Not long ago I was on a plane to San Francisco when my seatmate asked me an interesting question. An events planner from Atlanta, he was looking for a book to take with him to Hong Kong, but more than that he wondered what was the most significant change I had noticed over the span of my teaching career. Of course there have been many developments in the literary world over the past 25 years. Metafiction has come and gone as has the new formalism and minimalism, among other literary fads. But I told the man that the biggest change was the absence of “should” from our vocabulary when it comes to reading choices.
In days of yore, if I had happened to ask a casual acquaintance if she had read, say, Kurt Vonnegut, she might reply, “No, but I should. I mean to get to that real soon.” This doesn’t happen anymore. People are much more content to know little or nothing about literature, and few of the houses I visit these days have significant numbers of books on their shelves. More disturbing is the willingness among people who do read to spoon up the pabulum offered them by mass-market publishers and act as if this is real literature.
This theme was picked up, coincidentally, the same day I had my conversation on the plane by David Brooks in his New York Times column. Brooks wrote in part, contrasting the present to the ’50s and ’60s, “Readers feel less of a need to go outside themselves to absorb works of art as a means of self-improvement. They are more interested in exploring and being true to the precious flower of their own individual selves. Less Rembrandt, more Me. Fewer theologians, more dietitians.”
Brooks wasn’t talking, incidentally, about so-called high art. He wasn’t imploring readers to tackle Nietzsche or Proust in their spare time. He mentioned Thornton Wilder, specifically, and traced the so-called “middlebrow impulse” in literature to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had the quaint idea that “time spent with consequential art uplifts character and time spent with dross debases it.”
Of course, my art could be someone else’s dross. There’s no accounting for individual taste. But the idea that a working knowledge of such things as serious music, art and literature is part of being an aware, well-
rounded person is unassailable. In the past, Brooks continued, “There was a sense that culture was good for your character, and that a respectable person should spend time absorbing the best that has been thought and said.”
What a concept, but my point is not to suggest that serious readers are better than nonreaders or readers of popular fiction. After all, I’m a fan of the so-called “hard-boiled school” of detective fiction and even teach a course on the subject. No, my proposal is more modest than that: In this summer season, rather than clipping one of the many “summer reading” lists compiled by newspapers and magazines, why not set yourself the goal of reading a classic, something like “Moby Dick” or “Great Expectations”?
When I’ve suggested this kind of thing to friends, they have sometimes responded, “I don’t want to work that hard,” but the secret here is that once entered, the world of classic literature is not hard work but pure enjoyment. Moreover, it’s a welcome break from the constant noise and gossip that surrounds us in our daily lives.
Writing in “Great Books,” his record of a year spent studying the humanities at Columbia University, David Denby, film critic of The New Yorker, said, “I was tired of the media … experts talking, daytime couples accusing one another of infidelity, the sheer busyness of it all, the constant movement, the incredible activity and utter boredom. … No one’s information is ever quite adequate, which is one reason among many that Americans now seem half-mad with anxiety and restlessness. Like many others, I was jaded yet still hungry.”
What Denby was hungry for was meaning, yet while most of us might not want to take the draconian step of returning to college, we can all tackle something a bit more challenging than the latest effort by Danielle Steel or John Grisham. Not, as Jerry Seinfeld might say, that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s the difference between a snack and a meal, between a stroll and a hike. And, trust me, you’ll notice the difference.
The reason classics endure is not because they’re difficult or tedious, though initially those used to a faster pace might think so. But writers like Maupassant, Conrad, Turgenev and Stendahl, not to mention Dickens, Eliot and Hardy, were nothing if not entertaining. The idea is not to suffer great books or take them like medicine for the soul, but rather through them to enter lives and places we might never visit otherwise.
Anna Karenina’s conflict between responsibility and high romance is certainly something all of us are familiar with, as is the desire of any young person to find his/her place in the world, as does Edward Waverly the young hero of Scott’s great Waverly novels. Like Pip in Dickens’ classic “Great Expectations,” we are constantly confronted by the distance between our grandest hopes and the reality we must live. And Jane Austen, far from being just a writer of drawing-room comedies, had much to say about realpolitik, as practiced then and now.
The gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte are certainly as frightening as anything Steven King has written, and they provide a good deal more heft. You want humor? We’ve got humor. Start with Swift and continue on through the Restoration with Sheridan, Congreve and Goldsmith to Fielding, Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse.
And that, as they say, is only the beginning. One thing leads to another, but rather than simply challenging yourself on the treadmill or the golf course, why not choose a serious novel as your summer project this year? No time is the most frequent reason I hear. But spend an hour a day less at the computer or watching movies and you’ll be surprised how much time you suddenly have. Many of us have read these books or books like them in college, but that was a long time ago and, be honest, how carefully were you paying attention? In any case, there’s no reason that education – or satisfaction – had to end then. Choose one of the books listed above or another of that ilk, read it and then thank yourself. You’ll deserve it.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
