On Rereading

When nonagenarian novelist and story writer William Maxwell went into the hospital some years ago in New York City, one of his loyal correspondents reportedly wrote to ask how he was faring. Maxwell reportedly wrote back to say that he was passing the time by making a list of books he was going to read for the last time.
Rereading, for most of us, from those in middle age on down to the recent college graduate, doesn't take on that sort of urgency. Traditionally it's more of a seasonal preoccupation than an end-of-life concern, though I suppose for most serious readers, that time will come. But for right now, in the weeks before the holidays come around, when we can carve some time outside of time, and turn entire days, if not weeks, into rocks around which normal hours rush past like a mountain stream, it seems like a promising way to live. At least that's my thought on mornings when I wake to stare at my pile of books.


Because I review books, many of them are new, the novels and story collections of the next few months. But when I make up reading lists for courses I’ll be teaching I put aside some time for rereading, that act by which we judge work we once took pleasure from to see how it has held up, and, I suppose, judge our own taste and sensibility, to see how we have changed in the face of an old experience. And how much the books have changed in turn.
How much the books have changed? I don't mean to suggest that Moby-Dick will have a different last chapter or that The Great Gatsby will have narrator Nick Carraway adding new metaphors to his dialogue. Books change because our experiences change. Read a Shakespeare sonnet before you've had a major league love affair and it will be different from the way it seems after. So, too, with Mrs. Dalloway before and after marriage and Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina before and after adultery and betrayal. This is one of the great abiding principles of modern literature, that the text may remain the same but the meaning changes.
Sometimes this can be delightful, sometimes disappointing, but always, in its own way, rather revelatory, both for the books and ourselves. And that's why it is so worthwhile to reread and reread.
For example, a few summers ago I dove into Thomas Wolfe's novel Look Homeward, Angel for the third time. I read it once as an undergraduate and regarded it as something like a giant thermometer that told me the temperature of my 19-year-old blood. I reread it in 1979 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its publication and found that it held up rather nicely as a record of a young man's desires and aspirations for knowing the world in its fullness. But this last time around it seemed flat to me and full of satiric posturing and dull approximations of human character. The only parts that remained exciting were Wolfe's long, descriptive lists of food and clothing and tools and other human artifacts that are Homeric, or at least Whitman-like, both in impulse and execution.
John Steinbeck's East of Eden which I reread this year was a wonderful surprise to return to. I would strongly recommend it for anyone who hasn't yet added that final book to the top of his or her summer rereading pile. It's an idiosyncratic epic, set in the Salinas Valley during the making of modern California, and it shows us a vast amount about the essence of American life and both the negative and the endearing qualities of the American character. Along with Steinbeck's quasi-comic little masterpiece Cannery Row it's my favorite from the California novelist's large output of fiction. (Sorry to say that when I last reread his supposed masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath I wasn't as moved as I was by the other books.)

But that was all last year, when I was sitting in the cool shade of a room with walls of books in a rented house near the Pacific Ocean just west of Steinbeck country, up to my eyeballs in rereading.
The first volume I picked up was a 1955 American edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's essays, called Literary Essays. I hadn't read these pieces since I was an undergraduate. On rereading, I discovered that Sartre may have faded from contemporary thought as a philosopher and a novelist, but his literary criticism remains useful, particularly his essay on Camus' novel The Stranger and his two essays on the work of William Faulkner. It turned out that the distinctive American nature of time (as discussed in Sartre's 1939 essay on The Sound and the Fury) was a good question to ponder on afternoons such as summer brings.
It's refreshing to find that Sartre's essays hold up as well as they do (and in fact give welcome insights into the way other books work). But after rereading the essays, I had to face up to my major summer rereading project, hoisting up before my eyes the recently deceased William Gaddis' monumental work of contemporary modernism, the novel The Recognitions. Originally published in 1955, the appearance of this nearly thousand-page novel about life in what Gaddis has one character call "The Age of Publicity," which is to say, our own times, turned out to be what we like to call a major literary event.


I first traveled through this meticulously composed and satiric story about a gifted artist named Wyatt Gwyon, his talent for faking paintings by old European masters, and the time--our time--in which he lives, while traveling cross-country in a secondhand VW bug in 1963. I put in my six or seven hours a day behind the wheel, and my new wife put in the other half. While she drove, I sat back in the passenger seat and read Gaddis' novel. Eight hours a day, six days journey, and I finished the book. You can do the math along with me. That's about 20 or so pages an hour. Not exactly a page-turner. But when I was finished, I believed that I had read a masterpiece.
But part of my definition of a masterpiece is a book that you read over and over, and over the years, while I pursued my work as a writer, teacher and essayist, I never went back to The Recogntions. After Gaddis’s death I began to wonder about the novel and whether or not it would hold up against the test of time. I talked about it with a friend of mine, an octogenarian former Marine, a retired industrial psychologist who does nothing but read, read, read. When he admitted that he hadn't picked up the Gaddis novel since the year it was published, I dared him in as gentlemanly a way as I could muster to reread it over the summer.
And he dared me.
And, yes, the Gaddis novel had changed.
The first time around, I heartily embraced this huge book with its multitude of characters and its settings that range from Spain to Italy to New York to Central America, and its many great themes (illusion versus reality, the real and the counterfeit, the artist versus the philistine, the Old World versus the New, family versus society, to name a few). It was, to me in my early 20s, fresh out of school (with only one reading of Ulysses under my belt), the grandest contemporary novel I had read, the direct descendant of James Joyce's masterpiece, and the product of a writer with the best ear for dialogue in America.
I see it a bit differently now.
The lavish, sometimes lapidary descriptions of landscapes, both exterior and psychological, seem to slow the narrative down on almost every page. The great connecting themes of fathers and sons, and the real and the counterfeit, are strung out so tenuously because of the book's great length that this time for me the novel nearly came apart in my hands, with great scenes here and there (a funeral in provincial Spain, a night on the town in bohemian New York City, a voyage off the coast of Panama), but only one great character to hold everything together--and this fellow, the painter named Wyatt, was not present for more than half of the book.

What stood out for me this time around is Gaddis' famous ear. Line for line, the dialogue is the sharpest of most any modern American novel. And unlike most great books--and this is Gaddis' kinship with James Joyce, I think--the novel is consistently funny, filled with jokes and vast amounts of ironic dialogue, its parodies of modern advertising and public relations vivid and quite amusing. I was left with the thought that rather than looking back to Joyce as much as I thought it did, Gaddis' novel really points forward to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity’s Rainbow and the cold-hearted critiques of modern civilization in the novels of Richard Powers.
Gaddis' novel is not a great book, but a flawed attempt at a great book, and unlike the superior works of 20th Century Western prose modernism, Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury and To the Lighthouse, inside this massive structure there is no one home, no large beating heart that gives us the feeling of what it's like to be alive in these times as well as the ideas of the day, that great fusion of emotion and intellect that Joyce and Faulkner and Woolf offer us in such density and depth.
Right now as winter approaches I'm left as it happens with just a few short books—a stack of novellas that includes work by Melville and Katherine Anne Porter and William Maxwell and Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates--before the snow falls, stays, and melts. Before too long I’ll see how much they—and I-- have changed.