Thoughts on the Past

My friend and mentor Mr. B's quick and tidy review of The Corrections by J. Franzen made me reminisce rather ruefully.  I remember not so much the reading of this excellent novel but more so Franzen's collection of stories How to be Alone.  In particular, I remember reading this book alone on a quiet elevated train in Chicago.   It was dark out and I was wrapped deeply in a story about Franzen's return to St. Louis to prepare for the visit of the Oprah Winfrey show.  I could feel myself leaning forward into the book, especially avoiding the gaze of fellow passengers--there is nothing quite as awkward or heart-thumpingly worrying as catching the eye of someone else on public transportation.  Occasionally I would glance out the window only to see my reflection staring back at me with the flash and movement of purple and red neon interspersed in the darkness behind the man in the window.  Franzen's worry about what example he was putting forth or what exploitation he was performing by allowing the Oprah Winfrey Show to tour his old neighborhood, talk to his old friends and family, seemed to me a problem too good to have and one to be settled easily.  His exceptional novel had been named to Oprah's book club and an everest peak in book sales was sure to follow.  And yet.  Franzen was uneasy.  In conversation Franzen's peers either commended or condemned Oprah's stamp of importance. As he ruminated over how to perform, what to do, how to act, I felt undeviatingly on his side.  It was his life, his history, his neighborhood, his words.  And I was enraptured with them.

It is funny that Rishi would write about The Corrections and I should think back to How to be Alone.  It is funny because this:

This is what I have been into lately.  And if you haven't heard of Michael Chabon, hear about him immediately because he is The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay-mazing!  Mr. Chabon is perhaps the greatest living author of our time (suck it Franzen) and his prose, though awfully verbose at times, is beautiful and captivating. In this particular book, full of essays and short stories about his life as a somewhat normal white Jew, Chabon throws a lasso around the waist of the reader and slowly brings them in.  In most instances, I see stories as sort of a rope that the novelist dangles in front of the reader as if to say, "here, grab this and come with me. It's gonna be fun," and sometimes it is fun and sometimes you are glad you grabbed the rope and sometimes you regret grabbing the rope and are about to let go and then the author says, "hey wait just look over here, look what I got for you just a little further," and you grab it a little tighter and sometimes the author just totally neglects the reader or the reader's sensibilities and is so caught up in his or her own crap that the reader just lets go of the rope. Well Mr. Chabon, I did not let go. And so caught up in it I was that I often found myself struggling not to hug this book because there are times when I am reading that I feel it is just me and the author, the author and myself and I am looking deep into their mind and finding all these ideas that they have been aching to share with someone and it is heartbreaking and divine and captivating and intrusive and magical.  It's what makes reading fantastic, it's what makes reading human.

So go read this book and go read other books and go explore outside and have ideas of your own and invent and listen to music and make music and mess up and look at things. Because if you're not reaching out for someone else's rope and you're not dangling your own then what good is all this rope I'm selling?