Where I'm Reading From Read online

  ALSO BY TIM PARKS

  FICTION

  Tongues of Flame

  Loving Roger

  Home Thoughts

  Family Planning

  Goodness

  Cara Massimina

  Mimi’s Ghost

  Shear

  Europa

  Destiny

  Judge Savage

  Rapids

  Cleaver

  Dreams of Rivers and Seas

  Sex is Forbidden (first published as The Server)

  Painting Death

  NONFICTION

  Italian Neighbors

  An Italian Education

  Adultery & Other Diversions

  Translating Style

  Hell and Back

  A Season with Verona

  The Fighter

  Teach Us to Sit Still

  Italian Ways

  Where I’m Reading From

  The Changing World of Books

  Tim Parks

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Tim Parks

  All rights reserved.

  Jacket photograph: Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), detail, 1993

  Jacket design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parks, Tim.

  Where I'm reading from : the changing world of books / by Tim Parks.

  1 online resource. — (New York Review Books Collections)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-885-0 () — ISBN 978-1-59017-884-3 (hardback)

  1. Books and reading. 2. Fiction. 3. Authorship. I. Title.

  Z1003

  028'.9—dc23

  2014046215

  ISBN 978-1-59017-885-0

  v1.0

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  I: THE WORLD AROUND THE BOOK

  Do We Need Stories?

  Why Finish Books?

  E-books Are for Grown-ups

  Does Copyright Matter?

  The Dull New Global Novel

  Reading It Wrong

  Why Readers Disagree

  Where I’m Reading From

  II: THE BOOK IN THE WORLD

  What’s Wrong with the Nobel?

  A Game Without Rules

  Most Favored Nations

  Writing Adrift in the World

  Art That Stays Home

  Writing Without Style

  Literature and Bureaucracy

  In the Chloroformed Sanctuary

  Writers into Saints

  III: THE WRITER’S WORLD

  The Writer’s Job

  Writing to Win

  Does Money Make Us Write Better?

  Fear and Courage

  To Tell and Not to Tell

  Stupid Questions

  The Chattering Mind

  Trapped Inside the Novel

  Changing Our Stories

  Writing to Death

  IV: WRITING ACROSS WORLDS

  “Are You the Tim Parks Who . . . ?”

  Ugly Americans Abroad

  Your English Is Showing

  Learning to Speak American

  In Praise of the Language Police

  Translating in the Dark

  Listening for the Jabberwock

  In the Wilds of Leopardi

  Echoes from the Gloom

  My Novel, Their Culture

  Biographical Notes

  Acknowledgments

  I’D JUST LIKE to thank everybody who made this book what it is. Above all Hugh Eakin for all his thoughtful input and editing on every single piece, then Robert Silvers of course, Rea Hederman, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, and all the team at The New York Review of Books. Books are a joint effort. Many many thanks.

  Introduction

  IT’S TIME TO rethink everything. Everything. What it means to write and what it means to write for a public—and which public. What do I want from this writing? Money? A career? Recognition? A place in the community? A change in the government? World peace? Is it an artifice, is it therapy? Is it therapy because it is an artifice, or in spite of that? Does it have to do with constructing an identity, a position in society? Or simply with entertaining myself, with entertaining others? Will I still write if they don’t pay me?

  And what does it mean to read? Do I want to read the things other people are reading, so I can talk to them? Which other people? Why do I want to talk to them? So that I can be of my time? Or so that I can know other times, other places? Do I read things to confirm my vision of the world, or to challenge it? Or is reading to challenge my vision a reassuring confirmation that I am indeed the courageous guy I thought I was? The more challenging the books I read the more complacent I feel.

  Does the idea of one world, one culture, mean we are all being driven toward the same books—in which case how many writers can there possibly be? Or will everyone be a writer, but without being paid? “No one can do without some semblance of immortality,” remarked Emil Cioran. “Ever since death came to be accepted as the absolute end, everybody writes!”

  Why do we so often disagree about the books we read? Is it because someone’s reading well and someone’s reading badly? The professor and the students? Because there are good books and bad, or because people with different backgrounds inevitably like different books? If so, can we begin to predict who will like what?

  Most book talk is formulaic and has been for decades. Your average review offers a quick value judgment summed up in one-to-five stars at the top of the column. Why read on? There’ll be a declaration of theme (worthy), an assessment of narrative competence, some mention of character and setting (we’ve all done a creative writing course), some praise, some reservations. Above all it’s understood that books are introduced into a fierce competition for what few crumbs of celebrity TV and film have left to them. They have to hit the ground running. Toward the end there may or may not be a precious quote the publisher can use for the cover of the paperback edition. In 99.9 percent of cases the reviewer knows perfectly well what books are for, why they are written and read, what’s literature and what’s genre. He’s ticking boxes. Or she. Understandably, the newspapers have reduced the books section to the size of a postage stamp.

  For feedback there’s the Internet. Sometime it feels like all feedback and no feed. What’s most surprising on sites where readers offer their own reviews is how similar they are to journalistic reviews. They don’t object to distributing the Amazon stars. They know perfectly well how to hand out praise and punishment. They have their unquestioned criteria. The medium dictates the tone. “I haven’t actually read the book, but . . .”

  In the weeklies that still cover books, the author interview comes in the form of the same ten questions for all. “When did you last cry?” “What is your greatest regret?” It’s an invitation to look for distinction in quirkiness. Usually by email. “Of the novels you’ve written, which is your favorite?” “What are you reading now, during the day and at bedtime?” Apparently interviewers know that all authors read different things at bedtime. They are not allowed not to have a favorite novel, a greatest regret. The small photo running beside the piece is taken from the author’s Facebook page at no expense to the paper.

  The multiplication of literary prizes is in line with this. Their uncoupling from national literatures tells us that it’s the reputation of the prize that counts, not nurturing writers in a given community. People have invested money. The longlist is added t
o the shortlist to squeeze out a little more publicity. At the awards dinner, one writer is hoisted up to the pantheon and the others cast off into outer darkness. It doesn’t matter that the winner was no one’s first choice, that two members of the jury complained they couldn’t finish the damn book. It’s a winner now. By democratic process. And the winner’s sales outstrip the loser’s, the losers’.

  Meantime literary scholarship in the universities is impenetrable: less monumentally abstruse perhaps than in the rarefied heyday of structuralism and post-structuralism, but maybe that’s because there’s no need to work so hard not to be read these days. The tired jargon is enough, the tendency to confuse studies of literature with exercises in cultural history. It is astonishing how many hundreds of thousands of academic articles are produced to no end aside from the conferring of this or that teaching contract, how much endeavor and how little adventure.

  Beneath all the chatter and the liturgy runs a fierce nostalgia for the literary myths of the past, for the gigantic figures of Dickens and Joyce, Hemingway and Faulkner. A writer can’t even aim at that kind of aura today. But it’s that yearning for imagined greatness that drives the whole literary enterprise. Plus the publishers’ desperation to manufacture a bestseller to pay the bills. The idea of greatness is a marketing tool. See Franzen.

  Perhaps in the end it’s just ridiculous, the high opinion we have of books, of literature. Perhaps it’s just a collective spell of self-regard, self-congratulation, the way the jurors of the literary prize are so damn pleased with themselves when they invite their new hero to the podium. Do books, after all, change anything? For all their proverbial liberalism, have they made the world more liberal? Or have they offered the fig leaf that allows us to go on as we were, liberal in our reading and conservative in our living. Perhaps art is more part of the problem than the solution; we may be going to hell, but look how well we write about it, look at our paintings and operas and tragedies.

  It is not, after all, that we have to worry about the survival of literature. There’s never been so much of it. But maybe it’s time that the beast carried a health warning.

  —Milan, May 2014

  NB: Impersonal use of the third-person pronoun has become a problem for the contemporary writer in English. People have grown sensitive to issues of gender. Do I say, “Someone who has been told he is dying and must make his will . . .” or “Someone who has been told he or she is dying and must make his or her will”? My own feeling is that the old “he” was always understood to be impersonal and without gender while the he-or-she formula is fussy and inelegant, constantly reminding readers of a problem that isn’t really there. For the most part then, I have stayed with the old impersonal he and I invite my readers to believe that I do not do this in a spirit of chauvinism, but to keep the focus sharp.

  I

  The World Around the Book

  DO WE NEED STORIES

  LET’S TACKLE ONE of the literary set’s favorite orthodoxies head on: that the world “needs” stories. “There is an enormous need,” Jonathan Franzen declares in an interview with Corriere della Sera (there’s no escape these days), “for long, elaborate, complex stories, such as can only be written by an author concentrating alone, free from the deafening chatter of Twitter.”

  Of course as a novelist it is convenient to think that by the nature of the job one is on the side of the good, supplying an urgent and general need. I can also imagine readers drawing comfort from the idea that their fiction habit is essential sustenance and not a luxury. But what is the nature of this need? What would happen if it wasn’t met? We might also ask: Why does Franzen refer to complex stories? And why is it important not to be interrupted by Twitter and Facebook? Are such interruptions any worse than an old landline phone call, or simply friends and family buzzing around your writing table? Jane Austen, we recall, loved to write in domestic spaces where she was open to constant interruption.

  Proponents of the-world-needs-stories thesis are legion, but one of the more elaborate statements comes in Salman Rushdie’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). Here, in a text that falls between fable and magical realism, the telling of many stories is aligned with the idea of a natural ecology; in the normal and healthy way of things, we’re told, all the different stories of the world flow together in a great ocean of narrative. But now this harmony is threatened by an evil “cultmaster” who seeks to poison and eventually shut off the flow of stories, imposing universal silence and sterility as part of a bid for omnipotence.

  Given Rushdie’s personal plight at the time of writing, it’s hard not to think of the “cultmaster” as a metamorphosis of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Stories are presented as a manifestation of the natural pluralism of the imagination, engaged in a mortal battle against any fundamentalism that would impose its own, univocal version: fiction is on the side of freedom. Of course.

  Rushdie’s idea is charming, but his ocean-of-stories argument never, to risk a pun, holds water. Far from flowing together in a harmonious ecology, stories tend to be in constant competition with each other. Far from imposing silence, cults, religions, and ideologies all have their own noisy stories to tell. Christian fundamentalism with its virgin birth, miracles, exorcisms, and angels boasts a rich narrative flora; if we toss into the mix the Catholic saints and their colorful martyrdoms, we can hardly complain that the censorship and repression of the Inquisition resulted in storyless silence.

  Rather the problem is that preacher and polemicist want us to accept just one, exclusive set of stories, one vision, which we must believe is true. And many people are happy to do this. Once they’ve signed up to a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or even liberal pluralist narrative, it’s unlikely they’ll go out of their way to research competing accounts of the world. People tend to use stories of whatever kind to bolster their beliefs, not to question them.

  But I doubt if this politicized version of the we-need-stories thesis was what a writer like Franzen had in mind. “This is an excellent novel,” I remember a fellow judge for a literary prize repeatedly telling the rest of the jury every time he encouraged us to vote for a book, “because it offers complex moral situations that help us get a sense of how to live and behave.” The argument here is that the world has become immensely complicated and the complex stories of novels help us to see our way through it, to shape a trajectory for ourselves in the increasingly fragmented and ill-defined social environment we move in.

  There’s something to be said for this idea, though of course stories are by no means the exclusive territory of novels; the political, sports, and crime pages of the newspapers are full of fascinating stories, many of them extremely challenging and complex. What the novel offers, however, is a tale mediated by the individual writer, who (alone, away from Facebook and Twitter) works hard to shape it and deliver it in a way that he or she feels is especially attractive, compelling, and right.

  Here again, though, even if we are not immediately aware of it, and even when the author is celebrated for his or her elusive ambiguity (another lit-crit commonplace), such stories compete for our assent and seek to seduce us toward the author’s point of view. D.H. Lawrence attacked Tolstoy’s novels as evil, immoral, and deeply corrupting. Writing about Thomas Hardy, he rather brilliantly questions the motives behind Hardy’s habit of having his more talented and spiritually adventurous characters destroyed by society; Hardy goes “against himself,” Lawrence tells us (meaning, against his own specially gifted nature), to “stand with the average against the exception,” and all this “in order to explain his own sense of failure.” To Lawrence’s mind, a tremendously complex story like Jude the Obscure becomes an invitation not to try to realize your full potential but to settle instead for self-preservation. Hardy reinforces the mental habits of the frightened reader. It is pernicious. In this view of things, rather than needing stories, we need to learn how to smell out their drift and resist them.

  But there’s something deeper going on. Even before we actua
lly tell any stories, the language we use teems with them in embryo form. There are words that simply denote things in nature: a pebble, a tree. There are words that describe objects we make: to know the word chair is to understand about moving from standing to sitting and appreciate the match of the human body with certain shapes and materials. But there are also words that come complete with entire narratives, or rather that can’t come without them. The only way we can understand words like God, angel, devil, ghost is through stories, since these entities do not allow themselves to be known in other ways, or not to the likes of me. Here not only is the word invented—all words are—but the referent is invented too, and a story to suit. God is a one-word creation story.

  Arguably the most important word in the invented-referents category is self. We would like the self to exist perhaps, but does it really? What is it? The need to surround it with a lexical cluster of reinforcing terms—identity, character, personality, soul—all with equally dubious referents suggests our anxiety. The more words we invent, the more we feel reassured that there really is something there to refer to.

  Like God, the self requires a story; it is the account of how each of us accrues and sheds attributes over seventy or eighty years—youth, vigor, job, spouse, success, failure—while remaining, at some deep level, myself, my soul. One of the accomplishments of the novel, which as we know blossomed with the consolidation of Western individualism, has been to reinforce this ingenious invention, to have us believe more and more strongly in this sovereign self whose essential identity remains unchanged by all vicissitudes. Telling the stories of various characters in relation to each other, how something started, how it developed, how it ended, novels are intimately involved with the way we make up ourselves. They reinforce a process we are engaged in every moment of the day, self creation. They sustain the idea of a self projected through time, a self eager to be a real something (even at the cost of great suffering) and not an illusion.