Unfinished Stories

I’m having so much trouble reading at the moment.

I love reading. It’s been one of the single most important things in my life even since before I learned to read, as I absolutely loved having stories read to me from my infancy. I read everything. Well: perhaps not quite, but I always have to have something to read to hand, as if (like today) I’m stuck somewhere for an extended amount of time without something to read, I’ll feel myself start to panic. But recently… I don’t know what’s happening. I keep starting books and not enjoying them: books I really wanted to read, books I was so much looking forward to after reading about them… books which people would tell me were just the sort of thing I’d like. Maybe I’m just tired. No maybe about it: I am tired, beyond tired, drawing towards the end of the longest school term of my career to date. But it seems to be more than that. Recently, when I start to read, the words seem to swim on the page, blur into one another and stop making sense. I even went and had my eyes tested, in case the prescription of my reading glasses wasn’t strong enough any more. Not so: everything was fine. And oddly, it was happening only when I was reading for pleasure… I could work my way happily through entire Greek or Shakespearean tragedies during the teaching day, or analyse texts to my heart’s (and the A2 examiners’) delight: it was when I started to read my storybooks at night that it happened. And it happened with a few books I really wanted to read … like spending weeks wanting to meet someone and then discovering that you didn’t get on with them at all.

The first of these books was Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I remember reading The Corrections when it came out, with that bubbling excitement of finding something I really loved, something special, something new. I spent years anticipating Franzen’s next book, and had to get hold of my copy just as soon as it was available. At the start, there it was again, that excitement born of just how much I liked the book. The descriptions were drawing me in, I felt as though I knew the characters personally and then… then, somewhere just past the halfway mark, it all went wrong. It all went wrong when the lecture on environmentalism started, and I felt myself giving up the will to live, never mind the will to read. I don’t abandon books, but I abandoned this one, as it was making me feel as though I was going mad. Reading time is one of the things I look forward to most on returning home from work each day (and I realise that many of the students in my English classes would find this sad, as I deal with books and reading all day long) - but I was beginning to dread this book. Not only was its bulk giving me some kind of RSI (my husband suggested at this point that I might like a Kindle for Christmas, which I rejected completely, as I could never lose that child-like simplicity of curling up on the sofa with a paperback…), my mind felt as if it too was in pain as I was reading this. I gave up. It’s still there, on one of the Billy bookcases in the living room, and I’ll probably go back to the book and try again, perhaps in the summer holidays. Perhaps its realism was just too acute: like those people you meet in real life that you think you’ll really like at first, but then they start to pall, to bore you, to disappoint… and before you know it they’ve come out with one of those deal-breaker words like calling a restaurant an ‘eaterie’ or saying ‘cheers’ instead of thanks or telling you to keep out of their ‘private convo’. You just have to do it. Put it back on the shelf, and walk away.

The next book this happened with was by Jennifer Egan. A Visit from the Goon Squad has been much discussed - it’s even made it to the BBC2 Late Review. It’s the talk of fashionable New York dinner parties among the smart Greenwich Village set - imitated in a thousand smartly designed houses from Hoxton to Portstewart. And I thought it sounded great. An account of the music industry with shifting narratives and shifting timescales. Brilliant, I thought - just the kind of thing I think I’d like. How wrong I was. I truly hated it. Once again, I couldn’t finish it: it was simply indigestible, like a vast plate of pasta with a heavy cream-rich sauce, impossible and impenetrable and awful. You think there’s going to be variation of flavour, but it all ends up the same. The cleverness was so self-conscious it was like watching someone wearing their degree certificates like a sandwich board on a night out. It reminded me of all those lectures about signs and signifiers: clever little postmodern devices jumping up and down waving at you for attention like the icons on a Mac do when they need to be updated. Look how clever I am! I’ve shifted time and shifted voice and look… we’ve all got our own little idiolects and perspectives and everything! I felt myself grow old as I was reading this, and I know growing old is inevitable, but I’m not sure I want to do anything to encourage the process. Which is ironic, really, as the Goon Squad of the title seems to represent time. I’m not sure whether time was on fast forward or on pause when I was reading this… maybe both at once in some kind of excruciatingly clever narrative impossibility. Either way: I had to stop. Before it stopped me.

And then, most recently, there was Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Of the three, I liked this by far the most, but it was still with the reservation embodied by a conjunction-led qualifying clause. Again I felt this one was a bit too self-consciously clever: something of a masterclass of idiolect creation. There were so many strands of linguistic identity that I’m not sure I can quite keep track of them, but either way Safran Foer knits them into a meaningful whole through splitting his ever-changing storytelling perspectives. Best, most interesting, and most authentic, is the Ukranian character, Alex, and how his narrative develops as his English becomes more standard. Arguably his linguistic standardisation marks a weakening of individuality: once he stops writing as though he has swallowed a thesaurus, much of the novel’s humour and vigour disappears. My favourite sections were his letters to Jonathan, commenting on the stories they’re both telling, though at the same time those letters could be said to be an appallingly self-indulgent metafictional commentary on the art of narrative itself. Does the novel tell stories or does it tell us a story about telling stories? This is what Safran Foer is really trying to illuminate in his novel, more even than he is trying to illuminate his identity (as writer and as man) through digging into the characters of his family’s past. Like a medieval illuminated manuscript, the novel is composed with attention to the fine detail. It’s a bit self-consciously clever in how it does this: I’d probably have absolutely loved this about ten years ago, but somehow feel as though I’ve grown out of such ostentatious cartwheels of the intellect just now. Who knows. I certainly don’t. I just know that elements of this book made me fall asleep, elements of it made me angry, and elements of it moved me almost to tears. It even made me laugh a few times.

I don’t know, though. What’s going on with me and my reading and my writing. I’m now reading a so-called ‘light’ book, aimed at women, called The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs, by Christina Hopkinson. It’s all right. Not bad. A bit 6/10, if I’m honest: a bit mediocre. As someone commented on Twitter, it reads a bit like an article in the Femail section of ‘The Daily Mail’… an oh-so-politically-correct look at how badly done by women are by those hulking, galumphing creatures: men. And yet it’s done with some likeable humour, as the central character makes an Excel spreadsheet of all her husband’s shortcomings. I’ve never considered tabulation, but I think anyone who’s ever lived with another person has thought about an enumeration of their faults. The book has its moments of brilliance, but at the moment I’m losing patience with it as an unqualified whinge. I feel like telling her to pull herself together: to tell her husband he’s being bloody annoying instead of plotting his misdemeanours on her laptop. To tell him how to be less bloody annoying. To leave him if he doesn’t make an effort. To get a life, essentially… and to quit her moaning. I could probably start an Excel spreadsheet of my own about just how much I’m being annoyed by her, but I won’t: because my own life’s just too busy, and I have books to read and music to listen to and films to watch, and…

… and anyway. I only meant to chronicle some recent reading, not to go into a full-scale expose of why I read, and how, and … all the rest. I’m not sure, yet, that I have managed to illuminate anything. Let alone everything. But I have tried. And like my recent eye-test, I’ve established that, perhaps… there are no external adjustments needed, no modal auxiliaies of conditional past regrets, just a determination to keep reading.

And perhaps that’s the most important story of all.