels being written today are by authors deliberately trying to create art. And some of the best are written by people just trying to tell good stories.

The women in his life

We never grow up. I never did anyway.

John Banville, The Sea

When a man's beloved wife dies, would his mind focus mostly on women and girls from a lifetime ago? Somehow it almost makes sense in John Banville's 2005 novel The Sea.

Max Morden's wife, Anna, has just died after a long illness, and he is heartbroken. Yet this first-person novel focuses mostly on boyhood memories about a family that lived nearby during summers by the sea in Ireland. The family includes husband and wife, a twin boy and girl of about Max's age, and Rose, a young woman in her late teens, who helps care for the children.

Partly these memories seem an attempt to remember happier times. "Happiness was different in childhood," he says. His memories are also a record of his discovery of women, which eventually led him to Anna.

His first obsession is Connie Grace, the mother. His eyes follow her everywhere while he pretends to play with her children. Then he falls in love with Chloe, the daughter. Only later does Rose enter the picture, and this leads to Banville's interesting conclusion that, to some degree anyway, wraps everything up.

Banville's literary prose does not make easy reading, which is why he has had much more financial success with his wonderful mystery series featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist. But for patient readers, The Sea has its rewards.

Ideas out, ideas in

Both writer and reader experience the same basic pleasure — something in one form on the page takes another form in the mind. This is the essential pleasure of literature, ideas going into and out of words over and over and over, any time the readers opens a book, or the author takes up a pen.

Janes Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley

What Jane Smiley writes about literature above would seem true about language in general — about communication in general. Ideas out. Ideas in.

Good communication is usually thought to be when the ideas coming in (to the readers or the listeners) are the same as those going out (from the writers or the speakers). Yet sometimes we misunderstand entirely. This seems to happen all the time in conversation. What I hear isn't what you said, or vice versa. Even the written word can be badly misunderstood, even though writers can take more time framing their words and readers can always reread to better understand what they are reading.

But I am intrigued by one phrase Smiley writes: "something in one form on the page takes another form in the mind." This suggests that the two ideas, what is written and what is read, are rarely identical, and that this can actually be a good thing. Words are read (or heard) by someone with a very different mind, a different perspective, different beliefs, a different history. These differences color almost every attempt at communication. When a writer describes a scene, for example, readers will each picture something in their minds that is not quite what the writer pictured.

This is not necessarily failed communication. It is what makes language so magical. What readers read may often be something deeper, more profound, than what was written. Readers can find ideas in books that never occurred to the authors themselves, which is what makes literary criticism so valuable. Ideas inspire new ideas.

The spoken word and especially the written word are vital not just because they express ideas but because they give birth to ideas. 

Fast action

Joel C. Rosenberg's The Beirut Protocol (2021) proves to be a fast-paced thriller that will satisfy most readers, especially those who prefer action to sex and bad language.

Rosenberg is a citizen of both the United States and Israel, and this dual allegiance is reflected in the novel. Two Americans and one young Israeli are kidnapped by terrorists along the border of Israel and Lebanon. One of these is Marcus Ryker, the hero of several Rosenberg novels. The other American is a young woman.

The terrorists, while pretending to be part of Hezbollah, are actually financed by a new, independent agent. Thus, everyone — the U.S., Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, etc. — is confused by what's going on.

The three captives are tortured, but reveal nothing. If the terrorists knew one of their captives was Marcus Ryker or that another was an Israeli, things would get even worse. Most the story is about how Ryker escapes and brings about the rescue of the other two.

A two-page cast of characters at the beginning of the novel makes life easier for readers, for there are many characters, most with difficult names for American readers.

He, she or they?

For many, many years, when writers, both male and female, needed a pronoun to refer to someone of undetermined sex, male pronouns were always used — he and him. All readers understood, without confusion.

Then at some point in the lifetimes of many of us, someone decided that this is sexist, and thus the confusion began. Some writers began writing only she and her in these instances, as if this were somehow fair or perhaps retribution for past mistakes. Whenever I encounter this, my first instinct is still to try to find the woman in the text I somehow missed.

Other writers alternate, using a masculine pronoun, then a feminine pronoun, then a masculine pronoun, etc. Jane Smily uses a variation of this method in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. She uses feminine pronouns when referring to a reader, perhaps because most readers these days are, in fact, female. When writing about a writer, especially an imagined writer of an earlier age, she uses masculine pronouns, perhaps because most writers at that time were, in fact, male. Near the end of her book, she uses both masculine and feminine pronouns in the same paragraph. Talk about confusing.

William Shakespeare

Other writers try to  avoid confusion by using they in reference to just one person. I have read arguments for this usage, and I can even agree, up to a point. Even William Shakespeare used they when referring to a single individual. And yet I still find this confusing. How can one person be a they?

So why not write in such a way that they actually refers to multiple people? This is what I do in my own writing, and it works nearly every time. When Smiley refers to a reader in her book. she could have simply referred to readers instead. She could have written about writers in general rather than just one imagined writer. Almost any sentence can be rewritten in this way. The they pronoun includes everybody, and this way of writing satisfies those of us who are sticklers for singular/plural consistency..

On those rare occasions when I actually do need a singular pronoun, I go with the masculine one. If other writers can use she or her and get away with it, why can't I use he or him?