Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Read online

  Luckily, given my jobs, I don’t often have that problem. Still, to guard against that emptiness, I’ve planked over nearly every surface of the row house I now live in with my husband and daughter with piles of books and magazines. (They each have their own messy, sizeable collection of books and magazines, too.) The books are different and so is the style of furniture, but the basic decorating theme in my house is the same as that in my dad’s old bedroom.

  My mom, on the other hand, would rather try to talk to just about anybody—Minnie Mouse, Alan Greenspan—than read a book. She used to grow restless on those long-ago evenings when my dad and I would be lost in our separate fictional worlds. Because she knew better than to bother him, she’d invariably sidle up to me and complain that I was ruining my eyes by reading in the (perfectly adequate) light of the living room lamp, or she’d feel my head and tell me that I was “getting bumps” from too much reading. Sometimes I’d give in and watch TV with her for a while. But at some point I’d always pick up my book again, leaving her, as she’d complain, “all alone.” My poor mother. How did she get stuck with the two of us reader-loners for company?

  The necessary solitude of reading has something to do with my mom’s disinclination; she also has a Mrs. Malaprop way with words that betrays her essential uneasiness with language. One Sunday morning she called, all excited because she thought she’d won the Lotto. “I’m going to buy you and Rich a condom!” she announced breathlessly. “Have some machos,” she once urged us during a visit, offering a plate of chips and salsa. When I gave her a copy of the first theory-encrusted article I ever published in the academic journal English Literature in Transition, she proudly told relatives that I had “written a story” for something called English Literature in Translation . Actually, she was right that time.

  She was also eerily on the mark when she would tell people that I was teaching not at Haverford College but at “Rutherford College,” a name that sounds like it came out of a Marx Brothers movie.

  My mother had the bad luck to be a Depression-era child who had to leave high school early to work and help support her family. For a long time I’ve worn the small onyx “graduation” ring her older, already-working sister gave her to mark the transition. It reminds me of her courage in the face of limited options—the days spent hiding out at the Paramount Theater when she was supposed to be looking for work, the months spent at the hated factory jobs. It also reminds me to be grateful, especially on those gray mornings when I’m shuffling off to teach a class on a book, like Ann Petry’s novel The Street, that I admire for its various strengths but don’t particularly enjoy rereading. In the first awful year after my dad’s death, I sometimes stupidly sought to ease my mother’s grief by prescribing novels for her to read, good thick stories by Susan Isaacs and Maeve Binchy. And, slowly, my mother tried to read them. Maybe she sensed, as I did as a child, that reading was the way to be near my father.

  Of course, it’s a bit misleading to cast my parents as the Mr. Yin and Mrs. Yang of reading; for one thing, like most human beings, they sometimes acted unpredictably and switched roles. When I was a sophomore in college and recovering from a broken heart, it was my mother who urged my frugal father to help fund a literary escape for me— a month in Ireland in the company of a few chosen students and our beloved English professor. And I remember visiting my parents years later and turning on the TV set in the living room to watch a BBC production of a Shakespeare play. After about ten minutes, my father began sighing, drumming his fingers on his chair, and otherwise signaling that he found the actors and their orotund tones altogether too fluty; my mom pleaded, “Let her watch it”—even though neither the Brits in general nor Shakespeare in particular was her cup of tea. Like Lillian Hellman says in her lying-but-magnificent memoir, Scoundrel Time, “The traceries from what you were to what you became are always too raw and too simple.”1 Still, I’d say that the very different literary and anti-literary influences of my parents have shaped my life and career. As an English professor and book critic, I’m lucky enough to spend my working life reading, reading, and reading until, as my mother still warns, “my eyeballs will fall out.” But the way I talk about books and try to get other people interested in them in the classroom, in print, and on National Public Radio may well owe more to her indifference than to my dad’s passion.

  A few years ago I was standing in front of my fall semester “Women’s Autobiography” class (thirty-seven women and one lone male—either enlightened or desperate for a date). I was running down the syllabus with them and got to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. “It’s a brilliant puzzle text that anticipates deconstructionist approaches to autobiography by half a century,” I said. Noticing a couple of young women in the corner who looked like they were mentally mixing and matching their fall ensembles from Banana Republic, I decided to switch tactics. “In many ways, this is my favorite of all the autobiographies we’re reading. It’s an elegant goof! Stein lampoons the arrogance of all those guys who, for centuries, have been yammering on about ‘me, me, me,’ in their autobiographies.” There, I got what I wanted: faint amusement on the faces of those two women. Now, for a moment, instead of mulling over cargo pants, they were admiring a weird book written by a woman they no doubt would have been appalled by in the flesh.

  I absolutely want other people to love, or at least appreciate, the books I love. It doesn’t take a Sam Spade or a Sigmund Freud to figure out why. “What’s that story about?” my mother would sometimes ask. And so I’d tell her about Rose in Bloom or Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch or, later, The Great Gatsby. If I made the story sound funny or tragic, did justice to the surprising twists and turns in the plot, and, most important of all, kept my summary short, I’d be rewarded with a light of interest in her eyes; if I waxed too intellectual about themes and symbols, I’d get blankness. My reading-averse mother surely has a lot to do with the fact that I make my living trying to get other people excited about books in the classroom, in newspaper book-review sections, and in four-minute reviews (keep it short) on NPR.

  Years ago, my fellow Fresh Air commentators and I attended our one and only “voice workshop.” The point was not to rid us of our various accents; fortunately, NPR seems to like regional twangs. Instead, the voice coach wanted to help us sound more natural, more “talky,” as we read our pieces on the air. “Imagine, when you’re in the studio recording, that you’re in a room with a bunch of friends who are really interested in what you have to say,” she suggested. I try to do that each week. I people the closet-sized studio I record in here in Washington with a crowd that nods enthusiastically at every insight, every bon mot, I utter. But somewhere in that crowd stands my mother, and she’s bored. I’ve got to work harder—loosen up my diction, inject more energy into my voice—to make her see what’s so wonderful about this book.

  “Write what you know,” the old saw advises, and what I know, with much more certitude than I know almost anything else, is the world of books and what it feels like to be a passionate reader. This is a book about books . . . but not only about books. I want to talk about the unexpected places books take us readers. By way of demonstration, I want to revisit some of the extraordinary places books have taken me— in my imagination and in my “real life”—as well as some of the characters, both fictive and flesh-and-blood, I’ve met along the way. I want to talk about how books can give us readers some understanding of the boundaries of our own identities and how they can make us less afraid of moving back and forth across those boundaries into other stories, other lives. I’m certain that they’ve done that for me.

  I come from a short maternal line of shy women who’ve had to push themselves out of their shells. (A short line because I don’t know anything about my ancestors beyond my grandparents.) My mother’s mother, Helen Mrosz, got on an immigrant boat when she was seventeen and came to America, all alone. She had to—there was no work, no life for her back in turn-of-the-century Poland where her brothers wou
ld inherit the family farm. My mother, as I’ve already acknowledged, reluctantly left school at fourteen during the Depression to find work and help support her family. Both my mother and my grandmother were propelled by larger forces of history to leave their familiar worlds; I was booted out by books. There’s the irony. Like so many bookworms, I was timid and introspective, and yet reading, my earliest refuge from the unknown world, made me want to venture out into it, instead of sticking with my own kind. My yearning to fit in, to hang back, hasn’t been eradicated; it’s a lifelong inclination born of nature and nurture and who knows what else. But a lot of the courage I’ve found to sometimes diverge off familiar paths I owe to reading, and I want to talk about some of those turning points in my life and their literary sources.

  Many of the stories that have most profoundly affected me have come packaged in genre form—the word literary people give to books thought to be mass productions, unlike the “unique” genius of the Great Books. I especially want to look at men’s and women’s lives as they’ve been depicted in three mostly noncanonical categories of stories: the female extreme-adventure tale, the hard-boiled detective novel, and the Catholic-martyr narratives. These three literary genres are enormously popular, and I expect that some of the surprising and even subversive messages I’ve stumbled across in these books have resonated with many other readers, perhaps even changed their lives to a degree, as they have mine. But first, some definition is in order. The female extreme-adventure tale is the genre that I chiefly concentrate on throughout this book, and I want to clarify that I’m not talking about powder-puff versions of The Perfect Storm or Into Thin Air—two male accounts of endurance that, by the way, I loved reading. The classic female variant on the implicitly male extreme-adventure tale is, I think, a thriving literary genre that’s long been overlooked because its power has traditionally derived from its suffer-and-be-silent modesty. And when I say long been overlooked, I mean for centuries, millennia even. If we identify Homer’s Ulysses as the first male extreme-adventure hero in Western literature, then his wife, Penelope, qualifies as the first extreme-adventure heroine. While Ulysses was roaming the world, fighting the Cyclops and steeling himself against the Sirens, Penelope was also engaged in a life-and-death struggle, of sorts, with those greedy, repulsive suitors swarming all over the palace. Penelope doesn’t boast or bellyache in Homer’s account; instead, she hides her suffering and marshals her intelligence and emotional stamina to tolerate and eventually triumph. Penelope’s narrative establishes the basic plot characteristics of the female extreme-adventure tale, as I’ll go on to describe. These stories, up until very recently, have been about women who withstand psychological and sometimes physical torments over an extended period; they are usually played out in the secluded realms of the home, sometimes even within a woman’s own body. Recognizing the existence of this hardy tradition of women’s writing about private tests of endurance comforted me with the knowledge that I was in good company during a time when I was undergoing an extreme female adventure of my own.

  Unlike the male extreme-adventure tale, which has remained pretty constant for the past two millennia, the female extreme-adventure tale has taken speedy advantage of the social changes wrought by the Second Women’s Movement of the late 1960s to begin a major makeover that’s still in progress. Classic features remain in evidence in the feminist extreme-adventure tale: the heroine herself, and certainly the secondary female characters, usually retain aspects of the Penelope ethos of suffer and be still—and busily scheme under cover of darkness. But now women characters under pressure not only bear their trials, they act. In Black and Blue, the bestselling 1998 novel by Anna Quindlen that first got me thinking about the existence of the female extreme-adventure tale, the heroine, Fran Benedetto, tolerates her policeman-husband’s fists and curses for years. Then, one fateful morning, she runs off with her young son. Aided by a feminist rescue network, she settles in an anonymous suburb, gets a job, and changes her entire life—all the while looking anxiously over her shoulder. Contrast her story with some earlier, more hopeless literary portraits of abused wives, such as that of Helen Graham, the heroine of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, or Mrs. Heathcliff (the poor deluded Isabella Linton) in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. All three of the Brontë sisters were queens of the Victorian female-adventure tale, but, as I’ll discuss in Chapter 1, the most massive crown of thorns goes to Charlotte.

  These women had no realistic alternatives but to stay in place and endure. With the advent of the Second Women’s Movement, however, other possibilities began to open up for women in literature as well as in life. Besieged, threatened, and overwhelmed female heroines no longer “just” carry their considerable burdens quietly. Some talk back, while others make use of their advanced educations and professional positions to wield some power in the world. Still others confront hazards physically, relying on self-defense training to kayo thugs with their feet and fists. A few, in the most dire of circumstances, shoot first and ask permission later. An important word about these rock-’em-sock-’em dames: I think the post-1960s female mystery novel—itself a hugely popular product of second-wave feminism—is a grandly utopian version of the female extreme-adventure tale. The gal gumshoes and pistol-packing lawyers in novels by Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Lisa Scottoline, Liza Cody, and a host of other good women writers get to do what Jane Eyre and her long-suffering sisters couldn’t even dream of doing: they get to fight back.

  The underground tradition of the female extreme-adventure tale— a genre that has been remodeled but not razed by the social changes wrought by the Second Women’s Movement—is one I’ll focus on in the first chapter of this book, and will continue to trace, via its changing incarnations and near relations, throughout the chapters that follow. The female extreme-adventure tale is a genre whose possibilities fascinate me, perhaps in part because I’ve always been drawn to literature that preaches a stiff-upper-lip attitude toward life. In the middle of this book, I delve into the dark world of the hard-boiled detective novel. During the decades that I’ve been an avid detective-novel fan, I’ve also become more and more aware of surprising and complex views of work and family that these novels offer us. In the final section of this book, I revisit the beloved literature of my parochial-school girlhood, where secular saints like Marie Killilea of the bestselling autobiographical Karen books and Beany Malone of the eponymous girls series gave a recognizably Catholic spin to the ethos of female suffering in silence. Rereading these books as an adult, I was much more aware of the covert maneuvers through which their heroines managed to criticize the status quo and still keep their ladylike mantles in place. I think that, consciously or not, the sometimes seditious comments on conventional womanhood that these books offer contributed to their enormous popularity, particularly with women readers.

  Because I didn’t read all these books while hermetically sealed in a library carrel, I also want to talk about how life and art interrelate— specifically how what was happening to me at certain times in my life affected how I’ve read literature, as well as how books have affected how I’ve “read” and, to a certain extent, shaped my life. I think all of us committed readers experience this kind of symbiotic relationship with books. Another way of explaining the organization of this book is to say that it charts three major literary and life journeys, journeys that I’ve taken with different uniforms on: the book critic, the teacher, and the student. In the first instance, a flip feminist digression I made in a book review turned out to be the magic words that cleared the trail into some of the uncharted territory that still exists, in boundless stretches, within all great books. In the second escapade, a genre that I’d known and loved for years introduced me to a dissolute distant relation and we ran off together. And, in the third and earliest literary outing, cherished books of my childhood that were supposed to be safe and saintly shanghaied me into a wickedly naughty realm of righteous anger and pride.

  Books are wayward. You can be
gin a book assuming that you’re entering one kind of world, getting one kind of message, only to find out that beneath that cover story lurks another kind of tale—or two, or three—altogether. Books can turn us readers around, mess with our directional signals, deposit us, drained and bewildered, on completely foreign shores. A forgettable book disappoints or merely meets our conscious expectations; unforgettable books take us to places we didn’t even suspect existed, places we may not even have wanted to go. So many times I’ve started a book and, like my famous kinsman Douglas “Wrong-Way” Corrigan, who one July day in 1938 took off in his plane from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn for California and wound up some two days later in Dublin, Ireland, I’ve found myself on a strange and faraway shore by story’s end. There’s no such thing as travel insurance when it comes to reading. Sure, the syllabi I draw up for the literature courses I teach may look like itineraries—and they certainly are intended to give the reassuring impression that reading is an orderly tour from one fixed point of interest to the next—but it’s not so. We readers linger on particularly captivating language, get drawn into thickets of symbol patterns, or find ourselves stepping out of the book altogether to investigate its biographical or historical context. As I relearn, semester after semester, the route from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is never a straight line.

  Nor is reading a risk-free activity. As elevating and enlightening as literature can be, prolonged travel in the alternative worlds of books can also make a reader more prone to fantasy thinking and estranged from his or her “real” life. In the company of my then preschool-aged daughter, I’ve watched a lot of children’s programs on PBS and even sat through a few onstage extravaganzas featuring Snow White and the Three Little Pigs. These children’s shows routinely offer a paean to reading, no doubt as a sop to educated middle-class parents who worry about the fact that their kids are sitting before the TV screen or in a darkened sports arena, zombified by the antics of, say, Winnie-the-Pooh in animated or costume form, instead of actually reading about his adventures in A. A. Milne’s stories. What these songs and skits in praise of reading don’t mention, however, is that the child who gets lost in a book can emerge from that experience a changeling.