by Ronald Rice
This brings us to David Sedaris’s appearance in Portland. David is the only person who’s ever given me good advice on what to do at a public reading. Glorious advice.
In the interest of fuller disclosure, David gave me this advice in Barcelona where he and I were spending a week. We were there with Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and Heidi Julavits, doing a week of public readings and media interviews at something called “The Institute of North American Culture.” Rather a deep-pockets project that prompted Michael to the conclusion that the CIA was funding the whole shebang and our real agenda was to promote goodwill for America, not an unlikely idea after September 11, 2001. Anyway, it was in Barcelona that David and I went shopping one afternoon.
At an open-air flea market, I was perusing a box filled with antique chandelier crystals, silently debating whether or not to spend 200 euros on a deck of swastika-emblazoned playing cards issued by the Nazis—were they an eternal totem of everlasting evil, or just in poor taste?—when apropos of nothing, David said, “I can’t believe you’re really gay.”
In response, I pointed out the fact that I was wearing pleated pants and a pink silk shirt. I was in Barcelona with my partner of many years—as was he. And I was haggling over eighteenth-century chandelier crystals to hang on my Christmas tree. I said, “The only thing that could make me more gay at this moment would be a cock in my mouth.” And David laughed. And not just a polite laugh, he brayed.
I still marvel at that moment: I made David Sedaris laugh!
Beyond that, while we shopped, he told me to never read from the current book while on tour. Always read from the next one. Doing so builds reader awareness of your upcoming work. It rewards the audience members by giving them something exclusive. And it beta-tests the new material to see if it’s actually as funny as you imagined.
As if to illustrate the last point, the next time I saw David was in Portland. He was telling an anecdote at a public reading. In front of hundreds of rapt listeners he described sitting in the lunchroom of a medical examiner’s office, at a table of people eating food. Talking shop, cramming sandwiches and potato chips into their mouths, they were watching an autopsy in the next room through a large window. The subject was a dead boy, 8 or 9 years old. At the book event David worked his audience, describing the dead child’s blonde hair and unmarked body. The boy looked perfect, as if he were just asleep. He’d fallen on his bicycle, and now he was dead. Among the readers present, you could’ve heard a pin drop as David described in slow-motion detail how the attending physician cut across the child’s forehead and peeled aside that lovely face the way you’d peel an orange.
Among the lunchroom observers, someone pointed out the stripped skull and the exposed, magenta-colored musculature. His mouth still full of half-chewed tuna sandwich, this man said, “See that, there? That color of red? That’s the color I want to paint our rec room.”
Everything about the story should’ve worked. The setup, the pacing, the payoff. David Sedaris is a brilliant storyteller. But this was Portland, Oregon, the capital of Earnest Empathetic Sincerity. At the punch line, no one laughed. Hundreds of faces just stared, their eyes brimming with tears. A few sniffed loudly. OK, one person laughed. I laughed. Give me a break—it was a hideously funny story, but the beta test had failed. Needless to say it did not go into his next book. And at the insensitive braying those hundreds of weeping heads swiveled to glare at me.
David had laughed at my joke in Barcelona. I’d laughed at his in Portland. And now all those readers who loved him had someone safe they could hate.
And, no, I didn’t buy the Nazi poker deck.
Powell’s City of Books is located at 1005 West Burnside Street in Portland, Oregon.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK is the author of Fight Club as well as 12 other novels and two books of nonfiction, all of them national bestsellers. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Ann Patchett
McLean & Eakin Booksellers, PETOSKEY, MICHIGAN
I imagine there are plenty of people who travel around the country going to baseball games, and that those people can tell you everything there is to know about the motels near the various stadiums and the quality of the chili dogs. What they know of America’s cities they know insofar as it relates to the game: the convenience of the parking, the freshness of the popcorn. Over time the things that make us travel can also give us a certain kind of expertise. It could be amusement parks, Civil War battlefields, marinas, museums.
For me it’s independent bookstores.
Most of my travel is bookstore-based. I am a novelist, and when I’m not at home writing a book I tend to be sitting at a small table in the back of a bookstore trying to sell it. I can tell you who has the best selection of birthday cards, who is still serious about poetry, who’s got unusual coffee-table books. It isn’t just that I dip in and out of bookstores. I stay there for hours looking at the inventory. At the end of the night I’ll go to some hotel I won’t remember, eat dinner alone at the bar, and then the next morning I’ll fly to another city to see another bookstore. I can remember the fiction sections, the new-releases table; I just can’t remember which store was in which town. Like the baseball fan, the details of anything outside the parking lot kind of blur together. Except in this particular story.
The first time I was sent to Petoskey, Michigan, was in 2001. I wasn’t happy about it. It was sandwiched into my itinerary among cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, L.A. For this store I would have to fly to Detroit, take another flight to Traverse City, rent a car, and drive an hour and a half, give a reading, sign some books, get back in the rental car and do the whole thing in reverse. It was such a tight trip I wasn’t even going to get the dinner at the bar. “It’s supposed to be a really great bookstore,” my publicist said. I said that I didn’t care. I had already seen really great bookstores, loads of them. She told me I was going anyway.
Here’s a universal truth: The really great places are often the ones that are a drag to get to, and they have been able to remain great places for exactly that reason. Try going to the Spear-O-Wigwam ranch in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming (rutted dirt road, straight up) or Isle au Haut off the coast of Maine (you arrive on the mail boat). Petoskey isn’t that challenging, but it’s certainly off the beaten path. I drove my rental car down two-lane highways that were riddled with fruit stands, vegetable stands, pie stands, all of them nestled in orchards. I thought it was the loveliest drive I had ever been on, and then I was in Petoskey. The houses were wide of porch and steep of gable, many of them painted in the colors favored by seventh-grade girls. Petunias dangled from window boxes. Below the town the sun spread its diamond light over Lake Michigan, over the boats and the swimmers and the shore. The small downtown was a throwback to some simpler idea of American vacations, a couple of ice cream stores that sold taffy and fudge, a gift shop with T-shirts in the window that said LAKE. The world was leafy and dappled, quiet and cool. Within ten minutes I started to wonder how I could spend the rest of my life in Petoskey.
Say that you’ve fallen in love both unexpectedly and hard, only to discover that the object of your affection is a graduate of the Cordon Bleu and plays all the Chopin Nocturnes from memory and has a trust fund the size of Harvard’s endowment. Just when you thought that nothing could be better, it got so much better. I walked into the bookstore of this dreamy little town and at that moment all the other bookstores I’d known in my life fell away.
Julie Norcross founded McLean & Eakin Booksellers in 1992, naming it for her two grandmothers. Like the town she came from, I imagined she had a long history of people falling in love with her at first sight. She was one of those supremely competent individuals who would have made an excellent pioneer. She could have built a sod house in a pinch, but she could also tell a joke, drink a martini, run a business. Her son Matt Norcross worked at the store as well, a fellow as charming and book-savvy as his mother. A family business named for family members—what’s not to like about that? The dispositio
n of the store was one of warmth and comfortable intelligence. It was the favorite sweater of bookstores. The books at McLean & Eakin were arranged to beckon, and there were plenty of big chairs to fall into once you heeded their call. It was the kind of store where I could happily spend a summer.
But on that particular day I only had minutes before I had to get back in the car. Back at the Traverse City airport I bought a paper cup full of cherries (in the airport!) and ate them while I waited for the plane. I cursed the world that would come between me and the place I loved, and I swore an oath on my cup of cherries that I would return. I’m a big one for keeping my oaths. With every book I wrote after that, I said to my publicist that McLean & Eakin was at the top of my personal wish list. (For anyone who thinks that authors get to decide where they’re going on book tour, think again. Writers are more like soldiers: We get our marching orders and we go.) The next time I went back to my favorite bookstore, there was a wonderful new girl working there named Jessilynn. I was crazy about Jessilynn, and I wasn’t the only one. With my next novel, Matt and Jessilynn were dating. The last time I went back, they were married. Julie had retired and they now owned the store.
Which is all to say that life marches on, and yet at the same time I can’t help but feel that in Petoskey, some essential decency, some beauty, found a way to stand still. Julie Norcross made a brilliant bookstore, Matt and Jessilynn Norcross burnished it to something even brighter. Every customer shaped the terrain with their own interests, taking books away, requesting what was missing. The tourists come all summer long, wanting books to read on the shores of the lake, and the regulars come in all winter, wanting books to read in front of the fire as the snow banks up against the windows. The Norcrosses are there to help them all.
The best bookstores I can think of are the ones based in communities of readers. Petoskey is that sort of town, and it makes McLean & Eakin that kind of store. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and the store has made the town. It seems possible. Frankly, it is enough of a bookstore to make the place a destination all by itself; without the lake or the pie or the gabled houses, I would go to Petoskey just to buy books (and I say that as someone who owns her own bookstore now). It is just so thrilling to be around people who read, people who will pull a book off the shelf and say, “This is the one you want.” People who want to know what I’m reading and will tell me what they’re reading so that while we talk, stacks of books begin to form around us. It’s my own personal idea of heaven. It is also, in this age of the overnighted electronic handheld, a bit of Americana you aren’t going to see everywhere. Like the town of Petoskey itself, a very good bookstore feels a little nostalgic, a place out of time. Look at all those people looking at books! It is at once both rare and beautifully ordinary. I can get choked up just thinking about it. But then, that’s my job, the reason I go out to see this country in the first place. Books and bookstores are really the only things I can speak to with authority. And so I say to you absolutely: McLean & Eakin, Petoskey, Michigan—go.
ANN PATCHETT is the author of six novels and two works of nonfiction, including Bel Canto, Truth & Beauty, and State of Wonder. She lives in Nashville, Tennesee, where she is the co-owner of Parnassus Books.
Edith Pearlman
Brookline Booksmith, BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS
Despite the claims of the righteous, reading is not a virtue—“a commendable quality or trait,” as Webster would have it, or “conformity to a standard of right.” It’s not a vice, either, though teachers urging children toward books might profitably suggest that it is the favorite hobby of pirates and lion tamers. But, really, reading is a simple addiction, curable only by death—ours, or the world’s. Those of us in its grip turn our attention away from truly virtuous activities—writing thank-you notes, for instance, or washing the kitchen floor. It is, in Philip Roth’s words, a “deep and singular pleasure”—and we damn well won’t give it up.
My bookstore, Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts, caters to our habit. The Booksmith stands in the center of town among other pleasure palaces (sports bars, delis serving chopped liver to die from, cigar stores, vendors of dubious videos). The place is full of light—sunlight on a good day, fluorescence on a gloomy one; the enlightenment of scholarship in the Philosophy section, lighthouses in Travel, stars in Cosmology. Its generous hours accommodate those who need a late-night fix. There is a children’s section where some old party is usually sitting on a rocker provided by the Booksmith, reading to kids on the floor and kids on her lap. Most of them she’s never met before.
There’s a used-book cellar downstairs. You clamber down in search of a particular volume, fail to find it, and instead encounter four other books you’ve been meaning to tackle for years. There’s a mini lecture space where visiting writers read sometimes to overflowing crowds, sometimes to half a dozen fans and one slightly malodorous local who dropped in for forty winks. Brookline Booksmith tolerates this variety of audiences; it realizes that the popularity of a book does not necessarily indicate its worth. Its salespeople, addicts themselves, can direct you to the book you crave or order it for you if it’s not on hand. Patrons are diverse. Diversity is not the Booksmith’s mission; it just happens—the town is home to people of all ages, ethnic groups, skin colors, degrees of education, degrees of craziness. All are welcome here, as long as they keep their voices reasonably low and their clothing mostly on.
I have been a patron for decades. I walk in, glance at the newspaper rack near the door, and learn from its headlines that the world, though a little worse than yesterday, is still spinning. Off to the bookshelves I wander, to sniff familiar substances or try new ones, all in grave solitude. Oh, I can greet people if I’m feeling friendly (rarely); if I’m feeling reclusive (often), I can slide behind a rack of H.G. Wells novels and achieve instant invisibility.
But if the blessed bookstore itself ever disappears, I will know without the aid of newspapers that the world has finally come to an end.
EDITH PEARLMAN has published four collections of short stories. The latest, Binocular Vision, won the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story and the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
Jack Pendarvis
Square Books, OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI
One night my wife and I walked into the City Grocery restaurant and there was D-Day from Animal House having dinner. Naturally, we sent over a drink.
After he finished eating, the actor came over to our table. He was graceful and courtly, especially for a man I knew mainly for driving his motorcycle up the stairs and playing the overture from William Tell on his Adam’s apple.
He said he was passing through town.
“I’ve been enjoying your apricot-colored bookstore,” he said.
That threw me for a second. Did he mean Square Books? He had to mean Square Books. It’s the heart of Oxford, Mississippi. It’s the only game in town. If something happened to it, everything else would tumble into the hole.
But I don’t know what color Square Books is. I vaguely associate it with marshmallow circus peanuts, but walking home after dinner (Square Books is right up the block from City Grocery), I had to admit that D-Day from Animal House was closer to the truth. Maybe. Yes, the surface of Square Books is considerably darker than the disagreeable candy in question, and imbued with a rich, mysterious glow, but I still maintain there is a hint of circus peanut in the soft and bumpy texture of the building, so cool and refreshing to the touch, not that I’ve ever hugged or kissed it or tried to make sweet respectful love to it, not sober I haven’t.
I’d like to take a bite out of Square Books. It’s nutritious and delicious.
How do I tell you about it? A writer needs a little detachment. William Wordsworth would not approve of my desire to eat my subject, but he’s dead. I have no “emotion recollected in tranquility” when it comes to Square Books.
It is my tranquility, that’s the problem. I live there. I can’t write ab
out my internal organs either. If my brain stopped working my legs would automatically walk up the street to Square Books. If I miss a day I start feeling shaky. When I die my fleshly body will appear levitating among the paperbacks, dotted with stigmata and exuding a pleasant fragrance.
What’s so great about Square Books?
There are books. That’s always nice, especially in a bookstore.
What else can I say with certainty? It’s two stories tall. But that’s wrong. Between the ground floor and the second level is a strange half-space where all the spirituality and erotica in Mississippi has been shelved in case of emergency.
I teach a few classes at the local university and I have my office hours on the top floor of Square Books, a charming area that mitigates the grotesque prospect of listening to the thoughts and feelings of young people. There are tables and chairs. You can get coffee or even a scoop of ice cream. On my birthday one year the owner Richard Howorth voluntarily made me a root beer float and would accept no payment in return. I don’t expect he’ll do the same for you. He didn’t get where he is today by giving away free root beer floats.
Where is he today? He used to be the mayor of the town. That’s how much our townspeople love books, and how much Richard has done for us in return. President Obama appointed him to the Tennessee Valley Authority, but I don’t know what that proves. It’s a bit out of our orbit. Once you walk in the door of Square Books, you’re in a self-contained cosmos with its own government and physical laws. One day I saw Lyn, the manager, sorting through a pile of tiny, broken doll arms.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to put these in a gum machine,” she said.