by Sara Nelson
So far, so ordinary. I almost fell right back to sleep.
But then I flipped to the page that now appears in the front, or occasionally at the back of most books written these days: the acknowledgments page. That’s where I read the aforementioned interesting fact. “For his help early in my career,” it said, “I am especially grateful to Dave Letterman.” The fact that the author, Jill A. Davis, used to work for the late-night comedian is the main thing that differentiates her book from all the others in the genre known as chick lit.
Noticing Davis’s employment history didn’t make me like the book any more than I did in the first place, but it did help me understand how it got published. She has experience, albeit in another medium. She has a track record. She has, as they might say in Publishing 101, connections, connections, connections.
Here’s what book industry insiders routinely use the acknowledgments pages for:To inform or remind them of who the author’s agent is, in the event that they’re editors and want to know whom to call to get a look at the author’s other work, or, if they’re agents, to know from whom to steal the author away.
To identify the author’s specific editor and then surmise how much actual editing might have been done.
To check the spelling of the author’s family’s and friends’ names in the event that there will be enough boldfaced names to warrant a book party.
Here’s what the average reader can use acknowledgments pages for:To establish how the author did his/her research on the project. A nonfiction exposé may list a lot of attorneys or government types; a biography should indicate which of the subject’s family and friends were willing to speak—and thus why, in most cases, those people’s quotes are unfailingly laudatory; a good family drama will surely include the names of the author’s spouse and kids.
To track an author’s romantic or marital history. (NB: Sometimes you also need to check the dedication page for this.) I was a huge fan of the writer Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two. When Knapp died (at forty-two!) her New York Times obituary reported that she’d just gotten married the month before. I didn’t know Knapp, but I loved Drinking so much that I felt like I did, and so I wondered: Who was this husband, of whom I didn’t remember her writing? It turned out that he was one of the dedicatees in Drinking and acknowledged high up in Pack of Two.
To see if the author has any friends with recognizable names, which you can then check against the blurbs on the jacket to see if there’s been any of what Spy magazine used to call “logrolling in our time.”
You can save yourself a lot of time and money if you read the acknowledgments first: they can serve as a little window into the story you’re about to pay your twenty-plus bucks for. Or as the author Stanley Bing puts it, “I like acknowledgments. They give the reader a taste of the book and get them into it without putting too much pressure on them.”
You like cool, ironic detachment? Start with the introduction to Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. You like your satire gentle and tongue-in-cheek? Check out Bing’s anti-acknowledgment in his anti-business book What Would Machiavelli Do? “I’d also like to acknowledge the enormous contribution of my wife and kids to the general framework of my personal and professional life, but what kind of mean guy would do a thing like that?” You want careful? Flip back a couple of pages and note that I thanked just about every human being I’d met since seventh grade, partly because they each really, truly helped me, but also just in case my naming them might make them feel guilty enough to go out and buy this book.
No wonder acknowledgment pages sometimes go on for chapters and preoccupy writers almost as much as the ranking system on Amazon.com. I know one author, in fact, who opens a Thank You file whenever he begins work on a new book and adds names to it throughout the sometimes years-long process, so concerned is he that he’ll leave somebody out. Did writers of previous generations worry like this? Somehow I doubt it. Did Malcolm X (or Alex Haley, with whose “assistance” his Autobiography was written) thank the brothers who’d helped him in his life and work? Did Philip Roth thank Portnoy’s mother? Did Emily Brontë thank her sisters? Of course not. Maybe in those psychologically naïve days, authors weren’t aware of how much the sometimes passive contributions of others helped them to pursue their dreams.
Or maybe they were just a lot less cynical about what interests a reader about a book.
September 11
Oh, God
Will I ever see, or think, or write that date casually?
I won’t go into detail about where I was a year ago when I found out about the terrorist attacks, not because it wasn’t harrowing but because just about every piece of journalism published the week after 9/11 began with just that kind of “I was brushing my teeth, headed out for a normal day” disclaimer. Since this is a memoir of reading, I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember what I was reading that day or week, but I’m blank. All I know is that whatever it was, I stopped reading it, and like most of the rest of this city—and some of the country—I spent the following days watching television and “reading” only the newspaper and the occasional newsmagazine account of the disaster. It was hard to concentrate even on those. A few days later, I got a call from a friend who publishes a newsletter; she asked me to recommend books that would somehow explain what had happened, or provide comfort or wisdom.
I remember telling her I’d been thinking a lot about House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III’s brooding novel about an Iranian general trying to build a postrevolutionary life in southern California; I remembered it as a book about retaining your dignity and about what it means, both good and bad, to be an American. It wasn’t about terrorism or religious fundamentalism, and it wasn’t hokey like the number-one bestseller on Amazon at the time, Nostradamus. It also didn’t have any “advice” for surviving post-9/11 trauma. But it was the only book that kept reappearing in my mind.
In the throes of the worst political and social disaster my generation had ever known, in the midst of the biggest news story of the age, I was thinking about a made-up story on a tangential topic by a relatively unknown writer.
How typical. When my father was dying, I remember, I spent hours sitting on the deck outside of his bedroom at home reading T. C. Boyle’s East Is East, a dark but comic novel about a Japanese sailor shipwrecked at an American writer’s colony. Throughout my pregnancy with Charley, when well-meaning friends would pass along their dog-eared copies of What to Expect When You’re Expecting or Penelope Leach’s Your Baby and Child, I’d dutifully pile them up on the coffee table—and go on reading the collected works of Philip Roth.
I wasn’t then, and I’m not now, looking for escape, exactly. (If I were, I’d have been loading up on mysteries or romances or something.) But what I’ve come to realize is that I like to take my information in a more impressionistic way. If I’d thought about it—which I didn’t—I guess I would have said that East Is East was illustrating what I suspected I would soon be feeling—adrift and unprotected in a strange new world—and that Roth’s books, about family and Jewishness, were completely appropriate preparation for the birth of my child. It wasn’t, obviously, that I didn’t care about the processes, or the sciences, of birth or death, but I didn’t want to read about them, at least not in the straightforward, linear way that a book about dying or birthing would surely have to be read.
But back where I come from—college, journalism, the world of supposed “ideas”—novels still evoke a faint whiff of disapproval, as if they’re the kind of thing that only idle ladies who stay in bed all day and eat bonbons should read. There’s also something vaguely sexist about this attitude—women can’t handle anything too serious—which is still sneakily pervasive. (Men read novels, too, of course, but the stereotypical “guy’s book”—think Tom Clancy—has no moniker akin to the offensive “chick lit.”) Nonfiction books routinely sell more copies than fiction, for example, and thus generally earn their authors higher ad
vances. A college professor who publishes a novel may be envied, but it’s his colleague with the published nonfiction thesis who’s more likely to get tenure. The fiction/nonfiction split in perception is like Woody Allen’s stated desire in making Interiors, his first serious movie. He wanted to “sit at the grown-ups’ table,” he famously said. Comedy, like novels, is childish; drama and nonfiction are adult. But have you ever noticed that the highest praise heaped on a book of nonfiction is that it “reads like a novel”?
Although I don’t agree that a novel, a good novel, isn’t as instructive about the world as any work of journalism, I still feel conflicted. I admit that it has begun to worry me, when I look back on the pages in this journal, that no matter what books I put on my original list of must-reads, no matter how “important” or “relevant” the nonfiction titles I’ve written there are, the books I reach for again and again are novels. Still, when I ask friends for recommendations, I often get back nonfiction ideas. “Try reading Karen Armstrong’s Islam or David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace,” an acquaintance from the gym told me last week when I asked for September 11-appropriate fare. And I want to read them, really I do—I usually trot off dutifully to the store or the Internet to buy them. But I’ve noticed that when an envelope full of nonfiction arrives at my house, it often sits on the coffee table for three or four days. When I know there’s a novel inside, I don’t even wait to find the scissors, I just tear open the package with my bare hands.
In a recent New Yorker article about the author William Gaddis, Jonathan Franzen defines two “models” of reading. The one he calls the “status” model holds that books are works of art and “if the average reader rejects the work it’s because the average reader is a philistine.” In fact, a book has more status—and thus, apparently, more value—if it’s difficult or slow and thus turns most people off. The other kind, Franzen writes, is the contract model, in which the author and the reader tacitly agree that the “deepest purpose of reading and writing . . . is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness.” Contract readers (and writers) exist on a plane of “pleasure and connection.” On careful reading, I realized that Franzen was talking here exclusively about fiction, but the categories he constructs seem to break down for me along fiction and nonfiction lines. My first reaction to a work of nonfiction is to see it as difficult, or at least didactic—homework, in other words. But I approach a novel, no matter how difficult or sophisticated or “literary,” as a form of “pleasure and connection.”4
So maybe that’s why, on the September 11 anniversary, the last thing I wanted to do was study something about terrorism or religion or Mideast relations. Those of us living within a mile of Ground Zero had gotten a pretty complete education in those subjects over the past year from both the news programs we’d been watching incessantly and, simply, from just living here. We aren’t—or at least I’m not—in the mood for anything hard, or “status-y.” In fact, if there was anything even vaguely “good” about the whole experience, it was the sense of connection most New Yorkers felt, and continue to feel, with one another and with Americans in other cities and towns who, up until now, didn’t have much use, let alone sympathy, for us in the first place. I wanted to further that sense of what Franzen would call the contract. I wanted a novel.
Still, I did take my gym friend’s suggestion and start on Islam, which I found fascinating. Within five minutes, I learned that the prophet Mohammed was almost a feminist, preaching long and loudly that women should not be mistreated but cherished. But a weird thing kept happening as I read: when I’d put the book down around the house for a minute, to answer the phone or fix some lunch, I’d then be unable, for hours at a time, to find it. The same thing happened with Germs, the book that was published right as the anthrax scares began. Instead, I went back to House of Sand and Fog and read again about how difficult it is for a Middle Eastern immigrant to reconcile his life in the old world with life in the new. I also, on Liza’s recommendation, picked up Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me, which, before September 11, I would have thought was “just” a novel about a vain model whose face was destroyed in a car accident; now, the subplot—about a Middle Eastern man who lived among Americans for years as a way to learn how best to terrorize them—seemed to take center stage. That’s the other thing about a good novel: depending on your state of mind, and even the state of the world, you can probably find at least one of any number of themes to provide you the sense of connection you crave.
Not that you could necessarily explain just why a certain book called to you at any given time or that the relationship between what’s going on in your head and what’s on the page is necessarily a transparent one. My friend Jim, at the magazine, just told me today that he was at a similar loss for what to read during this emotional week, and that he, too, felt a pull toward fiction. But what fiction? It turns out, he said, that he burrowed down for several days with The Brothers Karamazov, even if he wasn’t at first sure exactly why. What do you think that has to do with the September 11 anniversary, I wanted to know. “I don’t know,” he told me. “But it just seemed right. It is, after all, about God and the Devil.”
September 18
Kid Stuff
Charlotte’s Web is one of those children’s books that adults have strong memories of. A woman I know told me the other day that thirty years later, she still tears up at the memory of her mother weeping as she read the book aloud to my friend and her sisters. Another friend told me she used to get into a fight with her younger brother and then purposely run upstairs to read the end of the book so she would burst into tears and then would blame her brother. Another has said that she was shocked to discover, a week before her wedding, that her husband-to-be had never read the book that she felt explained “everything” about her; she told him that his completion of the novel was a requirement for their marriage.
So when I told some friends—parents, most of them—that Charlotte’s Web would be my book of the week, now that it had turned up on Charley’s required third-grade reading list, their eyes welled up. “Oh, it’s a great book,” they said. “What a great thing to read with your kid.” What followed were the inevitable reminiscences of their own read-aloud experiences, their memories of giggling along at the wordplay of Dr. Seuss stories as Mom read the rhymes faster and faster, their eyes and minds opening to the gorgeous, complex and joyous world of being read to.
Except—and here’s a confession to mobilize the perfect-mother police—I didn’t experience much pleasure at reading aloud, either as a parent or a kid. I wasn’t a particularly good or happy participant, then or now, and nobody in either of my families seemed to like it all that much.
I have exactly one memory of reading with my parents, but it’s a powerful one. It was the summer before first grade, I think, and my father, who was, to put it mildly, not a get-down-on-the-floor-with-the-kids type of dad, sat with me on the back steps of our house at Harvey’s Lake and taught me to read. The book was one of the Dick and Jane series (he must have found it in Liza’s or Kuff’s room, or on the old creaky shelves). I can see him sitting there in his madras bermuda shorts with his knees up practically under his chin—his legs were so long!—and teaching me to sound out words. “See Jane run,” I can hear him saying. “Now you say it.”
What I don’t remember—or didn’t have—is the kind of experiences other people wax rhapsodic about, like rainy afternoons huddled under blankets with Mom, hearing her act out all the different characters in books about Alice and Pippi and Stuart. “Did you guys ever read to me?” I asked my mother on the phone last night. “Well, sure,” she replied, but then couldn’t name more than one book, Lucky Little Rabbit, about which we remember nothing except the fact that I could never pronounce the L’s in the titles correctly. “Well, I guess not so much,” she finally admitted. “I couldn’t stand most of the books,” she said. “And then, when you could read to yourself, you did.”
In fact, I don’t have a lot
of memories of so-called children’s books at all: I must have read The Wizard of Oz and Stuart Little—and Charlotte’s Web, for that matter—but whatever associations I have with them come from the movies. (Pippi Longstocking is another story: I loved the series and can still see the Astrid Lindgren books lined up on my pink-flowered bedroom shelves.) I never read Lord of the Rings, having waded through The Hobbit (probably a school assignment) with only marginal engagement.
And now, in a cruel but predictable twist of fate, I’m seeing the same behavior in my son. With the exception of the Captain Underpants series, books don’t call to Charley. And through most of his first seven years, our nightly read-aloud ritual was more chore than joy. Are my own mother and I the only ones who found reading The Runaway Bunny, about the baby rabbit who can never get away from his mother, repetitive and tiresome? Am I the only parent who regularly skipped the middle sections of those interminable Budgie books, until, at about four, Charley began to notice and call me on it? As for Harry Potter, we did pretty well with the first one, but by volume 4, I was hoping somebody’d put a spell on me. I was always too tired or impatient to relax into the process and he too keyed up to concentrate. When it came to bedtime reading, my son and I have long been at cross-purposes: my agenda was to read something quick and easy and get to lights-out; his was to ask for the longest, most complex book, the better to delay it. As a parental reader, I relapse into White Rabbit syndrome. I’m more interested in what reading aloud can accomplish than in what pleasures it can provide.
Obviously, I have complicated feelings about this. On the one hand, I managed to grow up into a reasonably sane adult who undeniably loves reading without a lot of the aforementioned beautiful childhood read-aloud experiences, so it’s possible, even likely, that Charley might, too. On the other hand, like most yuppie parents, I feel a pull to right the (perceived) wrongs of my own childhood, to be a better parent than my own perfectly decent ones. Besides, I’d rather he have more to wax rhapsodic about than the video games of his youth and, only if I’m very lucky, all those evenings he and I have spent dancing together in the living room to old Beatles songs.