Wednesday, May 29, 2013

The Book I'm Looking For

Like most serious readers, I experience periods when I'm unable to read anything. Nothing seems satisfactory. I'll pick up a book I've loved for years and the words will lie lifeless on the page. Not Beckett, not Chekhov, not even Nabokov's greatest invention, the intoxicating voice of Humbert Humbert, can trick me deviously into enjoyment. I seem to have lost all my readerly mirth, and even the fire-fangled fronds of Stevens's summer palms refuse to dangle down. Days like these, my swirling thoughts settle on the idea that I'm simply asking too much of fiction, of mere words arranged by the merest mortals. Why should a perfectly tuned sentence be expected to come as powerfully as a climaxing lover? Why should an enveloping image not satisfy unless its light is so brilliant it overpowers the sun by which we read? The doubts come unbidden and circle like melancholy birds that in evening's dying light glide downward to the realization that asking too much is exactly and entirely the point.

We should always ask too much of art. Unless we ask too much, we are not asking enough. Unless we hold art to the highest possible standards, we will eventually find ourselves eating shit and calling it caviar.

All I ask of a novel is that it blow my mind and alter my perception of the world. That's all. And I do not consider that too much to ask of a novel by a living American writer. Franzen and Chabon and Jennifer Egan and Junot Diaz don't do it for me (although I like Chabon a lot, and respect Franzen), but Gravity's Rainbow and Blood Meridian and William Vollmann's The Atlas and Annie Proulx's Close Range and even Infinite Jest do exactly that. Yes, even Infinite Jest, about which I have major reservations and which coincidentally concerns itself with exactly these topics of enjoyment and anhedonia.

There's something else, too, that I'm looking for when I read: a creative originality that doesn't limit itself to content and form but reaches down to the level of the sentence and the word. Bullet my brain with a metaphor; sing me a sentence that sounds like a song. More than anything else, show me something I haven't read before. Not necessarily some surreal invention or outlandish transgression or excremental abjection--which have all been done to death, actually, and have been old hat since Bataille, older than Bataille's poop-smeared hat. All a writer really has to do is show me a shower head in a way that makes me feel I've never looked at a shower head before. Describe a human eye in a way that makes me see eyes differently for the rest of my life. That's what I want to read, a book that impresses me the way Ulysses impressed me on my second and third readings two decades ago, that impresses me like Proust, like Beethoven, like Picasso and Cezanne, like the ceiling of St. Ignazio di Loyola on a rainy day in Rome or the infinite inventions of Borges the Unblind, like the slow dying of the light at sunset over the Great Plains, like making love. That's the book I'm looking for, jonesing for. That's what I need to read.

5 comments:

Joe Miller said...

The Man Without Qualities is just what you're looking for.

Bacchus said...

What are some of the best books of recent years?

Bacchus said...

Also, what are your favorite books written by women?

BRIAN OARD said...

My most common reaction to recent fiction--especially American fiction--is either disappointment or an unimpressed 'meh.' Some books published since ca.1999 that have impressed me: Coetzee's Disgrace, Sebald's Austerlitz, Bolano's Savage Detectives, 2666 and By Night in Chile; Pynchon's Against the Day; Proulx's Close Range and Bad Dirt; Gass's A Temple of Texts, Lethem's Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn; Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds; China Mieville's SF...

As for books by women, I just don't make gender distinctions when I read. I don't know why. I guess it's just one of the weird ways my brain works, but I'm a genderblind reader. Among my favorite fiction and poetry books, some that happen to have been written by women are: Annie Proulx's Close Range, Erica Jong's Isadora Wing trilogy (Fear of Flying, How to Save Your Own Life, Parachutes and Kisses), Toni Morrison's Sula, Flannery O' Connor's novels and stories, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Anne Sexton's complete poetry, Emily Dickinson's Complete Poetry, Eudora Welty's stories, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood...

BRIAN OARD said...

To he 'best recent fiction' list, I'll add Edward St Aubyn's five Patrick Melrose novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk and At Last. Five brief volumes of narrative notes from an aristocracy gone rancid.