Small Wonder

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Slowly that pile did grow. Too slowly, I feared at first, for when I'd conquered nearly half my assigned reading, it still seemed very small. I am too picky, I thought. I should relax my standards. But how? You don't "lower the bar" on enlightenment. I couldn't change my heart, so I didn't count the stories in my shrine, I just let them be what they were. Cautiously, though, I made another pile called "Almost, maybe." If push came to shove, I would reread these later and try to be more moved by them.

  If it sounds as if I'm a terribly demanding reader, I am. I make no apologies. Long before I ever heard the words, "We're going to try an emergency landing at the nearest airport that can read our black box" (I swear this really happened; that pilot should go to charm school), it had already dawned on me that I wasn't going to live forever. This means I may never get through the list of great books I want to read. Forget about bad ones, or even moderately good ones. With Middlemarch and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the world, a person should squander her reading time on fashionably ironic books about nothing much? I am almost out of minutes! I'm patient with most corners of my life, but put a book in my hands and suddenly I remind myself of a harrowing dating-game shark, long in the tooth and looking for love right now, thank you, get out of my way if you're just going to waste my time and don't really want kids or the long-term commitment. I give a novel thirty pages and if it's not by that point talking to me of till-death-do-us-part, then sorry, buster, this date's over. I've chucked many half-finished books into the donation box.

  You may be thinking right now that you're glad I was never your writing instructor, and a few former students of mine would agree with you. Once in a workshop after I'd repeatedly explained that brevity is the soul of everything, writing-wise, and I was still getting fifty-page stories that should have been twenty-page stories, I announced, "Starting tomorrow I will read twenty-five pages of any story you give me, and then I'll stop. If you think you have the dazzling skill to keep me hanging on for pages twenty-six-plus because my life won't be complete without them, just go ahead and try."

  I'm sorry to admit I was such a harpy, but this is a critical lesson for writers. We are nothing if we can't respect our readers. It's audacious, really, to send a new piece of writing out into the world (which already contains Middlemarch) asking readers to sit down, shut up, ignore kids or work or whatever important irons they have in the fire and listen instead to me. Not just for a minute but for hours, days. Whatever I've got to say had better be important, worth every minute you're giving it, with interest.

  Probably the greatest challenge of the short-story form is to get a story launched and landed efficiently with a whole, worthwhile journey in between. The launch is apparently easier than the landing; I've been entranced by many a first paragraph of a tale that ended with such an unfulfilling thud as to send me scrambling around looking for a next page that simply wasn't. Maybe the average American doesn't read short stories simply because of a distaste for this kind of a ride. A good short story cannot be simply Lit Lite. It should pull off the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces. If all short fiction did this perfectly, or even partially, then Fred would surely read more of them.

  For me to love a work of fiction, it must survive my harpy eye on all accounts: It will tell me something remarkable, it will be beautifully executed, and it will be nested in truth. The latter I mean literally; I can't abide fiction that fails to get its facts straight. I've tossed aside stories because of botched Spanish or French phrases uttered by putative native speakers who were not supposed to be toddlers or illiterates. More often, I've stopped reading books in which birds sang on the wrong continents or full moons appeared two weeks apart (no, it wasn't set on Jupiter). I am not sure whether the preponderance of scientific howlers in fiction derives from the fact that most writers don't take science courses in school, or if I just notice them more because I did take the science courses. In any case people learn from what they read, they trust in words, and this is not a responsibility to take lightly. Scientific illiteracy is a problem I care about, no matter whether it comes from inadequate science instruction or from nonscientists' playing fast and loose with facts. Literature should inform as well as enlighten, and first, do no harm.

  I ask a lot from my reading--ask of it, in fact, what I ask of myself when I sit down to write, and that is to get straight down to the task and carve something hugely important into a small enough amulet to fit inside a reader's most sacred psychic pocket. I don't care what it's about, so long as it's not trivial. I once heard a writer declare from a lectern, "I write about the mysteries of the human heart, which is the only thing a fiction writer has any business addressing." And I thought to myself, Excuse me? I had recently begun thinking of myself as a fiction writer and was laboring under the illusion that I could address any mystery that piqued me, including but not limited to the human heart, human risk factors, human rights, and why some people practically have to scrape flesh from their bones to pay the rent while others have it paid for them all their merry days, and how frequently the former are women raising children by themselves, even though that wasn't the original plan. The business of fiction is to probe the tender spots of an imperfect world, which is where I live, write, and read. I want to know about the real price of fast food in China, who's paying it, and why. I want to know what it's like in Chernobyl all these years later. Do you? I've learned the answers from short stories.

  When I look back now on the three months that launched a hundred travails of my heart and in the course of which I read more than a hundred stories, I understand that the reading was really not just a chore piled onto an unbelievably overscheduled piece of my life. Rather, it was a kind of life raft through it. While the people around me in Gate B-22 swore irritably through their cell phones, I was with a man in an Iranian prison who survived isolation by weaving a rug in his mind. The night after my teenager and I returned from her friend's funeral and she asked me how life could be so unfair, I lay down on my bed to read of the pain and healing of a child from Harlem. The stories were, for me, both a distraction and an anchor. Good fictional tales will always be my pleasure, my companionship, my salvation. I hope they're also yours.

  Marking a Passage

  In 1958, when I was hardly yet a dot on any map, a new bookstore opened its doors at the eastern end of the main street of what would one day become my hometown, Tucson, Arizona. The bookstore filled its shelves, and customers happily bought what was there, then asked for more, until the Book Mark came to assume the higgledy-piggledy atmosphere I associate with old London bookshops: high bookshelves stacked even higher on top with oversize stock lying sideways; sliding ladders shoved up and down narrow aisles crammed with every kind of wisdom. And always, of course, the friendly staff waiting to help track it down. One of them was a tiny woman named Anne whose memory presaged computers. She could identify just about anything ever published, declare it in stock, and scramble up a ladder for it, hanging up there near the ceiling fixtures and chattering away about what else this author had written, while your heart quailed lest she fall and dash her frail bones.

  Twenty-five years later, when I was still on nobody's map but my own, I had claimed that marvelous bookstore as my territory: I met friends there, attended my first literary readings, gained a little confidence at debating art and politics, gave and received recommendations for the obscure but spectacular first novel that would have to be read before anyone's life went one step farther. Once in this bookish meeting place I even began a star-crossed love affair behind the discreetly turned spines of Virginia Woolf and Leo Tolstoy.

  And then came the year 1988, when, unbelievably (to me, anyway), I was about to publish an obscure first novel of my own. My New York publisher turned out a few thousand copies, and we all hoped most of them would sell before it faded out of print. This is the way of first novels, which aren't generally greeted with trumpets. Mostly they are greeted with yawns. That is why most writers starve, or else have day jobs
.

  I was lucky, though. I had a guardian angel, a tiny one named Anne, who loved my book and made it her mission to shove it into the hands of everyone she thought would like it. This meant pretty much every unarmed human being who entered the Book Mark, and some who were merely hanging around in the parking lot. I had other guardian angels, too, it turns out: booksellers all over the country who discovered my novel and sold it "by hand," as they say in the business.

  Booksellers proceeded to change my life, and they have changed it since then in some ways they've probably never imagined. My name, for instance, used to be a disaster that nobody could spell. You don't just blurt out a name like mine, because it leaves people breathless and staring as if you'd made an inappropriate noise. For about thirty years I never said my name without spelling it: "Kingsolver--K-I-N-G-S as in Sam-O-L-V as in Victor-E-R--yes, ma'am, just like it sounds." That's twenty-six syllables. I still have to do that sometimes, but not at the library, no indeed, and not when I call to place an order at a bookstore. "Kingsolver, like the author?" they'll ask. "Any relation?" And I'll say yes, I think so. If I'm feeling sassy I'll say, "Yes, I'm married to her husband." How can I measure what this means in my life, to have a last name that's been reduced from twenty-six syllables to three?

  And that's nothing at all compared with the joy of working at a job I love. I'm finally pretty confident that I have quit the last of the long string of day jobs I held for so many years to support my writing, and now--thirteen years later--I don't think any of my old bosses is expecting me back. Each day as I sit down to work on writing a book, I begin by laying my hands gently across my keyboard and offering up my silent thanks to readers, to the people who publish books, and to the people who sell them--the people without whom I would not get to do what I do.

  When my first novel came out in its three-or-four-thousand-copy edition, my publisher and I crossed our fingers for luck, because that's how it is for little first novels with funny names on their spines that nobody can spell. After my guardian angels began to press it into people's hands, it went back to print, then back to print again, and while it didn't break any records for a first novel, it got read, all over the place. I earned enough royalties so I didn't have to go back to my day job to feed my baby and keep up with the mortgage. Instead, I got to stay at my desk and write a second book, then a third and a fourth. I finished each one with the help of booksellers who were rooting for my career. Now the copies of my books out in the world number in many millions, a lot of them in languages I can't read. This strikes me as a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes.

  Ten years after that first precarious launch of a first novel, my friends at the Book Mark asked me to give the debut reading of my eighth book, The Poisonwood Bible, at their store, and I told them I couldn't imagine any better place to launch it. I stood on a raised platform in their parking lot, surrounded by hundreds of cheering Tucsonans, and felt a little like Evita Peron. I swore I would never forget that day or the people there who had first guided readers to my words, and to whom I knew, absolutely, I owed my career. I thought of them as family. When my second daughter was born I sent them a birth announcement, which they proudly displayed.

  Then, the February following that marvelous coronation in their parking lot, they sent me a much less joyful announcement: After forty years, the Book Mark was passing away. Tucsonans' buying habits were changing, it seemed. They were purchasing through the Internet, hunting for bargains, and drawn by the lure of chain stores.

  Over the next weeks I determined to go in often to say good-bye to my favorite aisles and buy more books from their emptying shelves. The store had to sell as much of its stock as it could, I realized, but I dreaded that on my visits I would feel as if I were sifting through the goods of a dying relative. Nevertheless, I made myself march down to my bookstore with the same cheer and courage that my old friend Anne, now deceased, had once brought to the project of hand-selling my first novel. I hugged each of my friends behind the counter and told them: I can't bear this passing.

  I couldn't, and still can't, because the scene is repeating itself in cities everywhere as other small and large independents announce their final closing sales. I'm grateful, of course, that books are still sold elsewhere, in other stores including the national chains, and I know that in some small towns that have never before had the privilege of having a real bookstore, the nationally run stores now turning up may be a godsend. I appreciate the reading series and book clubs they have organized where such things have never happened before. The big stores have their place; I'd just be happiest if it weren't in place of the other kind. I have a bone to pick with any behemoth if its strategy includes purposefully locating close to, and outcompeting, the neighborhood shops by offering discounts on its most popular stock. I am uncomfortable with taking advantage of a bargain if the store's size allowed it to snag that book for a reduced price from a publisher that didn't offer the same deal to the independents. (Independent booksellers have challenged this practice in court.) Publishers also subsidize certain books by giving "co-op money" to all booksellers; the chains get these subsidies on a scale that determines which books will move forward into the large, front-of-the-store displays. This practice means that people in many cities at once will hardly be able to walk in the door of their nearest big bookstore without tripping over a stack of the new Stephen King or--yes--the latest Barbara Kingsolver.

  I am stunned and flattered to find myself so prominently displayed, and deeply grateful for support I've received from any and all bookselling quarters. But I'm humbled by what I know of my roots: I wasn't always up there, front and center. Once I was the name no one could spell, on the spine of a book that could have gone quietly out of print while its author went back to free-lance science writing or professional (but cheerless) housecleaning. There but for the grace of my guardian angels go I. If I were trying to launch a writing career today, I would be launching it into very different waters. I could not possibly have as much support from independent booksellers as I did back then, simply because there are not as many of them now. I'd be taking more of my chances in the chains, as an impossible name on the spine of a little lost book somewhere in the back of the store--a needle in a brightly lit haystack. I can't be sure I'd be a writer today if that's what I was up against, starting out. What I'm sure of is this: Mine would have been much more of an uphill struggle without my legions of bookseller-promoters, and I would not have been able to write as many books. Some of the titles I've given the world would not be in it. There would be no glorious launching of The Poisonwood Bible in the parking lot of the Book Mark; there would be no Book Mark, and no Poisonwood Bible. I don't like this grim re-visioning of my life as it might have been, but it's the truth.

  It's not only starving artists who should care about what we're losing when an independent bookstore dies. This is not about retail; it's about people who serve as community organizers in places where you can always find kindred spirits, a good read, maybe even love behind the spine of Virginia Woolf. A store where you can be sure no one will say to you, as happened to someone I know when he went into a place I shall not name, asking for Catcher in the Rye: "Um, check the sports aisle?"

  Putting an extra dollar or two back into our hometown's economy, rather than sending it off to a distant, faceless conglomerate, is worth what it costs for so many reasons. Holding on to our independent booksellers is nothing less than a First Amendment issue. To put it bluntly, megasellers and megapublishers have significant power, when put together, to manipulate what Americans will see, purchase, and read. Their power has its purpose, but it needs to be balanced. "Independent" means what it says: stores that are locally owned, by people who know books and need not tailor their orders to the appetites of a distant city, but would rather honor their customers' interests in regional issues, local authors, small-press books, poetry, first novels--things that matter to us, right here, right now. Is this something you can live without?

  Appa
rently, the answer for lots of us is that yes, we can, and we will have to. Miraculously, Tucson still has a glorious feminist independent named Antigone Books that's still going strong after more than twenty years, as well as a raft of specialty and used-book stores. But most of the rest have gone the way of Arizona's native fish: One by one their streams dried up, and they went extinct. Wonderful names--the Haunted Bookshop, Coyote's Voice, Marco Polo, Whiz Kids--are now a kind of secret code that passes poignantly between old-time Tucsonans who love to read. And now another has joined them--that bookish trout that swam upstream for so long, the Book Mark.

  For those sad last weeks of its closing sale I was stuck in the earliest stage of grief: denial. I kept banking on a miracle on the order of Jimmy Stewart's in It's a Wonderful Life. People would show up there in droves with cash in hand, I thought, to prove that their hearts had not been sold after all for the three-dollar markdown. The prodigal readers would return, and those who had never left would also come back to scour the aisles, looking for the enlightenment and passions and how-to manuals that filled our lives before TV stultified and bumfuzzled us. And this actually did happen, in a way: People came in to the store begging to know how they could help, even offering to invest their savings. But for that store, it was too late.

  I keep running across the phrase "because of the demise of the independent bookstore," and it causes me to get hot under the collar. The reports of this death are greatly exaggerated--I just can't believe the independents will all go down. The tides of fortune will reverse themselves, I still tell myself, every time I read of another closure. It will happen because this is America, where we love to believe in our own story, the possibility that any one of us could write the Great American Novel, and the rest of us could read it, without waiting for Big Brother to buy it a place at the table. It will happen because we're devoted, above all, to independence and freedom of thought.