Nervous Summer

And but so. I have spent most of the last two months, in which I have not been blogging, being nervous. I have spent hours and hours in front of the ESPN network's Baseball Tonight program, not paying attention to them and instead focusing, with Great Mindfulness, on the pains in my stomach and wondering how much of them were psychic and how much somatic. It was, I began to notice, an almost wholly situation-independent case of nerves; no matter how pleasant or un- things would seem to be, I would become maximum level nervous, and dream up reasons to be so. It made me nervous that I hadn't gotten into any schools, for a while; then it made me really nervous that I had gotten into NYU. It made me nervous that the one of the dogs we live with developed a cough. It made me nervous that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were revealed to have taken steroids in 2003. Anything made me nervous. It was a nervous few months.

I started to notice that there were a few homey things that soothed my nerves to total satisfaction. One was going to the supermarket; one was listening to John Sterling call Yankees games. And a big, generic, booky thing, that I learned from the Summer of Nerves, was the incredible therapeutic power of the Fat Book of Short Stories. The particular Fat Book of Short Stories that I have been seeking solace in is the Early Stories of John Updike, but based on some dabbling in Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, I think that others can work as well. Novels (most novels, anyway; not, say, Proust, on whom more soon) can be tempestuous relationships; they are capitalist little monsters, committed to dynamism. Things should have changed greatly from one chapter to the next in the novel. Take, say, Mansfield Park, a great book by Jane Austen, that makes enormous changes in both tone and pace. At the time in life in which I read Mansfield Park, I read a lot at a Starbucks while I waited for my brother Pete to finish his driving lessons. And it sort of jerks around: Fanny always seems at the point of being denied the life she wants, and the narrative takes some time off for class satire. Or, things are speeding along, and then we get the very long, very excellent, but very disruptive focus on the play that Fanny's cousins put on. Not quite a soothing element.

The Fat Books of Short Stories, however, are little pieces of stasis. Very little happens, and it happens beautifully, exquisitely. The well-formed short story tends to have one action, one Thing That This is the Story About; and the action is surrounded by a murmur of beautifully pitched observation, framing our action and delighting us. Especially in a writer like Updike, whose capaciousness allows for infinite gradations of tone, or one like O'Connor, whose singleness of purpose provides the same, we can return, story after story, to our Fat Book and find ourselves right where we were, and, provided that this is an author we like, we find ourselves just where we want to be. My nervous summer began with me reading 2666 on a beach, with its swooping plot and jagged contours; and hopefully, the nervous part of that summer will end here, with Updike and his fat book of beautifully considered, beautifully same moments.

Incidentally, I am only about a third of the way through my Updike book, which only goes about two fifths through Updike's career, but my favorite stories, for those of you wanting to get a toe (soothingly) wet, are: Pigeon Feathers, which has a magnificent final sentence; Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth; A Trillion Feet of Gas; and Twin Beds in Rome. So, for all of you who wondering what my favorite Updikes from about before 1960 were: there you are.