I am fortunate to have among my friends a much-acclaimed, not to say revered, poet and fiction writer whose books carry blurbs from my enthusiastic reviews, a friend who did me the very great honor of inviting me to read the manuscript of her new novel. Flattered and excited, I said yes even though I felt as much trepidation as anticipation. I was floundering in the quicksand of work and other obligations and knew it would be difficult to find the time and energy her tender, funny and complex work deserves. But I have trouble refusing people I care about, and I’m an addict: I cannot pass up a good read.
I hurried over to her place with a bottle of champagne in hand and left for home several hours later with the manuscript hugged tight to my breast and bubbles fizzing in my head. It was late, and even though I knew I was physically incapable of reading, I had to at least take a peek. Sure enough, the words jumped and twisted like cats chasing bugs on a summer lawn. It was hopeless. I straightened the pages I’d peeled from the neat stack, placed the manuscript carefully on the far corner of my desk and went to bed musing on the many ways we read.
One mode is “professional” reading–the sit-up-straight-at-your-desk, pen-in-hand reading that everyone from doctors to teachers to business people performs on a regular basis.
Then there’s the art of reading for cover, using a book to protect yourself from your surroundings, whether on a bus or train, in a restaurant, at an airport or in your own living room (where a book can be a shield against less-than-pleasing forms of domestic interaction). The opposite approach is pure abandon. You stretch out languidly on the couch with something salty or sweet at hand. Your head is propped at an angle more conducive to daydreaming than following the carefully crafted thoughts of a writer. In this twilight state, your own fantasies continually intrude on the text, as scenes in the novel (it’s sure to be a novel in this sprawled position, and not likely one on the scale of Don DeLillo’s “Underworld”) arouse reveries best pursued alone and supine.
And then there’s reading in its purest, most alert and ardent form. The bid for enlightenment takes place in a favorite reading chair, or, if you’re so inclined, on a pillow on the floor. The lighting is good, all is quiet and there is an air of reverence and ritual to the proceeding because this is a meditation. You are concentrating mightily, and the vector of your curiosity, your hunger for what the book will teach you, is profoundly personal and urgent. Reading in this mode is the ideal, every writer’s dream, every reader’s sanctuary.
But all too often you find yourself staring at a printed page in the grip of crackling fatigue. For most adults, reading a book is a luxury, a balm for the soul put off until the end of a demanding day, which is why so many people read in bed. When I turned to m’y friend’s manuscript the next night, after a long stint at the office, I could barely focus on the page, and it was rough going the next night too. I spend my days on the printed trail, which winds across computer screen as well as paper, and so, just as you walk gingerly after hours of hiking have strained every muscle and tendon, and bruised feet, I found myself struggling over every word, a clumsy approach that brought the poetics of the text into uncomfortably high relief. I was almost painfully aware of the patterns my friend was creating with certain objects, colors and phrases. This went on all week; each time I sat down with her manuscript I was tired, preoccupied and tense, unable to give myself over to the flow of the story. Reading at high magnification, I was impressed with the narrative’s beautiful molecular structure, but missing the larger dynamic. Frustrated and feeling guilty, I gave up.
I forced myself to work through all the other responsibilities clamoring for my attention, and then, liberated, I returned to the manuscript early one Saturday morning. Rested and peaceful, I found myself reading an entirely different novel. I still picked up on all the subtleties of language and images, and I noticed how the writer’s metaphors and references extended the story in every direction like bits of mirror sewn into a dancer’s dress, but I didn’t get distracted by them, I stayed tuned in to her narrator’s voice. I’d entered the spinning galaxy of the novel from another spot on the space-time-emotion continuum and found the going much smoother, the view still detailed, but far more cohesive.
That’s the amazing thing about text: It lives. It is always in play. So ubiquitous and communicative are printed words, we forget they are mere symbols, nets and hooks fashioned to grab onto the passing whirl of impressions and thoughts that revolves in our minds like swarms of bees, schools of fish, or haze of stardust. Just as we perceive of a floor as solid even though we know it is actually a dense and ceaseless dance of particles, each word appears to be sturdy and immutable, yet as soon as it enters the kaleidoscope of the mind it changes shape, size, hue and texture in patterns unique in their particulars to each reader. And each time you read a novel, this shift from symbol to sense yields different results. All is perpetually in flux.
When I told my friend about the altered states I experienced reading her novel, she laughed, and confided that she’d rewritten most of the book many times because every time she read a passage it seemed slightly different, and she felt it needed something more, or less. Something had to be smoothed, or moved, or expanded, or deleted; each reading become a prompt for rewriting, for seeking a form of clarity a writer only recognizes when it coalesces. Writers write and read simultaneously, and the best of literature has been worked and reworked in an instinctive and transcendent process that ultimately yields novels, like my friend’s, that can be read on many levels–as pure entertainment or psychological illumination, as manifestations of the mythic, the moral and the spiritual.
Because I write about books, I do most of my reading in the professional mode, and anytime I’m not thrilled with a book, especially a novel, I set it aside and wait until I can re-enter it in a more fluid state of mind. I know how hard novelists work, and I believe my reading must match their writing in intensity and vigilance. To review, after all, means to look again, to go back and re-examine something carefully and judiciously–in this case, to ensure the consummation of the mysterious communion between writer and reader, the alignment of perception that is the life force of literature. We are a voracious species, consuming stories on television and in movie theaters every day, watching the same episodes, the same films, the same news clips over and over again. The best of fiction is worth repeat performances. Go back to an old favorite or, better yet, a book that never quite clicked, assume whichever reading position seems right, and read it again. You’ll be amazed at how much you missed the first time, at how much vitality, beauty, wit, wonder and revelation seemingly inert lines of text can generate under the heat of your gaze. Immerse yourself: There is always more to discover, another layer to slip beneath or rise above.
