So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  “Hmm,” I said.

  The next day, he said it again. “Mom, tell me the truth: you’re Santa Claus, right?”

  I tried some lame humor: “You callin’ me a fat guy in a red suit?” I said.

  He didn’t laugh.

  “Tell me the truth, Mom. Don’t you buy all the presents?”

  I bobbed and wove. “You think I buy all those presents?” I asked. “I’m not made of money, you know.”

  Having heard that remark a few hundred times before, he seemed satisfied. Santa Claus case: closed, at least for now.

  Would that my writer friends were eight-year-olds who didn’t know about nondenial denials.

  If a book recommended between friends is not so much a book as a pop quiz, a request to read someone’s unpublished manuscript is like the law boards, the med boards, and the FBI clearance exams all rolled into one. You’re being called on for your expertise in a given area, but if you don’t give the tester the answer she wants, you risk expulsion. The only good news is that you usually have time to prepare your answers. How honest should you be? A novelist friend who’s had her fair share of similar requests has worked up a theorem: Grade your degree of closeness to the person on a scale of 1 to 10, then divide that number by how good or bad you think the book is (also 1 to 10). “And then tell them you love it,” she says.

  As a writer, I subscribe to the bartender theory of manuscript sharing: Like the unhappy husband who confides his misery to the guy pouring the beer or the stranger sitting next to him on the train, I’m much more comfortable spilling my guts—what Anne Lamott calls my “shitty first [and second and third] drafts”—to people outside my immediate circle. If a second- or third-tier friend likes what I’ve written, I can tell myself her reaction was “pure” because her personal involvement with me is minimal, and if she hates it, I can dismiss what she says because I don’t have to face her in the morning. If this is what Peggy is doing, I know what my job is: to follow my friend’s theorem and tell her it’s great. But what if, like Charley, she really wants to know “the truth,” and “the truth” is that I think the book’s a mess?

  These were the questions that occupied me from three to five A.M. Saturday morning and a good chunk of the next afternoon as I combed through Peggy’s memoir. And for a while, I was plenty worried. Peggy is not, as I said, an experienced writer—and for the first fifty pages I agonized over whether I should tell even this tough, forthright woman that she should probably bag the whole project. But then, on about page 60, the book began to change; it actually started to become a book, because Peggy started to speak passionately in her own voice about the people she’d known and the lessons she’d learned. “I think what you need to do is throw out the first fifty pages and forget about the last fifty pages,” I told her when I called her on Monday. “And then work on what you’ve got in the middle.”

  “So you don’t think it’s a total disaster?” she said.

  “No,” I said. Whew, I thought.

  Worried as I was about reading Peggy’s manuscript, I realized later that this situation was nothing compared with the one Liza and I got ourselves into a couple of years back. Liza had been “working on” a novel for, oh, I don’t know, maybe for as long as I’d known her, and for several of the more recent years I’d been asking her to let me see it. She kept demurring, and then one day, more or less out of the blue, she offered to send it to me. “Great!” I said. “Please tell me the truth,” she said.

  I should have been nervous. Hell, I should have been petrified. This was my sister, of whose intellect I’ve always been afraid and jealous. What if I hated it and told her “the truth” and our relationship, which had survived some bad years there back in adolescence but was definitely on an upswing in recent decades, collapsed around me? Or what if I loved it and was so consumed by all the envy and jealousy I go around trying to pretend I don’t have that I couldn’t talk to her? There was no way, I should have realized, that this wouldn’t end badly. Liza and I come from a clan that has historically mixed business with family—to disastrous results: both my grandfather and my father started companies with their brothers, and both died estranged from those brothers. Getting involved with Liza and her novel had a good chance of becoming another version of Bleak House.

  Except it didn’t. In fact, it turned out to be more like a remake of Rich and Famous. Here was an opportunity for both of us to play to our strengths and stick to our prescribed roles. Liza, the artist, had written the book, and I, the more commercially minded critic, could help her get it into shape, get it to an editor, and get it published. She was happy to have the help and I was thrilled to be useful: it was a match that could have been made in film heaven.

  Of course, it helped that when I read the novel—Playing Botticelli, it’s called; it was published in 2000—I just plain loved it. Well, okay, I had a couple of problems with it—like, I remember, some feeling that the love interest in the book wasn’t completely believable and that he needed to be redrawn—but they were the kinds of minor problems that (a) she could easily fix if she wanted to or (b) I wouldn’t feel dissed if she didn’t. And she, for her part, was a willing listener: I remember her pronouncing me “a genius” when I suggested that if she made the hero a farrier (a guy who shoes horses, if you didn’t know; like Godiva Blue, Botticelli’s heroine, Liza lives a rural life), the love affair would make more sense. When she’d made the changes, I started talking it up to editors and agents I knew, as did others of her friends, and eventually it landed with a woman I’d worked with for many years. The book was published, and we both ended up with what we wanted: she was a bona fide novelist, and I had been the successful helpmeet. Any jealousy I might have felt was mitigated by a sense of a tiny bit of ownership.

  Looking back on the Playing Botticelli period now, I think it should be taught as a test case in writerly sisterhood. Liza had waited until she was truly ready to let someone else read it, and when she said “Tell me the truth,” she actually meant it. Ever the little sister, I entered into the whole thing with the desire to please her, but also to show that I was actually an independent smart person whose years on the reader end of the publishing business might be of use to her. At her book party, let’s just say, we were both beaming.

  Things don’t always work out so well, of course, partly because we’re not all tuned in to our real feelings and partly because, even with unpublished books, timing is important. A friend of mine last winter asked me to read his manuscript, which was scheduled to come out in the spring. “Please be honest,” he said, “tell me what you really think.”

  I took the manuscript home for the weekend. I dutifully read it through and (thankfully) laughed where I was supposed to and didn’t where I wasn’t. I liked the book a lot, although I did think it took too long to get started and that he should probably prune the opening two chapters. Knowing my friend to be the thin-skinned, anxious type—did I mention he is a professional writer?—I agonized about what to do. Should I tell him I thought the opening was slow?

  “Tell me what you really think,” he had said. So on Monday morning, I did. “It’s great, it’s hilarious, I love it,” I told him. “But if I were you, I’d cut back on the opening a little.”

  Silence on the other end of the line. “I can’t really do that,” he said. “It’s in copyedit.”

  In a masterstroke of timing, my friend had given me his manuscript to read when it was already bought, accepted, and in the later stages of the publishing process.

  I was annoyed, to say the least. “You set me up!” I said. “How dare you give me something that’s completely finished and then demand that I tell you what I really think!”

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he conceded.

  I thought, of course, that he meant he shouldn’t have given me the manuscript so late. I felt vindicated. And then it was his time to tell me “the truth”—a truth that most writers don’t have the nerve to say out loud, even to the most well-meaning and wisely
critical friends.

  “I just wanted you to say it was brilliant,” he said. “I didn’t want you to tell me what you really think.”

  December 30 What Did I Do?7

  You’d think that by now I’d know better. You’d think that after a year of compiling lists and packing for trips and trying to control my reading life, I’d have figured out that it is uncontrollable. Still, as John Belushi used to say (and as Leo and I often say to each other, in one of the few Saturday Night Live catchphrases we ever use), “But noooooooo.” I’m just back from a few days with the family at Liza’s, and once again I’d gotten the book thing all wrong.

  Every year for the past two decades, I’ve gone—either alone or with friends and now with Charley and Leo—to Liza’s Georgia farm to celebrate Christmas the way only two Jewish girls can, which is to say extravagantly. As kids, we’d never observed the holiday,but as wives of Christians and mothers of kids who celebrate every festival, Jewish or not, that involves food and/or gifts, we go wild. For several days, we bake our brains out, decorate the house and tree with Santa Clauses and red balls and ornaments we’ve collected over the years, and generally “make merry.” We plan and execute an elaborate Christmas Eve dinner, to which Liza invites some of her local friends, after which we all sit up late drinking and playing games of our own idiosyncratic development. (It’s no accident that Liza’s novel is called Playing Botticelli, referring to a word game we played as kids.) Then, when we’re all too groggy to talk, we load up a brown paper bag with gifts from Santa and fill the stockings and make sure we leave a plate of cookies and a half-drunk glass of milk for the children to find in the morning. Usually, my mother comes up from Key West for the festivities; sometimes one of my brothers comes, too, and on occasion one of Liza’s old friends from school. We’re pretty busy, but there always seems to be time to lie around by the fire that Liza’s husband, Rick, keeps burning all day, which means, of course, a lot of reading.

  So here was my plan: I was going to end the year the way I’d tried to start it—by reading and enjoying Ted Heller’s Funnymen. It seemed the perfect choice to meet the major requirements. I’d be spending the next days in a jokey, talkative, histrionic group of people—did I mention my mother was going to be there?—some of whom actually remember the Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin days and would surely get the jokes. Even better, finishing the book that I had started at the beginning of the year appealed to my well-documented love of narrative: reading Funnymen now would complete the arc.

  Except, guess what? I couldn’t do it. “What’s the matter with you?” Leo asked me the first night, after I’d picked the book up and put it down at least half a dozen times. “Can’t you just start where you left off?” But of course, I couldn’t: after a year of other authors’ pages and plots, I had only a vague memory of Funnymen ’s first hundred pages, so starting in on page 101 would be like walking into a movie halfway through. On the other hand, the thought of starting from the beginning again was just too daunting. Read something over again, just to get back to where you started? That seemed a ridiculous waste of time. Besides, it almost felt like Funnymen was cursed; like a new restaurant on the site of an old restaurant that never had any patrons, it had too much unhappy history. I didn’t feel comfortable going there.

  You may have noticed by now that in all this year of reading, I’ve never told you about tackling a book of short stories. That’s because—as much as I love pieces by, say, Andre Dubus or Alice Munro when I encounter them singly—I almost never succeed in finishing a whole collection. “Why is that?” I recently asked a friend, who, like many others, has said that short stories are her favorite form of fiction. She told me I had a commitment problem. “When you’re beginning a book like a novel, you’re entering a writer’s world,” she told me. “And that takes commitment. With short pieces, you have to make that commitment five or ten separate times in a quick row.” Well, Funnymen is a problem for me on both counts: it’s a novel I have to recommit to, for one thing, and for another, it is written in an oral-history style that is short-story-ish, lots of little pieces, so I have to recommit many times. And that was too intimidating just then.

  Still, I really wanted to read this book, and so I set out, the next morning, to find a way into it once and for all. Have you ever been in this desperate state? It seems absurd, really. What’s the big deal, I wanted to say, just put the book down, just as you put down Cold Mountain and White Teeth and that impenetrable Milan Kundera. But wait! my better self responds. You loved Slab Rat and you have liked what you’ve read: before you give up entirely, try the skip-around method of reading, the one where you read the end first and then work your way back to the middle, if not the beginning.

  For the first thirty or so years of my life, I would have called this cheating. It was against the rules, and I was nothing if not a follower of rules. To wit: I’m in the fourth grade, and the teacher hands us each a sheet of paper with a dozen questions sandwiched between spaces for the answers. At the top of the page, there’s a space to write your name, and then a box marked “Instructions.” “Before you write anything, read through the whole test,” it says.

  Dutifully I get out my number 2 pencil and begin curling the bottom of my braid over my left index finger. I read through the questions and maybe, I confess, doodle some notes to myself about how I will answer them later. (Who was President at the time of the Louisiana Purchase? Jefferson?) I read down through the page, turn it over, and read to the end, where it says: “Good work! Thanks for following the instructions. Do not write anything on this paper except your name at the top and then give it to your teacher.” I look around at the other kids, most of whom are filling in the white spaces on their sheets with their newly learned and very labored cursive handwriting. Uh-oh, I think smugly. Some body isn’t following the rules. I, on the other hand, go back and erase my doodles, sign my name, and present the otherwise unmarked paper proudly to the teacher.

  I bring this story up not because I think it makes me look so great—in fact, it makes me out to be the kind of Goody Two-shoes teacher-pleaser I was, but am not proud of—or even because, in retrospect, there’s something sadistic about the whole incident in the first place. I think I retain such a strong memory of this test because it was one of my first, and very profound, lessons about reading: You have to start at the beginning and get to the end before you’re allowed to comment on what came in between. There’s an order to these things that you must respect. Beginnings, middles, ends are meant to be beginnings, middles, and ends: confuse them at your own peril.

  Little did I know then, or until very recently, that people skip around in books all the time. If I’d thought about it, I would have said only professionals—agents or editors who have major time issues attached to their reading—can be forgiven for doing it. But a couple of years ago I discovered that even my serious sister jumps ahead in a book she reads for pleasure. I found this out by accident, after Liza had been visiting me in New York and had borrowed my copy of Allegra Goodman’s great novel Kaaterskill Falls to read on the trip home. When she called to check in later that night, she mentioned she’d left the book on the plane. “But it’s okay,” she said, obviously glossing over the fact that I might have wanted the book back, “I was almost finished, and besides, I’d already read the end.” Since then, I’ve been asking other friends if they ever read out of order, and most, some sheepishly, have said that they do. Why? “Because sometimes I get so anxious from following the plot that I can’t concentrate on the language,” says one. “Once I know what’s going to happen, I can read more patiently.”

  Frankly, this sounds weird to me, but not quite as weird as the friend who told me he reads backward only in mysteries because he “hates suspense.” In my desperation, I tried it with Funnymen. Still no luck: Funnymen in reverse order was as hard to get into in front of a Georgia fire as in front of a Vermont one. There was just something about the rambunctious, back-and-forth voices of performers, agents, and o
ther vaudevillians that just didn’t compel me to keep reading, forth or back. Ted Heller is still, in my book, a good novelist, and I’ll be first in line at the store when his next book comes out, but for now, at least, we’re parting ways.

  The irony isn’t lost on me that this is the second time this year that I had to resolve to give up on Funnymen. Even more striking: it feels like the second hundredth time I’ve come face to face with the fact that my best-laid plans rarely end up completed. If I knew it at the beginning of the year, I’ve learned it ten times over: reading is organic and fluid and pretty unpredictable, based as much on mood and location and timing as anything else. If a book is “good,” that doesn’t mean you’ll want to read it, and if it’s “bad,” that doesn’t mean you’ll pass it by. I only have to glance at my original list to see that, in spades. Why didn’t I read Infinite Jest as I said I would? Because Charley played baseball and because Leo and I had a fight. Because I was feeling nostalgic for my father and visiting with my mother. Because one of my new friends lent me a novel. I couldn’t have predicted that those things would happen, let alone when, so I couldn’t plan my reading list around them. But my subconscious mind—the part I’ve heard writers call the lizard brain—could and did: it told me to reach for Anne Lamott or Edith Wharton or Calvin Trillin instead. And if I’ve learned one thing in my decades on earth, it’s this: Don’t argue with your lizard brain; it knows you better than you know yourself.

  There was some freedom in this realization, I must admit; it wasn’t unlike the way I felt all those months ago when I just gave up on Ulysses and Invisible Man et al. and went out to buy clothes. And as I did then, I had the feeling that if I could just relax into the fact that I wasn’t reading, something would present itself to me as clearly as Bird by Bird did last spring. But what? I prowled Liza’s shelves—but to no avail, even though there were plenty of titles in English in this particular rural home. While I still think one needs a book to protect oneself from intense intrusions of the familial or any other kind, maybe, just maybe, I would get through this family holiday without a book to protect or distract me. Besides, I still had a lot of cooking to do.