Keep your paws off the books, Mr. Starr. No groping the Barnes & Noble records. No sniffing around the bookshelves. Talk about unwelcome advances.
Is there an avid reader in America who didn’t wince at last week’s news that Kenneth Starr, still in panting pursuit of President Clinton, was trying to get his mitts on records showing which books Monica Lewinsky bought at a couple of Washington, D.C., bookstores? Even if you’re short on sympathy for the president or Monica, if you’re a serious reader, you have to shudder at the thought of a government prosecutor leering at the books you buy.
I’d rather go on Jerry Springer and display the contents of my lingerie drawer, my nightstand, my bathroom cabinet, my datebook, my checkbook and that battered box in the closet marked “Personal” than to have a special prosecutor, or even my best friends, peeping uninvited at my books.
The books we own are a blueprint of our curiosities and fantasies. Through books we go exploring, visiting parts of the world, and of ourselves, we’d otherwise never know. Through books, we investigate places we’d like to travel. Houses we’d like to own. Meals we’d like to cook. Sex we’d like to have. Love we’d like to find. Problems we’d like to solve. People we’d like to know. People we’d like to kill. Lives we’d like to live, or wouldn’t.
Some of our books we display as gladly as a new dress or suit. Others are more like underwear, stashed far out of sight.
That 900-page opus on the French Revolution? It can proudly anchor the coffee table, along with those Umberto Eco novels you’ll never read. And all the books you read in college, or pretended to, they can embellish your living room like your favorite art, broadcasting your good taste.
But the trashy books only an idiot would buy? The ones with names like “10 Astrologically Correct Zen Secrets to Perfect Sex, Skin, Fitness, Finance and Simple Living”? Those get hidden behind “Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” God forbid some houseguest with a hankering for Thomas Hardy plucks Tess off the shelf and discovers that behind your intellectual facade dwells a total nitwit.
A friend of mine who understands the power of books to confer status or shame once attended a hotsy-totsy party thrown by a woman she couldn’t stand. The hostess, an intellectual with a highbrow East Coast pedigree, had treated her badly and my friend was on the lookout for revenge. While the guests wafted through the intellectual ozone, she studied the bookshelves. And there among the pretentious tomes, like a roach dropping among pearls, sat Jacqueline Susann’s “The Love Machine.”
My friend discreetly pulled “The Love Machine” from the shelf and placed it on the coffee table, knowing it would humiliate her haughty hostess.
Our books have as much power to embarrass us as they do to enlighten us. People infer things about us, right and wrong, based on what we read. Until now, we’ve enjoyed thinking that our book choices can be private once we’re past the bookstore clerk.
That presents its own perils. More than once I’ve stood at a bookstore checkout with a copy of something like “10 Astrologically Correct Zen Secrets to Perfect Sex, Skin, Fitness, Finance and Simple Living” and wanted to explain, “Um, this isn’t for me. Really. It’s a gift. I’m currently reading Salman Rushdie.”
All of us project parts of ourselves through the books we own and read. But books alone don’t prove anything about what you believe or do. At most, they prove what interests you. No one knows for sure what ideas you, the reader, take from a book or how you apply those ideas in your life.
So what can we know about Monica Lewinsky if we know, as has been reported, that she bought “Vox,” Nicholson Baker’s novel about phone sex? We could guess she was interested in phone sex. We can’t know that she had it.
Reading is a deeply private enterprise. It is your mind in intimate connection with itself. Through books, we take risks and dares we might not take in the flesh. We ought to be able to explore our own minds without embarrassment and intimidation, without fear of being stalked by a peeping prosecutor.
But just to be on the safe side, it couldn’t hurt from now on to take a few simple precautions in the bookstore:
Wear sunglasses. Wear a wig. Above all, pay cash.
