Failure to read

Now and then even the most dedicated reader happens on a book he or she cannot get through. I am not talking about picking something up only discover it's the next Who Moved My Cheese. I mean literature. The good stuff.

Bibiliophiles have a variety of responses to this phemomenon, ranging from tossing the book down with nary a regret (rare), to slogging through dutifully, eating their spinach (or bran flakes, or whatever) to get to the Haagen Daz. Then there are the types that read fifty pages and put it on the shelf, promising to return come the next vacation. Which never comes. Then there's me. I am rarely able to stop reading a book. Until this most recent one, I cannot recall the last book I abandoned.

Time to 'fess up. I read eighty-one pages of Ian McEwan's Saturday, marveling at his felicitous sentences, his ability to introduce backstory, even liking his main character, but approaching the book with a vague dread. By page eighty-one McEwan was finally moving inexorably toward THE BAD THING that would move the plot from Rich English Family--very lucky--in an incredible English Mews Home (what is it about the English and real estate? they make Californians look like dilettantes!) to not-so-lucky after all. As the plot inched toward this moment--a traffic accident, but I didn't get that far--there was lots of musing about Iraq, terrorism, and 9/11.

It was strange. I knew something bad was coming and just didn't feel up to dealing with whatever it was through Henry Perowne's meticulous surgeon's eyes. I knew it would be awful and then resolve, because the Henry Perownes of the world are intended to live on three floors with libraries and Victorian Chandeliers, contemplating Middle Eastern bloodshed from an anguished if safe remove. And I just couldn't do it. Partly this had to do with the 9/11/terrorist theme. Of course it's timely and relevant and hideous, and you know what? I don't want it in my fiction. The reality is awful enough--plenty of anguished bloodshed at a safe remove for me.

I realize my stance could be interpreted as a refusal to meet reality in fiction. To seek escape. To paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates, people read to get into other people's skins. Sometimes we meet a skin we'd rather not step into, no matter how beautifully rendered. Most serious readers are taught to be ashamed at this--how many people admit they find Joyce, or for that matter, Pynchon--impenetrable? Might as well turn your credentials in at the door. Not being able to get through McEwan, whose prose is crystalline? More's my shame.

I do plan to shelve this one, rather than turn it around for used book credit. I think--hope?--the time comes when I can read it without feeling beaten about the head by it. Meanwhile, I have begun Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind (I seem stuck on Patty Hearst themed books) and scored a copy of Barbara Pym's Excellent Women. Claire Messud and Jane Grigson are on order. So the stack is reassuringly high, even if I am not the intellectual giant I'd wish to be.