readers

A lot of my reading seems to be cyclical lately, or at least thematic in ways that don’t relate directly to a dissertation. Noticing this trend made me think about how certain books find us, and how much our personal context affects why we like what we like. Inspired by this blog post, I’ve read two novels by Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird (1976) and The Angle of Repose (1971). I read Spectator Bird first and, although The Angle of Repose is perhaps the more complex novel in terms of plot structure and historical, this is the novel that resonated most with me. (Although I did run across an interesting twist on Stegner’s description of the Doppler effect in this article.)

It was due in part to the moment at which I was reading it, one of those happy coincidences in which exactly the right book falls into your hands at exactly the right time. I was on a plane bound for a job interview and had just finished When the Ground Turns in its Sleep (2007) by Sylvia Sellers-García. Although Sellers-García’s novel has many things to recommend it, among them supple language and the fact that its author is a PhD candidate in history (ah, the lure of extra-academic creativity), it failed to excite me. So when I began Stegner’s The Spectator Bird, it was without much expectation and mostly to pass the time. Instead, it was engrossing, if slightly uncomfortable, to read about the protagonist’s efforts to come to terms with his life as it is, not as he wishes it were. I read throughout the flight and stayed up late the next two nights to finish the novel.

Sellers-García’s and Stegner’s novels share thematic and structural elements, most importantly the search for individual identity as set against family history. The characters travel to the purported geo-cultural source of identity, Guatemala in the case of the former and Denmark in the latter, and re-read diaries to make sense of the past. For the protagonist in When the Ground Turns, this means re-visiting his late father’s diaries while searching for his parents’ former home in a small Guatemalan town made tight-lipped by the atrocities of recent civil strife. The town’s secrets draw him deeper into regional rivalries and personal feuds, until he inevitably finds the family he seeks. This scene—in which the protagonist is threatened with physical violence until he literally cries ‘uncle,’ thus revealing his familial relationship with his attacker—topples the plot structure. As befits the post-everything academic novelist, the reunion is ‘problematic,’ fraught with the tensions of otherness and assimilation in a globalized world, but this scene triggers a denouement in which the protagonist decides to stay indefinitely in the remote town. He’s got no job and no family left in the States, true enough, but really? Perhaps in another context it would be believable, but here it smacked of sentimentality. If going ‘home’ is that easy, then why all the fuss about the search for identity?

In The Spectator Bird, an aging literary agent and his wife read journals written during a long-ago trip to Denmark. The protagonist reads reluctantly, unwilling at first to re-visit a period colored by the loss of their only child. He is the son of a Danish immigrant mother, and the trip forces him to confront the overlapping of personal, cultural, and national identities. From the Midwestern couple they meet on the Atlantic crossing, returning to an imagined ‘Old Country,’ to their encounter with a Danish novelist famous for writing about Africa, identity is layered in this novel by both time and place. Social class is an important dimension of his experience of Denmark, given that the protagonist is of a markedly different status than either his immigrant mother or the landed elite with whom he stays while abroad, a difference alluded to but not explored by Sellers-García’s novel. In The Spectator Bird, the protagonist too falls sway to the exoticism of the almost-familiar, including a friendship that verges on romantic with their beautiful Danish host, but remains apart, cognizant of the different cultural forces that have shaped him, as well as of the social structures that would have separated him from his hosts, given other circumstances. It is this restraint that makes the novel work. The protagonist is grouchy, unwilling to confront old age with the cheery goodwill urged by his contemporaries. Likewise, this quality prevents him from over-indulging in reunions with an imagined homeland. He is stodgy, motivated by an almost anachronistic sense of duty and disenchanted with the social changes of his time and place, yet his character is painfully aware of his own failings and of his limits.

Both novels are about readers, and about how texts can draw one in and elicit unexpected responses. The blog post on Stegner cropped up according to its author’s logic, following a schedule far removed from mine. Yet I found it on the heels of a year in which I’d spent a great deal of time traveling through many of the places in Stegner’s fiction, and at a time in which I not only had freedom to read what I wanted, but during which I needed to read about the kinds of things talked about in the novel. It was a random encounter, of the sort that feels anything but. Because I read both novels at a time in which I was seriously evaluating my place in academia, their content underscored other doubts. Really awful things happen to people, and how do we make sense of them? How does one write anything at all about a place such as Guatemala, a country with a horrific recent history of violence, without delving into sentimentality or paternalism? Is my discomfort with Sellers-García’s novel in part a reminder of the uncomfortable dynamic between indigenous groups and anthropologists that I experienced as a student in Guatemala? Am I harder on her because I also study Latin America?

Weighty questions indeed, but this process has also induced a measure of humility about my own reading process. As an instructor, how often have I groaned about the reading habits of my students, about their lack of motivation to complete assignments, about the ways in which being nineteen interferes with their college education? In the end, though, I’m not sure I’m much better. Oh, I can force myself to think critically about something I dislike or to finish canonical novels out of willpower, but unmotivated reading is still unmotivated reading. Part of being an adult is doing unpleasant things, of course, and a large part of what one learns in college is task completion, so I’m not letting my students off the hook. But instead of imagining myself as a Literary Critic or as The Instructor, thinking about my personal reading context brings me back to being a reader. We’ve all had times when headaches or personal hang-ups affect how we understand a book, or conversely, when everything aligns and the right series of books falls directly into your lap. Although I know that books don’t literally seek us out, I like to think that great reading benefits, not unlike love, from luck and personality and timing.