Excuse Me For Living, But I Never Read It

Don’t ask me why: I was just reading about Vladimir Nabokov. I’ve never read Lolita and I don’t want to. A deeply admired reading friend once urged me to read Pale Fire, and I certainly started it; it was one of the first books I abandoned unfinished.

There’s a slew of Important Male Writers of the 20th Century whose work I don’t know – they haunt me, their writings were in my first homes, and I respected those who respected them. The New Yorker talked about them, and featured their work. I was not yet able to identify the machismo that seemed to pervade their works and their reputations, so I humbly waited to grow into reading them.

These authors included Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Nabokov, Norman Mailer…. Eventually I read some of John Irving, driven not least by a sense of deficit in regard to these other men. Irving infuriated me in a way I have still to unpack: it is a combination of respect for his obvious craft and skill, and rage at the kind of narrative gut-punching he continually offered. I felt a similar respect/resentment at Kurt Vonnegut, but his prose style allowed me to get further into his books before my resentment overwhelmed my reading. Ian McEwan also lands here for me.

This is less a sound writing critique than an exhibition of my own reading frailties. Sensitivities of one kind and another have disabled much of my reading in recent years; I was astounded (and dismayed) to find that even re-reading A Tale of Two Cities, a year or so ago, was almost unbearably raw and upsetting. My most recent re-reading of The Lord of the Rings nearly made me cry even revisitng – at the very beginning, when Gandalf explains Sauron and the Ring to Frodo – just how dangerous the situation is, and how disparate the powers in opposition.

So I can’t suggest with any objectivity that those Impressive Masculine Voices are less great than their reputations.

I do wonder- are any of them still getting the big attention? Are there college literature courses that explore these guys, and their concerns? And why were they so hard for me to read? I managed to stuff down War and Peace as well as Crime and Punishment, without real excitement but chewing the full 32 times, by my early 20s.

Perhaps I have aged past the necessary intellectual plasticity; certainly I have lost some of the necessary energy. Maybe I was never quite bright enough, or in the right ways of being bright. I don’t expect from here than I will scale these particular heights. (Never say never…)

What I’m trying to do is pay some kind of respect, and also to wiggle out from a lingering sense of obligation: one ought to explore the giants out there, however measured and far away. The value of reputation is not sheer stupid glory or money but allowing Great Work, or Great Ideas, to travel abroad, sowing more greatness.

Right?