Reading as refuge

Reading is among the most private, the most solitary things that we can do.

Francine Prose, What to Read and Why

Francine Prose

These are the first words Francine Prose writes in her introduction to What to Read and Why, and they are worth stopping to consider.

Privacy and solitude may not be objectives for everyone who reads, but for most of us solitude helps us focus on our reading. Sometimes if we cannot be alone, as in a crowded waiting room or aboard a crowded train, reading can help us feel alone. Prose remembers as a child that reading for her, even though she lived in a happy home, "was a way of creating a bubble," a buffer zone between herself and adults.

Reading is both a way of turning off the world and turning on a different world, usually filled with people very different from those people we are perhaps attempting to hide away from when we sit down to read. A book, Prose writes, is "a kind of refuge."

It is no coincidence that so many readers are introverts. Extroverts seek out other people and often have little time to read. Introverts like people well enough, but frequently they yearn to escape actual people to spend time alone yet in the company of the other people they find in the pages of books. Reading about the fictional people or historical people they encounter in books may in some way help them cope with the real people in their lives. At any rate, it gives them a welcome break.

There may be something of a paradox here, this refuge from people found by reading about other people. Prose writes that "reading is not exactly like being alone. We are alone with the book we are reading, but we are also in the more ethereal company of the author and the characters that author has created."

Reading may seem anti-social, yet it really isn't, at least not for most people. Reading places us in the minds and the lives of those very different from ourselves. Reading helps us understand them. It helps us feel what they feel, experience what they experience. Reading alone may, in fact, be one of the best things a person can do to connect with others.

What Francine Prose reads and why

The title of Francine Prose's 2018 collection of essays What to Read and Why suggests it might be one of those books suggesting which books you really must read before you die. Fortunately that is not the case, although it does make one wonder about the reason for the title. Was the title Prose's choice or something forced upon her by her publisher?

In any case, her book consists mostly of book reviews, magazine articles and introductions written for new editions of classic books. Her comments are almost entirely positive, so a reader might use the book as a kind of checklist, but had that been her intent, she no doubt would have included many other books. She does include just such a list at the back of another of her books, Reading Like a Writer.

Two of the books Prose writes about are less about "what to read" than "what to look at." These are photograph collections by Diane Arbus and Helen Levitt. Her analysis of their pictures is as impressive as her dissection of various works of prose.

These books are a diverse lot, from traditional classics like Little Women, Great Expectations and Pride and Prejudice, to works by more contemporary writers such as Charles Baxter and Stanley Elkin. She praises short stories by the likes of Mavis Gallant and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as some nonfiction books.

Three of the best essays in the volume are not about particular books or particular authors. In one, "Ten Things That Art Can Do," she argues that "it is neither the responsibility nor the purpose of art to make us better human beings." It can, however, help us understand what it means to be human beings, she says. It can also move us, transport us through time and give us pleasure, among other things.

In "On Clarity," she argues that clarity in writing is not just a literary quality but a spiritual one, because it involves compassion for the reader.

Then in "What Makes a Short Story?" she reflects on the puzzling truth that the short story defies simple definition. Although Anton Chekov does not have an entire essay devoted to him, he pops up frequently in Prose's book, especially in this chapter.

Francine Prose the reader impresses as much as Francine Prose the writer. In What to Read and Why, we get a good taste of both.

Who will save the libraries?

To the protesters, published texts, no matter how humble or tired or peripheral, still possessed an inviolable potency. They were, as Henry Petroski puts it, the basic data of our civilization.

Stuart Kells, The Library

I worry about our nation's libraries. After all, if a statue of Christopher Columbus or Robert E. Lee or Thomas Jefferson is found offensive, then what about books about Columbus, Lee or Jefferson? As Stuart Kells describes it, revolutionaries eventually start burning books.

To date the rioters in such cities as Portland, Seattle, Washington, New York and Chicago have focused mostly on statues, government buildings and downtown businesses. At some point they are likely to turn their attention to libraries.

Will those public officials unwilling to protect police stations, or for that matter police officers, do anything to save those libraries?

Statues are merely symbols of a culture or a civilization. Libraries, as Henry Petroski said, hold the essence of that culture. What did people like Columbus, Lee and Jefferson actually do? What did they  say? What did they think? What did they believe? You don't learn that from statues, but from books.

And so those determined to destroy a civilization will eventually target libraries. Will anyone step up to save them?

An ideal world

If it had been Salem in witch-hunting times she would have been the first to go.

Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World

Alice, the central character in Jane Hamilton's great 1994 novel A Map of the World, takes a one-two punch that could knock any of us flat, if not out cold. First this school nurse and wife of a Wisconsin dairy farmer is still looking for her swimsuit when the two-year-old daughter of Teresa, her best friend, drowns in the farm pond. Numb with grief and guilt, Alice is then arrested, charged with sexual molestation of a boy in her school. She's jailed for months, while virtually the entire community thinks the very worst of her.

Most of the story is told from Alice's point of view, but in the middle third of the novel Hamilton gives us the perspective of Howard, her silent, handsome husband, for whom a dairy farm is a dream come true. Yet a lawyer, not to mention bail, costs money.

A third main character is Teresa, a devout Catholic woman who despite her daughter's death, perhaps because of Alice's carelessness, cannot turn against her friend. At least not until she spends a night in Howard's arms, albeit the two of them consumed more with grief than passion. Still she and Howard now have their own reason for feeling guilt.

Alice is clearly not guilty of the criminal charges against her, yet her trial proves dramatic anyway, mainly because we see it through her eyes and can read her compassionate thoughts about not just those who testify against her but also about those women with whom she lived with so long in jail.

As for the book's title, it refers to a map of an ideal country in an ideal world that Alice had drawn when she was a girl. She finds the map, in fact, while she is looking for that elusive swimsuit, and the image pops up here and there throughout the novel. Alice's own story shows us that such a perfect world is impossible, yet by the end we see that the only chance we have is for the people of our own world to accept, forgive and even love one another. The story is really all about grace.

Corrective reading

Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

C.S. Lewis

The above words by C.S. Lewis seem wise in a politically correct age where large segments of the populace believe that only one point of view, no matter how often this point of view may change, should be voiced, heard or tolerated. Yet Lewis was speaking not about culture or politics but rather about literature.

His view was that ideas expressed in books from the past can act as a corrective to ideas expressed in books today, just as those ideas found in today's literature can be a corrective to those expressed by writers of the past. He considered those open only to ideas from one's own time to have a kind of blindness. "None of us can fully escape this blindness," he wrote, "but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books."

He went further. "Where they (modern books) are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only reading old books."

There is "no magic about the past," he writes, but then there is no magic about the present either. There is no magic, only wisdom, and wisdom comes from considering other points of view from other times — and, he might have added, from others who think differently in our own time.

Somewhat facetiously, Lewis goes on to say that "the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them." Science fiction writers do attempt to invent a future corrective in their stories, as Lewis himself did in his own science fiction. Yet science fiction is just guesswork. We have no way of really knowing what ideas will be prevalent a century from now. What we can guess with accuracy, however, is that thinkers in 2120 will think many ideas current in 2020 as foolish as people today consider the ideas of 1920.

The elusive ideal woman

The Well-Beloved was moving house — had gone over to the wearer of this attire.

Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved

For Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor who is the central figure in Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved, the object of his affection changes with the wind — or with the woman. What he thinks of as his Well-Beloved is not a real woman but an image, an ideal, a mirage.

In the opening pages he becomes engaged to two women. He jilts Avice to propose to Marcia, who then jilts him. Through the years of young manhood, he wanders from one Well-Beloved to another, never marrying any of them. 

Hardy's novel skips ahead at 20-year intervals, so we next find Jocelyn at 40 meeting Avice's lovely daughter, also called Avice, who instantly becomes his new Well-Beloved. Yet she must turn down his proposal because she is already married, even if unhappily.

Twenty years later, Jocelyn at 60 spots the third Avice, a girl even lovelier than her mother or grandmother at the same age. His chances of marrying her look good, especially with her mother working to make the marriage happen. She missed her chance to marry the wealthy artist and wants her daughter to take advantage of her own opportunity.

Hardy gives us some plot twists at the end that add interest to a short novel that otherwise seems artificial and bland. Yet a few years after this book was published, Hardy himself would marry a woman 39 years younger than him. So maybe the story is not quite as fanciful as it may appear.

Healing in Hallum

Bodies are not the only things that sometimes require healing. Sometimes that's true of marriages, relationships of all kinds, our grief, even our own attitudes about our place in the world. That, in brief, is the gist of Carol Cassella's compelling 2010 novel Healer.

Two factors caused Claire Boehning to abandon her medical profession just short of certification 14 years earlier. First came the birth of her premature daughter, Jory, and the need to give her her full-time attention. Then there was the stunning success of Addison, her husband, a medical researcher who struck it rich with the development of a cancer drug. Money poured in. They built a spacious home in Seattle, became accustomed to a luxurious lifestyle and even bought a vacation home in a rural area in the Pacific Northwest.

Now, without first talking it over with Claire, Addison has lost everything but that vacation home trying to finance development of another drug after tests go awry. So while Addison struggles to find financial backers to resurrect his research, Claire and Jory are stuck in their small house in Hallum, Wash. Jory misses her friends and her former lifestyle, and somehow resents her mother more than her father for their present isolation. Claire, meanwhile, wonders if her marriage can be saved and, more immediately, if she can make a living practicing medicine in Hallum.

Despite her lack of certification, she is finally hired by a clinic that mostly treats migrant workers. Her pay is minimal and she speaks little Spanish, yet she soon enough becomes indispensable, especially when Dan, the aging doctor who hires her, develops serious medical problems of his own.

In an important subplot, both Claire and Jory develop a close relationship with Miguela, a Nicaraguan refuge who keeps hanging around the clinic even though she does not appear to have any medical condition. It turns out she is trying to learn why her daughter got sick and died after coming to Hallum to work.

A medical school graduate with another degree in English literature, Cassella has written a brief series of novels with medical backdrops. Oxygen was terrific, and the same can be said for Healer.

You guys

"Who are you examining?"

"You," he whispered to her immensity. In English it could be plural or singular. English was a fine language for prevarication.

Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

When you are sitting in a restaurant with a group of people — perhaps it's a group of men and women, or perhaps a group of men or women, or perhaps just your family — how is your server likely to address you? Chances are, in most restaurants in the United States, what you will hear is "you guys," as in, "Are you guys ready to order?"

There are those, perhaps women of a certain age, who still resent this, but most of us have gotten used to it by now. In an age when it is considered sexist to use a masculine pronoun to refer to someone who may be either male or female, somehow it has become permissible to refer to both men and women as guys. Go figure.

The reason has a lot to do with that oddity in the English language, one of many, that makes the personal pronoun you both singular and plural. We all learned this in school. We understand it. Yet most of us have never felt comfortable using the plural you.  Something always seems to be missing. That's why people down South say "you all" and those in other parts of the county often say something like youse or you'uns. I once had a pastor, raised in eastern Pennsylvania with degrees from Swarthmore and Harvard, who referred to groups as "you all." The word you just seems somehow inadequate when addressing more than one person.

Go back a few hundred years and the English language didn't have this problem. One person was addressed with the pronoun thou. For two or more people, the word was ye. Simple, right? Yet somehow the two words got combined into a single, all-purpose you. After all these centuries we still haven't fully accepted it.

Perhaps it's time to bring back ye.

Love and bowling

There were sawed-off limbs in every direction on the family tree.

Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway

Not since The Big Lebowski has bowling been such a delightful background to a wacky, totally unconventional story with endless surprises. I am speaking of Elizabeth McCracken's 2019 novel Bowlaway.

The novel covers decades, during which characters scatter like bowling pins. Some die in outrageous ways. One in a flood of molasses. Another from spontaneous combustion. Some disappear and come back. Others just disappear. Nobody hangs around long enough to become the main character, leaving that role, by default, to the bowling alley in Salford, Mass.

Bertha Truitt, whom McCracken describes as "a matron, jowly, bosomy, bottomy, odd," shows up prostrate one night  in the Salford cemetery, never explaining where she came from or how she got there. A young man named Joe Wear comes to her aid, as does a black doctor named Leviticus Sprague. For Bertha and Dr. Sprague, it is love at first sight. Or as the author describes Bertha's feelings, "She felt a plunk in the pond of her heart." They marry, have a daughter, Minna, and build a large house as odd as Bertha. And she builds a bowling alley.

Most of the story occurs in, around or at least about that bowling alley. Again to quote McCracken, "Our subject is love because our subject is bowling." The novel may not amount to a perfect game, yet still it offers as much fun as any game in any alley.

Bookstore discoveries

On a website we cannot discover anything, we can't bump into the unexpected book, because an algorithm predicts what we're looking for and leads us — yes, mathematically — only to places we already know.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Browse

Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Discovery is one of the great joys of visiting a bookstore. (It was still winter when I last stepped into a bookstore, so I am speaking from what seems like a distant memory.)

I recently read a biography of the explorer Christopher Columbus, who on his first voyage across the Atlantic had no idea what he might find or when or where he might find it. That's something like entering a bookstore without a specific objective in mind. Any shelf, any table might just hold that book that makes the whole excursion worthwhile, that book that, like San Salvador, will seem like a discovery worth celebrating.

Colombian author Juan  Gabriel Vasquez has it right. It's difficult to experience that same feeling of discovery when buying books on Amazon or some other online bookseller.

On rare occasions I do buy books online, but only when I know specifically what I am looking for and haven't seen those books in actual bookstores. You can find just about any book on the web, including those no longer in print. What's hard, even next to impossible unless one has all the time in the world, is to find that book you didn't know you were looking for but will cause rejoicing when you find it.

A balanced look at Columbus

Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492 when the New World gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.

Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea

So was Christopher Columbus a good guy or a bad guy? To those eager to tear down statues honoring anyone less than perfect according to the holier-than-thou standards of today's left, he was clearly a bad guy. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his classic 1942 study of Columbus Admiral of the Ocean Sea, takes a more balanced approach. To him Columbus was an usually good man for his time — the 15th and 16th centuries — but like everyone else from Adam to Zinn, a flawed man.

He may have never realized what he had discovered, believing until his death that he had found a shorter route to the East Indies instead of what he had actually found, what is now called the West Indies, but he was nevertheless an outstanding sailor, according to Morison. He just believed the world was much smaller than it actually is. The author himself sailed a similar route in a similar kind of ship in order to better appreciate the man's achievement in an age with such primitive instruments for navigation.

A deeply religious man, Columbus made prayer a daily part of the routine aboard his three ships and did his best to keep his men in line when they mixed with the naked natives they found on the islands. Yet Columbus himself viewed these peaceful people as potential slaves and captured a few to take back to Spain. Trading trinkets for gold was a major objective of his travels about the islands. Morison writes, "If gold or something else of great and immediate value had not been discovered, the conquest of the New World might have been a brighter page in the history of Christianity."

For some reason Columbus chose the slowest of his three ships, the Santa Maria, as his flag ship, meaning that the Nina and Pinta had to deliberately show their pace going west so that Columbus could keep up. The leader of the expedition was usually the follower. The Santa Maria went aground in the Indies, so Columbus moved to the speedier Nina, yet still managed to be aboard the second ship to return to Spain with the news of the discovery. The jealous Portuguese twice slowed his progress on the return, and briefly he feared for his life at their hands. Yet he did return to Spain, was honored by the king and queen and led two more voyages of discovery.

On the way west, mutiny was his greatest danger, and Morison suggests that had land not been spotted when it was, Oct. 12, 1492, Columbus might have had real problems with his impatient men.

Columbus was a controversial figure even in 1942, and Morison does his best to sort through the conflicting claims to get to the truth. If only he were alive today to defend his besieged, imperfect hero.

Pirates on land

Even on land, Spider John can't escape the pirate life. In A Bottle of Rum, the third installment in Steve Goble's Spider John mystery series, our hero keeps telling himself and Odin, his aging comrade, that they are ex-pirates. That life is behind them. Spider just wants to return to his wife, Em, and their son, whom he hasn't seen in years. But then there's a murder in an inn where they are drinking, and if there's one thing more of a lure for Spider than Em it is a mystery. He discovers that the murder weapon is a knife that he made himself and had given to Hob, a young pirate who in previous novels has become something of a stand-in for his son.

Spider John quickly determines Hob is not the killer. For him the larger mystery is to find his young friend, and if necessary rescue him. The search leads him and Odin to join a gang of cutthroats hired to protect a compound where an odd doctor named Oates is supposedly treating mentally ill patients while, at the same time, conducting strange experiments on them. Might Hob be one of those "patients"? And why would a hospital need so many armed guards?

Goble gives us plenty of pirate-style action, even if on dry land, as Spider and Odin draw closer to the truth about Oates and, eventually, about Hob. Spider John may think of himself as an ex-pirate, but he must think like a pirate and fight like one to get out of this mess and one step closer to Em.

The wound of individuality

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

C.S. Lewis

Stories allow us to experience another person's pain, joy, love, struggles, passions, whatever. This is true of stories of all kinds, including those we find in movies, TV shows and even in conversations with friends or strangers. C.S. Lewis is speaking specifically of the stories found in great literature, offering us a clue as to why we study literature in high school and college classes. All stories work, but great stories work best.

What does Lewis mean when he says literature "heals the wound" of individuality? To be too self-absorbed really is something of a wound. Those who think only of themselves, their own wants and needs, do seem somehow unhealthy, somehow out of balance. Feeling compassion for fictional people isn't quite the same as feeling compassion for real people, but it is a start. However briefly, stories take us out of ourselves, while making ourselves better.

Lewis amplifies this idea in sentences that follow in the same paragraph.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.

I can be a boy wondering if he is bound for hell by taking a runaway slave downriver on a raft. Or a runaway slave wondering if he is making a terrible mistake by going downriver on a raft with an unreliable boy. I can be a girl wondering if the spooky, unseen man next door, whom she calls Boo, might cause her harm. Or the timid man next door wondering if that little girl might be worth venturing outside to save. And then I'm back appreciating what Lewis calls the privilege of being myself.

Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.

Literature allows us to eavesdrop on countless other lives, while viewing everything from our own unique perspective.

Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Love for a lifetime

One must read far into the 2016 Sebastian Faulks novel Where My Heart Used to Beat before realizing it is a love story.

In 1980 Robert Hendricks is an aging man who has become something of a cliche in fiction: a psychiatrist with psychological problems of his own. He receives a letter from an elderly neurologist living on an island off the French coast who says he knew his father during the First World War. Hendricks does not remember his father, who died in that war, and decides to visit Dr. Alexander Pereira.

Instead of telling Hendricks anything about his father, however, Pereira asks him to tell his own war story, from World War II. At the heart of this story is a young woman named Luisa, whom he meets in Italy while recovering from a wound. They spend weeks together and fall in love, but then Luisa disappears. Hendricks learns she has left to care for her husband, a wounded Italian soldier. Hendricks never knew she  was married. In the decades since, Hendricks says, "Luisa was every woman to me." He has never been able to form a lasting relationship with any other woman.

After his time on Pereira's couch, so to speak, the psychiatrist is better able to make sense of his own life, better prepared to learn the truth about his father and finally willing to look up old friends from the war, the best friends he has ever had, he realizes. And this leads him back to Luisa.

Where My Heart Used to Beat is a powerful novel, yet one that may frustrate impatient readers hoping for a more conventional love story, war story or whatever. Faulks is the author of Birdsong, another wartime love story that has become a classic.