Ganging Agley

So. My big plan, for the summer, to read nonfiction books from the library, thus expanding my horizons and holding dear to my ducats, not so hot. It started with a schedule, and with a burst of enthusiasm; it performed execrably during June and July; and, despite a few solid efforts in August, it retreated shamefully into the fall. So, if there were an award for Specious Book Club's Specious Program Most Resembling the Last Twelve Years of Baltimore Orioles Baseball, I would have won.

Anyway, the inaugural and terminal selection of this summer program was Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz, which I liked, did not get so interested in, owed the library money on, and finally deferred on, partially due to the stern reminders the NIOGA system kept sending me, partially because the copy itself was like falling apart, and partially just because, when I surveyed my stack of books littered next to my bed, I kept opting for like Cavell or Marx or Nabokov or Dickens, and getting just distracted away in general.

And, then, two weeks ago, I thought that I would do this: I would write about how, having given up on Confederates in the Attic, I had picked up a new book, Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte, which I had just started then, and i would write about the differences between books about people and books about garbage, and wonder why I found a book about garbage so much more engaging than a book about people keeping the Civil War alive. It was for that post, in fact, that I wrote the above paragraphs, except...then, eventually, I kept reading books by Murakami and Wodehouse instead of my book by Elizabeth Royte, either. So, it was a short little collapse. A little more Mets than Orioles (sorry, Misk). And I think I came up with something.

See, originally, I thought of writing about how I found Royte's angle -- she's on a mission to see what happens to her garbage, rather than a nonspecific mission to find the soul of the South -- worked better because a nonfiction book should be all process (this is how this works) rather than just talking (this is what some people say) because why those people, why this talking? But even Royte, following her garbage, talks to people; naturally, that is how she finds out most of what she finds out (and, I should add, she writes well and interestingly and the people to whom she talks say interesting things, and I swear I'm going to finish this book, just -- I can't get into a groove about it). My problem, in neither book, was with the narrative voice, which in both nonfiction cases I found charming and interesting. It was with all those other people, because what were all those people doing there? This -- and I think this marks for me the reason that I can never get wholeheartedly into nonfiction narratives (n. narratives, I should mention, that are not essays [on which see]): it didn't have to be these people whom we are hearing about; and it could just have well have been somebody else.

Who but Blazes Boylan could have left potted meat in Leopold Bloom's bed? Who but Anatole Kuragin could have nearly run off with Natasha? Nobody, that's who: everything, every single thing that we learn about Blazes and Anatole is there exactly because it is important. It is not important because it is the part of the person's life that is most related to the Civil War, or to waste disposal, interesting as, say, Boylan's methods of waste disposal would surely be. But what the novel, what good fiction, offers to us is a vision of the person as an agent not of illumination but of meaning, of a person who does not help us to see something bigger because of what he does, but who is himself something bigger because he is. I really think that the best characters in fiction are the ones most like this, the people who exist best not only in themselves but for themselves, keep us able to believe that there is a meaning in people. I think that I find nonfiction narratives unengaging -- rather than stupid or not worthwhile -- because they only just fail in presenting the kind of richly determined characters imaginable in the novel.

Of course, if that is so -- if the benefit of reading a novel is seeing the most meaningful (in the fullest sense of meaning-ful) versions of people like ourselves -- it needs some kind of defense against a charge of mere escapism. For that, I'm going to want to talk about Pnin, though, so I will say: that sometime in the early (singly digited) days of October, we will hear my final thoughts on Timofey Pnin and his novel and then: a new selection for the Unpacking My Library Book and Film Discussion Club.