Book Barren

Before a trip, I usually find myself downstairs in our library, looking at 1,200-odd books and trying to figure out how much reading time I’ll have, what mood I’ll be in during the trip, how much weight I’m willing to carry in my bag, and what book will make me look unapproachably smart in the terminal and on the plane. This time around, I was too harried to think straight, and so, last week in Milan, I got stuck without a book.

This almost never happens to me. I knew there would be plenty of time to read on this trip, but I foolishly brought along only a brief (350 pages) novel I was halfway through (Spook Country) and a 110-page play (Rock n Roll), both of which I wrapped up by the second day of the trip. It was time to employ The Eco Strategy.

Unfortunately, the first two bookstores I checked out had no English-language section. Since I was on conference-schedule from then on, there was no time to look up and visit a specialty store (Amy sez there was one over by Castello Sforzesco).

I stopped in at one near our hotel and discovered a very small Inglese shelf. The books were mostly UK Penguin editions, and the most contemporary writer on the shelf was Beckett. So I found myself studying a collection of classics to figure out what the heck could occupy me for the rest of the trip and the 8-hour flight home.

I considered picking up Nostromo, but thought, “That book killed David Lean; there’s no way I’m going to make it.”

Trollope? I wouldn’t know where to start.

Bleak House? My cheap-ass stereotype kicked in, as I picked up a new copy a year or so ago, in the hopes of re-reading it.

A Room of One’s Own? Tried it on three different occasions and never got into it. (Tried reading Mrs. Dalloway twice: same result.)

F. Scott Fitzgerald? I’d be back in the same bookless boat a day or so later.

Then it hit me: Middlemarch! Sure, I had a copy at home, but it was mass-market paperback, and this edition was larger and more readable (I’m getting old, and mass-market typesetting is beyond my eyesight).

I started Middlemarch once back in college, but got derailed due to some piddling matter like coursework. But now it would be the only book in my possession! I’d be sure to get so far into it that I wouldn’t just bail partway through! Plus, it would make me look smart and out of step with the times! The back-cover blurb was from Henry James, fergoshsakes!

From the first chapter, as George Eliot relates the marriage prospects and religious tendencies of Dorothea Brooke, I got to thinking about the nature of sprawling novels like this one. Over its 800 pages, the book attempts to canvas the interweaving lives and classes of a town in 1832 England. I wondered how contemporary readers — outside of academia, that is — would devote themselves to this sort of project. Do people have the patience to read a book like this one? I find it charming in parts, and possessed of enough tension and engaging characters to outweigh the archaicness of some of the language.

But I also find myself facing a variant on the suspension-of-disbelief: that is, I feel as if I have to slow down, to reframe my perceptions to an era in which communications were slower and religious and ideological debates were of a different stripe. That’s not to say that it’s some sorta relic. Dorothea’s zealotry, Casaubon’s arm’s-length distance from the world, Fred’s slacker college-kid are all vivid characters and could easily transpose into the present. Still, a novel like this requires a different way of thinking than that to which I’ve grown accustomed in these past hyperaccelerated years.

Finishing Book One (about one-eighth of the novel) on the flight home, I felt confident that I could stick with this novel and its pace, that I can slow down from this frenetic pace.

Then I thought, “In eight hours, I’ve probably traveled more miles than George Eliot did in her entire life.”