Since finishing that Robert Moses book last week, it’s been kinda tough for me to start another book. It’s as if I’m caught in its wake. I spent the last few days catching up on some long-form comics, like Eddie Campbell’s The Fate of the Artist, which I’m afraid left me flat. Compared to his most recent collection, After the Snooter, it was a distinct let-down.
I’ve also been catching up on magazines. Amy & I went on a subscription binge a few months ago, and now I’ve got the Virginia Quarterly Review and Foreign Affairs to beat me into submission.
Yesterday, unable to settle on a new book to read, I decided to go back and reread one of my favorites, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. (If you’re interested, there’s a neat piece in the Guardian about Stoppard’s new play, Rock ‘n’ Roll. It sounds pretty neat to me.)
What brought me back to Arcadia was the weird realization that, if you asked me what my favorite novel is, I would have no answer for you. Arcadia was a fave of mine upon a time, and it still resonates for me. In fact, if I had been immensely talented, it’s probably the piece I would have tried to write, given my interest in its subjects (chaos mathematics, the mistakes of history, English letters).
I can tell you what my favorite movie, my favorite comic, and my favorite record are (Miller’s Crossing, Little Italy and Stop Making Sense), but I’d have a devil of a time deciding on a favorite novel.
It’s not for lack of trying (here’s that list of all the books I’ve finished since 1989, when I started college). But there’ve been so many phases, and so many directions I’ve taken, that it’s really difficult for me to settle on a single novel. When I think of what I might have answered in years past (Gravity’s Rainbow, Tropic of Cancer, The Recognitions, Pale Fire, Invisible Cities, Going Native, Anna, Portnoy, Gatsby, Lolita, “Marcel”) I wonder what each answer tells me, and what changed that struck them from the top rank. (Fortunately, the “novel” requirement knocks out the Athenians, Homer, and Shakespeare, and that Arcadia. And if I have to pick a non-fiction book, it’d either be Ron Rosenbaum’s essays or that book on Robert Moses.)
For a moment, I tried to convince myself that it was somehow a universal problem afflicting our age, but I’m pretty sure it’s just me. Maybe I’ve oversatured myself with these books. Maybe I’ve simply become too fluid, or disconnected from the influences I thought I had. Maybe I need to — or already have — circumscribed my life in ways that keep some books from mattering so much to me.
Nowadays, I’m wondering if All the King’s Men is the book that speaks to me the most, or if it’s Gould’s Book of Fish. I’d better keep looking.
You, meanwhile, need to tell me what your favorite novel is, and what it means to you.
Tarnsman of Gor
I seem to be much more moved by non-fiction as an adult than fiction, and I’m not exactly sure why. The fiction of my youth was fabulous; while we lived in Taiwan my mother ordered tons of mid-century British children’s books from Blackwell’s. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, Elizabeth Gouge’s The Little White Horse, and The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett all come to mind as wonderful reading experiences because they combined vivid characters, history, adventure, and the triumph of the human spirit. I suppose picking a favorite book is like picking a favorite child – it just can’t be done.
SURE it can be done! Why, it was pretty clear to me and Boaz who Dad favored: the Corvette!
Or, as Penn Warren puts it:
“The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know that they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can. And the good old family reunion, with picnic dinner under the maples, is very much like diving into the octopus tank at the aquarium.”
Lolita…I use it as a model for a healthy romantic relationship.
Chomsky’s The Media War… It’s when the penny finally dropped…
A similar thing happened with Susan Faludi’s Backlash.
Little, Big…and the unibrowed boy I once dated has that book to thank/blame for our relationship.
So, um, yeah…Gil’s a huge step up for me.
Tough question to answer. B/c I teach the same books over and over again, I know them really well and would probably say that familiarity has bred favoritism. ATKM has passages that have stunned me for the past two decades (btw: boys really dig this book, but most girls I’ve taught are unimpressed with it)–especially the scholarly attorney’s final moment of lucidity on the novel’s penultimate page. War and Peace was better for me to teach than Anna, and now that I’ve taken up the Brothers K. for the next few years, I find myself regretting my departure from Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei (no y–inside Roth joke), far more than Anna, Vronsky, and Levin. Strangely I identify more with Natasha’s motherhood than Levin’s fatherhood. One book I have taught for 11 straight years that I don’t really like but feel obliged to inflict upon the young is Heart of Darkness. Again though, from numerous re-readings I know so much about the book that I could probably talk myself into liking it more than I should (ditto with As I Lay Dying, even though S/F and Ab/Ab both demolish it). One book whose charms have worn off–even though I assigned it as summer reading to my rising junior English class–is Invisible Man. It seems less germane to me as I’ve become a spouse and parent (I’m never invisible now!!). I’m curious, Gil: have books grown on you from re-readings even though, deep down, you really don’t like them. Or the opposite: have some works that originally charmed you lost their magic after a second (or sixth) reading? Gosh this is a long post!
Here’s a way to perhaps provide a fresh take on Invisible Man – read it in conjunction with Faulkner’s Light in August. Both try to wrestle with a sense of place and identity. Actually, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake might round out that troika nicely.
Cryptonomicon is another book that girls aren’t supposed to like, but I found it irresistable.