The audio version of Dakota, Or What’s a Heaven For has just been released from Audible.com.  It is unabridged and narrated by Margaret Daly.  Readers/listeners can also access the audio book from their Amazon accounts.

Can a reader, even a good reader, ruin a good book?

I believe so.  I believe that we enter into a contract of sorts when we take up a work of literary fiction:  we will commit, we will pay attention, we will read steadily.   If we break that contract, we are likely to be rewarded with a lesser book.

The other day I asked my partner how she was enjoying her Elizabeth Bowen novel, to which she replied that it was okay, but not as good as the last Bowen she had read.  My partner is chronically busy, often hurrying from one deadline to the next, and her reading of Bowen, I am guessing, had been fragmented, with a few pages read here and a few there.  Then her schedule eased for a couple of days and her reading intensified.  “I was wrong,” she told me.  “This is a really good book.”

We all do it at some point.  That’s just life.  But some books are more damaged by neglect than others.   A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) by Jennifer Egan is an example.  Read in halts and starts, it is a series of vaguely connected short stories.  Read carefully, its interrelated narratives form a web, a time web, that is.  Time is a thief.  Time is the goon.  The central (recurring) character is Sasha, who is also a thief.  We think, as the novel progresses, about what is stolen and recovered and what is unrecoverable

In the last chapter a character is trying to find his wife and daughter in a crowd.  At last he sees them:  “They were too far away for Alex to reach them, and the distance felt irrevocable, a chasm that would keep him from ever again touching the delicate silk of Rebecca’s eyelids, or feeling, through his daughter’s ribs the scramble of her heartbeat….In desperation, he T’d Rebecca, pls wAt 4 me, my bUtiful wyf, then kept his zoom trained on her face until he saw her register the vibration, pause in her dancing, and reach for it.”  As I read this passage, I felt that word “irrevocable” itself vibrate, and I recalled the line about Big Ben striking in London in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, that most potent discourse in literature about time that I know: “First, a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”

Egan plays with literary forms and disrupts expectations.  It’s not a game, but it can be playful, and sense is often made on a level just below cognition.  One of my favorite moments in the novel came in the penultimate chapter, when the PowerPoint pages (created by a 12-year-old girl) enact a textual “pause” in the novel itself as the young narrator attempts to decipher her brother’s fascination with deliberate pauses in popular music.  The PowerPoint graphs are oddly touching, as we watch her analysis develop.  Pauses are not, we understand, empty.  Silence reconstitutes the surrounding sound.

I can be a little critical of lazy readers, the ones who need the car crash or the dismemberment or the murder on the first page to catch their interest.  I understand that spectacular beginnings have to do, on the one hand, with genre (all of the above seem right at home for a murder mystery, but I like my literary fiction to ask more of me as a reader), and on the other hand, with a publishing industry that is often more concerned with sales than quality.  One of the reasons I enjoy teaching an introduction to literary studies at the university has to do with the pleasures of teaching the rewards of patience, of paying attention to the words and sentences on the page as much as to the plot that develops.

I had my (smug, you bet) attitude put to the test with Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here (2011).  I had read a couple of Swift’s earlier novels, Waterland and Last Orders (for which he had won the 1996 Man Booker Prize), so I was looking forward to Swift’s nuanced and careful prose.  But I admit that I was well past the half-way point in this novel before I began to appreciate it, and that’s asking a LOT of the reader.  I’m glad I finished.  The cumulative effect of the novel is powerful, but it is certainly not for all markets, and only a perverse stubbornness kept me reading.

Wish You Were Here melds story and the style brilliantly, and that’s the problem as well as the achievement.  The central character, Jack Luxton, is an English farmer who sells his farm after a series of hardships, including the devastation of the family’s cattle herd, first to fears of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), and then to an epidemic of hoof and mouth disease.  The loss of the farm signals a loss of the past and of a way of life.  When Jack learns that his brother, Tom, has been killed in Iraq, he enters into a period that is defined by obsessive rumination, in which he compulsively relives, rethinks, repeats and revises the past.  The novel works as an honest recapitulation of how a man’s mind can process loss and anxiety.  We get Jack’s thoughts that make sense and that don’t make sense, the ones that fit into a sensible world, and the ones that are without that world but no less real for him.  The thoughts, and thus the representation of those thoughts in Swift’s style, are circular and repetitive, filled with lapses, breaches, leaps, ruptures and return.

It is a painful journey, as much for the reader as for Jack, and yet, having been on that journey we understand, in a way that an easier style would not have made possible, how salvation need not be glamorous to be miraculous.

When Borders closed its doors in Ann Arbor I was among the jackals feeding off the corpse, buying up dozens of books at bargain prices.  Some of the books I bought fell into the category of “Books That I Know I Ought To Read.”   Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone (first published in Germany in 1947) was on that list, and sure enough, it looked heftily important sitting there on my bookshelf for almost two years.

The copy on the dust jacket had me girding my loins for a difficult, if meaningful, read when I recently pulled it off the shelf.  I wasn’t wrong, but I was right for the wrong reasons.  The prose itself (translated by Michael Hoffman) is very simple.  This 500-page novel was, after all, written in 24 days, and that generally leads to a certain zippiness in presentation, to an uncomplicated, linear structure.

The difficulty is in learning again, and again, about the power of fear.  It is not the language and not the plot (based on a true story about a nondescript working-class couple in Berlin who begin an anti-Hitler, postcard-writing campaign following the death of their son at the front) that rivet, but the steady accumulation of terror and suspicion that we watch seep into a populace, making the unthinkable not so much ordinary as a component of self-preservation.   This is not a story of the banality of evil, as we understand it from Hannah Arendt, in which the unspeakable becomes normalized in a society; rather, this is a story from within the community of those who remained aware of the moral and physical degradation of their state.  And that is partly why this is such a difficult book.  Because it is not a fantasy filled with heroes who rewrite the past for us.  There is no happy ending available.  Every Man Dies Alone is a story of ineffectual and piecemeal resistance that changed absolutely nothing.  It is a story of the unknown, the forgettable, the everyday German citizens who were not pro-Nazi, who were not informers, who were not necessarily cowards, but who were always afraid, and thus, generally complicit.

I am not a scholar of WWII, of Germany (or France) during the Nazi era, or of Fallada’s work, and so my reading is necessarily superficial, but as I was reading this novel I was thinking that it might be a good companion piece for readers to Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, which portrays the mass exodus from Paris as German forces prepared to invade.  Fallada wrote Every Man Dies Alone soon after the end of WWII; Nemirovsky was writing of the war as she was living within it.  What she had perceived as a five-part novel ends after the first two parts.  Arrested as “a stateless person of Jewish descent,” she died in Auschwitz.  I suggest that these books might be usefully read together not simply because both were written by authors who were living within the maelstrom of Nazi Germany and Occupied France, but because both are dedicated to working on the level of the individual.  These are not sweeping sagas of battles, or of heroes and villains (although there are some of the former and plenty of the latter), but of an everyday reality defined by the unthinkable.

Over the holidays, however, my partner and I took a “vacation,” that is, we traveled for the purpose of being purposeless, which is, I think, a very lucky and healthy thing to do.  Part of the pleasure of the vacation had to do with reading new books (new to me), instead of re-reading books to teach.

But there was one hitch.  I had to finish Philip Roth’s 1975 The Great American Novel before the fun could begin.  I hadn’t read a Roth novel since the 1970s and I wasn’t looking forward to reading any more, but a student in my “Moby Dick and Intertextuality” course this past semester had informed me that he was referring to the Roth novel in his final paper, so I sighed and read (and sighed some more).  As it turned out, my student was only referring to the novel’s prologue, but, suffering from a bad case of dutiful thoroughness, I was determined to finish this “slapstick comedy.”  I read the last page as our plane touched down and I gratefully tossed the novel in the first trash bin there.

My partner was horrified that I was not recycling, but I did not want to run the risk of some unsuspecting reader picking the book up and thinking it was “literature.”  It isn’t.  It’s Roth at his most puerile and misogynistic.  Perhaps someone reading this blog will say that I just don’t get Roth’s humor.

Correct.

Next up was Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), which is a fine “vacation” read, exactly what I needed.  I was more interested in imagining Niffenegger’s study, and the charts and timelines she must have had to keep in order to control her novel’s structure, than I was in the story itself, but watching how other novelists do what they do is part of the act of reading for me.

Then I picked up Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize.  I had read, and enjoyed, a couple of earlier Barnes’ novels, and I am almost always happy with books that are nominated for, or win, the Booker Prize.  This novel is written in lovely prose and deals with an interaction of concepts that interest me, as a teacher and as a writer: how does time shape memory, how does narrative shape memory, to what extent does narrative constitute the past?  And certainly Barnes captures the fears that accompany us (and grow) as we get older.  Thus, I am not unhappy to have spent time with this slender and thoughtful novel, but ultimately, for me, it seemed to have a hole in the center where a plot we actually believe in or care about should have been.

Finally, I came to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004).  I am late to this party, I know, but I’m going to stay late, too.  Cloud Atlas, with its palindromic structure, is smart, fun, unexpected, and then unexpected again.  And again.  I found myself chuckling and muttering to myself, “You didn’t!” with amazement and appreciation.  And even when I got to the futuristic stuff, which is usually when I simply lose interest, I wanted to keep going, to see how and when I would get my next glimpse of how this Chutes and Ladders of a book worked.  Better yet, each component of this multi-segmented novel had me intrigued, in the ideas, in the plot, and in the characters, which, given the emphasis on fragmentation and the instability of narrative, was pretty amazing.  It is, in short, brilliantly constructed metafiction with a heart and a brain, and some great storytelling, to boot.

I finished Cloud Atlas the day after getting back from our two-week vacation.  What a pleasure it had been.  To read.  Just for fun.

When I use the phrase, “working within a network of texts that precede it,”  I am talking about intertextuality.  Intertextuality foregrounds the notion that all literary production takes place in the presence of other texts.  Julia Kristeva said that “any text is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”   Although Kristeva’s work is far more theoretical and complicated than I am suggesting here, applied to a literary work we might say that the work is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts, and to the structures of language itself.

My first book, Teaching the Postmodern:  Fiction and Theory, was a study of how postmodern fiction and poststructuralist theory were in many ways covering the same ground, albeit in very different narrative form.  Although my second novel, Dakota, Or What’s a Heaven For, reads as realist fiction in the Victorian vein, it also reflects, on a deeper level, my postmodern sensibilities, which are inscribed within the novel most obviously through paraphrase and allusion.

The paragraph with the paraphrase, by the way, comes at the end of Dakota‘s “Pre-Amble”:

I am Frances Louise Houghton Bingham, daughter-in-law of John Bingham, wife of his son, Percy, friend of Percy’s sister, Anna, and I mean for this to be my story.  It, too, is a story of what a woman’s patience can endure, as well as of what a woman’s resolution can achieve.  As to whether that refers in this case to one woman or two, you will have to make up your own mind.

And so, Reader, to Frances, alone in the bedoom she shares with her husband in his father’s home in St. Paul, Minnestoa.  It is January of 1874.  There is a photograph in her hand.

Now, you, lucky reader, should go right to Collins’ The Woman in White for a great read!

My partner, Valerie, and I were married on May 24, 1986, in a chapel on the campus of Brandeis University. The officiating minister was careful to state during the service that she was not marrying us by the power vested in her by the state of Massachusetts, but rather, by the power granted by a Creator of love and equality. Valerie and I had met with the minister several times, and had shared with her the vows that we had written, each incorporating one of Rich’s love poems (II and XII). The minister chose to use these lines from XIX in the service:

two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has made simple,
two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness,
the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch
where the fiercest attention becomes routine
–look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

When, 20 years later, a nephew asked me to give the toast following his wedding, I returned to that poem and to the line, “two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness,” because I had come to understand not only the heroic labor of that ordinariness, but the joy as well.

Today, I am remembering the gifts of Adrienne Rich, the honesty and the fierceness and the intelligence, and I am remembering, as well, those two nervous, but proud, young women who turned to her for a language of dreams.

II. (from Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems)

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone…
and I laugh and fall dreaming again of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

XII. (from Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems)
Sleeping, turning in turn like planets
rotating in their midnight meadow:
a touch is enough to let us know
we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:
the dream-ghosts of two worlds
walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other.
I’ve wakened to your muttered words
spoken light- or dark-years away
as if my own voice had spoken.
But we have different voices, even in sleep, and our bodies, so
alike, are yet so different
and the past echoing through our bloodstreams
is freighted with different language, different meanings—
though in any chronicle of the world we share
it could be written with new meaning
we were two lovers of one gender,
we were two women of one generation.