Reading Above The Din

Although Tim Parks grants that today’s readers are willing to put in time for lengthy novels like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s multi-volume My Struggle or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he finds that “the texture of these books seems radically different from the serious fiction of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. There is a battering ram quality to the contemporary novel, an insistence and repetition that perhaps permits the reader to hang in despite the frequent interruptions to which most ordinary readers leave themselves open.” So what does this mean for fiction?

“In a good novel—it hardly needs to be said—every word matters.” Thus Jay Caspian Kang giving us the lit-crit, text-is-sacred orthodoxy in a recent New Yorker blog post. Honestly, I wonder whether this was ever really true; authors have often published then republished their work with all kinds of alterations but arguably without greatly changing a reader’s experience (one thinks of Thomas Hardy, Lawrence, Faulkner), while many readers (myself included), in the long process of reading a substantial novel, will simply not register this or that word, or again will reread certain sections when they’ve lost their thread after a forced break, altering the balance of one part to another, so that we all come away from a book with rather different ideas of what exactly it was we experienced during perhaps a hundred hours of reading.

But today Kang’s claim seems less and less likely to be true. I will go out on a limb with a prediction: the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture, will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable. No doubt there will be precious exceptions. Look out for them.

In response to Parks, Corey Robin confesses to taking long subway rides to no place in particular in order to find time to read:

I take nothing with me but my book and a pen. I take notes on the front and back pages of the book. If I run out of pages, I carry a little notebook with me. I never get off the train (except, occasionally, to meet my wife for lunch in Manhattan.) I have an ancient phone, so there’s no internet or desire to text, and I’m mostly underground, so there are no phone calls.

When I get back, I sometimes post about my little rides and what I’m reading on Facebook: Schumpeter in Queens, The Theory of Moral Sentiments in the Bronx, Hayek in Brooklyn. The more incongruous, the better, though sometimes I find some funny or interesting parallels between what I’m reading and where I’m riding and what I’m seeing.

But the joking on Facebook covers up my dirty little secret: I ride the rails to read because if I’m at home, and not writing, I’m on the internet. “It is not simply that one is interrupted,” as Park writes; “it is that one is actually inclined to interruption.”

Freddie recommends turning off “the part of your mind that cares about getting finished quickly”:

A project book is one that you want to take a long time with, often one that necessitates taking a long time with. And though so many of your instincts are going to militate against it, you should stretch out into that time. Get comfortable. Think of your project book as a long-term sublease, a place that you know you won’t live in forever but one that you also know has to come to feel like home. You want to take months, reading little chunks at a time. It might offend your bookworm nature, but I find it’s useful to make a regular appointment– for this hour, twice a week, I will read this book and ancillary materials about it. Think of it like appointment television, if that suits you. Learn to enjoy the feeling of not being in complete control over what you mentally consume all the time, a feeling that has become rarer and rarer.