Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE - Ain’t No Mountain High Enough: Women’s Extreme-Adventure Stories (and One of My Own)

  “Books, what a jolly company they are

  CHAPTER TWO - Tales of Toil: What John Ruskin and Sam Spade Taught Me About Working for a Living

  CHAPTER THREE - “They’re Writing Songs of Love, but Not for Me”: Gaudy Night and Other Alternatives to the Traditional “Mating, Dating, and Procreating” Plot

  Looking for a Ship/Looking for My Dad

  CHAPTER FOUR - Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition: What Catholic Martyr Stories Taught Me About Getting to Heaven— and Getting Even

  Recommended Reading

  Acknowledgments

  EPILOGUE - My New York: September 8, 2001

  Notes

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  This book is dedicated to my father,

  John Joseph Corrigan (1920-1997),

  and to my husband, Richard Yeselson.

  Two champion readers; two great dads

  “Bet you didn’t learn anything about foundations when you were in graduate school for English.”

  —remark made by basement-waterproofing contractor in November 2003 as he was writing out a $10,000 estimate for draining the leaky basement of my row house, where some 4,000 books are shelved

  Acclaim for Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading

  “A wonderful work that strikes a pitch-perfect balance between erudite literary criticism and common sense.”

  —The Columbus Dispatch

  “A fine apology for bibliophilia. . . . [Corrigan] segues from perceptive discussion of novels by Austen, the Brontës and Anna Quindlen to her own life, including her journey to China to adopt a child. . . . Funny and insightful. . . . A celebration of the fellowship of bookworms.”

  — San Jose Mercury News

  “This reflective and entertaining memoir is about more than just books. It’s about being a daughter and an adoptive mother, a student and a teacher, a feminist and a skeptical Catholic—about being Maureen Corrigan. Learning about Maureen’s life made me think about how my own life was shaped by books.”

  —Terry Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air

  “Corrigan deals . . . with that intimate connection between reading and life, launching many of her critiques with personal anecdotes in a seamless blend of autobiography, literary criticism and essay.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “What will most draw fellow bookworms in and delight them about Corrigan’s book is her appreciation of how books can be like people— affecting you in ways you were not expecting, pushing you when you need the push, and forcing you to look at your own life differently. . . . [A] heart-felt journey through life and literature and its transects.”

  —Gothamist.com

  “If you wonder about the secret life of bookworms, this is the book that will open up the rich rewards of going around with your nose stuck in a book. . . . Delightful, absorbing, and engaging.”

  —Bobbie Ann Mason, author of An Atomic Romance

  “[Corrigan is] an intelligent, unpretentious critic whose love of books—all kinds of books—comes across in both her radio reviews and her engaging new memoir. . . . Engrossing.”

  —The Journal News (Westchester County, New York)

  “An educated and engaging discussion of some of the author’s favorite books and how she thinks they’ve affected her life. . . . A thoughtfully assembled reading list . . . should inspire you to explore some of the books she mentions.”

  —New York Post

  “Splendid. . . . Whether your taste runs to Pride and Prejudice or The Maltese Falcon, you will love Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading. It’s the book for people who love books.”

  —Susan Isaacs, author of Any Place I Hang My Hat

  “For anyone who regards a trip to the bookstore as an all-day event or who might judge new acquaintances by the number of volumes in their living rooms, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading is a must read.”

  —The Portland Tribune

  “A little gem.”

  —Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

  “From the first page of the introduction to Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, I knew I was in the hands of another book luster. I valued her insights into contemporary and classical literature and the connections she made to her own life, but I especially loved her enthusiasm for books and the act of reading.”

  —Nancy Pearl, author of

  More Book Lust: Recommended Readings for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

  Introduction

  It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others—even my nearest and dearest—there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.

  And, for many hours of almost every day, that’s what I’m doing. I have a great job—or, to be more accurate, cluster of jobs—for a bookworm. I read for a living. For the past sixteen years I’ve been the book critic for the NPR program Fresh Air. Just about every week, I read a new book and review it for Fresh Air’s approximately four and a half million listeners. I get paid to read, to think, to share opinions about literature. I also write a regular “Mysteries” column for The Washington Post and review books for other newspapers and journals.

  “Do you ever get tired of reading?” people sometimes ask me—particularly people who’ve seen the inside of my house, where stacks of books are piled on the dining room table, the floor of my bedroom and study, even on the radiators in summertime. The truthful answer is “Rarely.” There are those occasional stretches where I’ll review three new novels in a row that are all about five hundred pages long and packed with nature descriptions and I push myself to finish these books out of professional duty rather than pleasure. But there’s always another, possibly better book on the horizon that I’m curious about, another world to lose myself in. After more than a decade of weekly reviewing, during which, on average, I receive about fifty new books a week sent to my house by publishers hoping for a review on Fresh Air, I still feel an upsurge of curiosity every time I rip open another cardboard book box to look at the new title inside. There’s always a chance that this new novel or work of nonfiction will be a book I’ll love, a book that I’ll pass on to friends and rave about on Fresh Air; a book that changes the way I “read” my own life. For the chance of finding such magic—as I do maybe ten times a year—I misspend hours of my life reading what turn out to be the wrong books: biographies promoting glib psychological keys to their subjects, or novels that go nowhere, or mysteries narrated by cats. No pain, no gain.

  In addition to being a book critic, I’m a professor of literature (for the past sixteen years at Georgetown University). Again, a nice job for a compulsive reader, especially since it allows me to escape the relentless pressure of reading hot-off-the-press books and return, again and again, to familiar literary works—some classic, some personal favorites that haven’t been anointed as “canonical.” Years ago I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on, among other figures, the twentieth-century British social critic and artist Eric Gill. Gill was a gifted coiner of aphorisms, and one in particular has always stayed with me: “The free man does what he likes in his working time and in his spare time what is required of him. The slave does what he is obliged to do in his working time and what he likes to do only when he is not at work.” According to Gill’s definition, through the grace of literature, I’m a “free man.”

  But here’s a catch: I live an intensely bookish life during a resolutely nonliterary era.
An absurdly small number of people in America care about what I or any other book critic has to say about the latest novel or work of nonfiction. Despite the proliferation of mega-bookstores and neighborhood reading groups, most Americans are indifferent to the lure of literature: in fact, according to a Wall Street Journal article of a few years ago, some 59 percent of Americans don’t own a single book. Not a cookbook or even the Bible. Just as I find that statistic incomprehensible, a lot of people consider what I do for a living fairly pointless, as the epigraph to this book demonstrates. All that reading and so little material reward. My own mother, who’s always dazzled by my facility in answering questions in the literature category on Jeopardy! whenever we watch it together, keeps urging me to try to get on the show to make all those years spent reading finally pay off.

  There’s another downside to what I do: a critic makes enemies. I’m no Sheridan Whiteside, aka The Man Who Came to Dinner; I don’t enjoy slamming other people’s work. Indeed, there’s always greater happiness all around in praising a book rather than in panning it: the author and publisher are delighted; my editor or producer feels good about devoting space to a book that merits it; and I, the reviewer, presumably have had a good-to-great experience reading a book that I can recommend to others. But if a book is lousy, I say so. Besides other, more noble reasons—such as integrity—I selfishly care about the quality of my own writing, and whenever I’ve attempted to be “nice” and make a book sound better than it is, my review sounds forced and wooden. As a consequence of the negative reviews I’ve written, I’ve lost freelance jobs (because an editor was either friends with or a fan of the writer) and been the target of angry authorial outbursts. I answered the phone in my office some years ago to hear a tearful voice say, “Professor Corrigan, you’ve ruined my life.” The voice belonged to the author of a novel I had just given a thumbs-down to in The Washington Post. “Why?” was the title of a two-page cri de coeur e-mailed to me by a prominent newspaper columnist whose first book I’d positively reviewed but whose second I thought was poorly thought out. The sense of personal betrayal felt by that author was palpable.

  I don’t shrug off these incidents. Nor do I get pleasure from the attentions of the eccentric NPR listeners that I’ve attracted. One fellow has been sending me penciled postcards every couple of months or so for years, chiding me for pronunciation problems like my New Yorker’s dentalized “ t”. Barbara Walters, he’s assured me, had the same problem early in her career. I’ve also been treated to the sexual fantasies some listeners harbor about me, and I regularly receive piles of books as well as unpublished manuscripts that listeners want me to use my influence to get noticed. There well might be another Ulysses moldering away unseen in those piles, but I’ll never have the time to find out. I’m always reading on deadline. I read every opportunity I can, and the pressure to grab those opportunities has grown more intense since the arrival of my daughter six years ago. I read and take notes on books I’m reviewing every day—as well as on vacations and all the major holidays. I read in the hours before dawn and while I proctor my students’ exams and while I wait for an oil change or a doctor’s appointment. Luckily, my job demands constant reading, otherwise I’d have to figure out some other excuse.

  This, my own book, is my attempt to figure out some of the consequences of my prolonged exposure to books and to explore how reading has transformed my life, mostly for the better, sometimes for the worse. Because I read so widely and so much, I’ve recognized some rarely discussed themes—in particular, powerful ideas about womanhood and work—running through the subtexts of some of the most hallowed classic texts as well as some of the most devalued popular books. I want to share those insights—and their effect on my own life—with my readers. Think of this book as analogous in method to those marvelous mongrel texts written by M.F.K. Fisher or Laurie Colwin that combine recipes and revelations about food with autobiographical digressions. Some people live to eat; others of us live to read. In both instances, the particular hunger and the life are absolutely intertwined.

  Hovering over all the ruminations about literature and life that follow is the cosmic question of why so many of us feel compelled to go through life with our noses stuck in a book. I’d like to propose a resolutely earnest answer—all the years I devoted to reading the Victorian Sages in graduate school have left their mark on my beliefs about literature. I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies. Good writing is writing that’s on target; that captures, say, the smell of sizing on a just-sewn garment the way no other known grammatical scramble of words has before. (Ann Packer’s recent wonderful debut novel, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, did just that.) Those are, unfailingly, the sentences that we reviewers quote in our reviews because they leap out and offer those cherished “Aha!” moments in reading. Little wonder that one of the most overused words in favorable reviews is the adjective luminous. Readers, professional or casual, are alert to passages in a book that illuminate what was previously shadowy and formless. In our daily lives, where we’re bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small. Hence the enormous popularity of extreme-adventure tales that take their readers to the “last good places,” like the top of Mount Everest or the middle of the ocean— places that are still unsullied, authentic. Detective fiction, another literary genre that I love and will talk about in this book, oftentimes weaves the search for authenticity into its plots. What I and a lot of other readers consider to be the greatest American detective-fiction tale of all time, Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon, describes a fast-paced search for a bejeweled falcon that dates from the Middle Ages. When detective Sam Spade finally gets his hands on the bird, it turns out to be a fake. Spade, being made of tougher stuff than most of his shocked readers, takes his disappointment in stride and forges on. Detectives, like Spade, are close readers. They have to be to catch all the hidden clues. Spade’s close reading throughout The Maltese Falcon as he searches for the authentic treasure mirrors our own activity as readers of the novel, as we search in Hammett’s story for something authentic that will deepen our understanding of our own lives.

  The roots of my own yearning to read are easy enough to trace. I was a shy kid, an only child who grew up in a two-bedroom walk-up apartment in Queens. Reading offered companionship as well as escape. It also gave me a way to be more like my dad, whom I adored. Every week-night, after he came home from his job as a refrigeration mechanic and ate supper, my dad would go to his bedroom and read. Mostly, he read adventure novels about World War II. He had served first in the Merchant Marine and, then, after Pearl Harbor, in the Navy on a destroyer escort. Those Navy years were the most intense of my father’s life, although he never said so. My dad belonged to that generation of men, forged by the Great Depression and World War II, whose unspoken motto was “The deeper the feeling, the fewer the words.” He didn’t talk a lot about the war, but I knew it haunted his memory because every night he cracked open a paperback (usually one with an embossed swastika on its cover) and sat smoking and reading. Near his chair was a framed photograph of his ship, the USS Schmitt. To read was to be like my dad and, maybe, to get a glimpse of his experience—to me, as wide and unfathomable as the sea.

  In his youth my dad’s reading tastes had been more eclectic. For one thing, he liked poetry. On a childhood expedition into his dresser, I once came across a wrinkled green pamphlet—the kind, I later learned, that used to be sold on newsstands. It was entitled The Most Wonderful Collection of Famous Recitations Ever Written. They were, too. Inside were funny and melodramatic poems by Robert Service, Rudyard Kipling, and other now-demoted bards. The titles
alone would draw a reader in: “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” “Casey at the Bat,” “Laugh and the World Laughs with You,” “Over the Hill to the Poorhouse,” “Woodsman, Spare That Tree,” “One Day of Turkey, Six Days of Hash.” It even included a Shakespeare soliloquy, “All the World’s a Stage.” I used to hear stories from relatives about how, in his drinking days, my dad would stand up and recite Shakespeare at parties. When I was growing up, the sole evidence of my dad’s former hamminess was the line “Sound and fury signifying nothing,” which was one of his catch-phrases, usually muttered when a politician appeared on television.

  He liked Dickens, too. “That’s a good one,” he said to me when I brought home A Tale of Two Cities from grammar school. As a product of “the American Century,” my dad also harbored a great love for American history, particularly the American Revolution. He regularly reread all the novels of F. Van Wyck Mason, took my mother and me on vacation pilgrimages to Valley Forge and Williamsburg, and held me spell-bound as a small child, spinning out vivid tales of General Washington’s soldiers fighting the British and dying in the snow. Without ever talking about it, my father understood how, through reading, a person’s world could be immeasurably enlarged. Because he was happy to see an early love of reading taking hold of me, he even helped me commit my first Catholic-school act of insubordination. We second-graders at St. Raphael’s Parochial School weren’t allowed to bring our Dick and Jane readers home because the nuns didn’t want us reading ahead. (Why? Don’t ask. Stay in line.) Memory is hazy on the specifics, but I must have asked my dad for my own copy of the reader. I do remember the two of us going down to Macy’s at Herald Square, which, back in the early 1960s, had a big book department, and my dad buying the reader for me. I finished all the stories weeks before we got to them in class, where I sat, bored, during reading period. So, instead of learning to sound out the words I already knew, I learned, firsthand, about the void that all devoted readers dread—the void that yawns just past the last page of whatever good book we’re currently reading.