The Amphibium, pt. 4
This is Vol. 4 of the Amphibium.
Books Do Furnish a Life
The fine literary magazine Image Journal is celebrating its 30th anniversary, and they asked me and a few other writers to name our favorite books of the last 30 years.
It sounds like a fairly straightforward exercise, but it wound up taking an inordinate amount of time, because I didn't want to include any books without re-reading them first, and my favorites tend to be long, so re-visiting various candidates took up a fair chunk of my winter.
Returning to books that were important to you ten or twenty years ago can be a fraught undertaking. Sometimes the only thing you really remember about the book is the fact that it was once important to you. Other times you remember vividly things that strictly speaking aren't there on the page.
If you spend enough of your life reading books, they become one of the ways you mark the passage of time. This is particularly true of great books, which have a way of polishing our eyes a little bit, sharpening our vision of the world around us. Important life moments carry with them a footnote: that was the summer I read War and Peace, that happened during my Elizabeth Bowen kick.
The night before my wedding, I stayed up late finishing Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries. On our honeymoon in Argentina, I re-read Cortazar's Hopscotch and most of Borges' Fictions. Just seeing the spines of these books on my shelves brings back a bit of the happiness of those days.
But life is not all sweetness and light, and many of the most powerful experiences with books come during moments of personal crisis. There are times when it feels like a good book is the only thing you've got in this world, and the right book at the right time can save your life. One goes back to such books with a spirit of emotion recollected in tranquility, and it's not always clear what was so powerful about them in the first place.
I started a few books warily before finishing with pleasant surprise at how well they'd held up. Others I wound up wishing I'd never re-read at all. But I felt the whole time a certain wistfulness. It's possible that no book could mean to me now what some of these books meant to me in my early twenties. I lived on books then in a way I don't today.
I don't want to overdo my nostalgia: I have a young family now; my greatest desire of those years--to publish books of my own and somehow make a life out of my love for literature--has to a large degree been met; on a day-to-day basis, I am far happier now than I was then. If books mean slightly less to me, that may be because I don't need them in the way I once did. But nothing's had for nothing, and it's impossible not to view this good fortune as entailing also a loss.
Image itself is always physically gorgeous (my contributor's copies just arrived), and this issue in particular has got a lot of other great stuff in it, so I encourage you all to track it down in print. Failing that, I expect my full write-up will be available online sooner or later. In the meantime, here is the list itself. (I only included novels, for reasons I explain in the piece.)
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
- Operation Shylock by Philip Roth
- Underworld by Don DeLillo
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
- The Known World by Edward P. Jones
- The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
- The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
- The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
- Compass by Mathias Enard
Reading Backwards
Image wanted a list of books published since the journal was founded in 1989. Though the bulk of the books that have been most profoundly important to me weren't actually published within this time frame, such constraints can be nice to have when making the tough choices a list like this requires. I didn't have to ask myself whether I actually prefer Roth's The Counterlife to Operation Shylock, because the former came out in 1985. I didn't even begin to think about where George Eliot or Proust or Henry James fit into all of this.
Any unconstrained list of my favorite books would have to find a place for John Crowley, but he isn't on the list I produced. My favorite of his standalone novels, Little, Big, came out in 1981, well outside the window, but another contender was a more difficult case. The bulk of Crowley's four-part AEgypt was published within the past thirty years, but the first volume appeared in 1987. (I wrote about the whole thing in Bookforum when the final volume appeared.) Given that publication history, I could have made an argument for including the whole series, but in this context I was actually looking for excuses for exclusion, even that meant excluding one of my favorite books. Two spectacular more recent Crowley novels, The Translator and Lord Byron's Novel, would certainly have been on a top twenty list, but I couldn't quite justify putting my third or fourth favorite Crowley book ahead of the books I ultimately chose. So the upshot was that possibly my favorite living novelist was left entirely off a list of my "favorite" books.
This is all by way of a clumsy segue, because John has a new book coming out this year, a collection of his non-fiction called Reading Backwards. Probably the best thing about being a magazine editor is getting to ask writers you admire to write things for you, and one of the first things I did when I started acquiring at Harper's was to ask for something from John. Magazine publishing is a cyclical job--there's always another issue to get out--and you rarely get a chance to step back and look at what you've done over a space of years, so I was quite moved to see the book's table of contents and realize that I'd assigned about a dozen of the pieces in it. (The most recent is in our current issue.) I honestly had no idea that I'd gotten to do this much work with one of my literary idols.
Incidentally, this does all circle back, because one of the central themes in John's writing is not just the magical work that books can do in a person's life, especially when they arrive at the right time, but also the strange and poignant fact that this magic can't be summoned on command, that certain moments in time make themselves available to it, and others do not, and that this difference is not entirely (or maybe not at all) up to us.
Writers I have known
While I was mostly glad to have an excuse for this deep dive into the books that mattered to me in my twenties and early thirties, I'm rarely tempted to return to the books that mattered to me as a teenager, which were exactly the kind of books that matter to many would-be literary teenagers. One of them--Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five--was published 50 years ago this week, and the anniversary has led to a fair amount of commentary. I don't actually have anything to say about the book, which I haven't cracked since it was about twenty-five, but, in and earlier edition of The Amphibium, I wrote about my experience rifling through purses with Philip Roth, which people seemed to enjoy, so I thought I might tell you all about my one face-to-face encounter with Vonnegut.
I was probably fourteen or fifteen, in my peak Vonnegut-reading years, sitting in the Candy Kitchen on Main Street in Bridgehampton, when I spotted Vonnegut outside, holding the hand of a girl about my age, who I presume was his daughter. (A digression: the Candy Kitchen, something of a local landmark, is where the Hampton Jitney bus makes its Bridgehampton stop. Some time after this encounter, I read a Vonnegut novel--I forget which one--in which Kilgore Trout arrives in an Indiana town, and the bus he's taking stops on Main Street, outside the Candy Kitchen.)
Anyway, I ran over enthusiastically and yelled, "Are you Kurt Vonnegut?" Of course I knew perfectly well who he was, but I couldn't think of anything else to say. He looked at me, slightly startled, and said, "Yes, and I'm crossing the street now." And that's just what he did. I never saw him again.
A brief solicitation
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If you're new around here, a bit more about me.