Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

by Wendy Lesser

  The mystery novel, as a rule, ends more firmly than this. It asks a straightforward question—which might be “Who committed the crime?” or possibly “Will the murderer be caught and punished, or will he escape?”—and then it proceeds to answer that question to our complete satisfaction. There are notable exceptions to this pattern, such as Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall’s Rosanna, where we never discover who committed the murder, or Jo Nesbø’s Redbreast, which solves one aspect of its mystery plot but leaves an equally important element unresolved. But even these exceptions confirm the rule, by hastening on to multiple sequels in which the plots do get tied up, as if to say to us, “Yes, yes, you’ve been very good, tolerating this amount of ambiguity, but we promise not to ask it of you again.”

  The mystery, despite its general gruesomeness, is designed to reassure. It asserts the existence of an author who knows the answers (who has almost certainly, in fact, arrived at those answers before constructing the plot) and who will eventually give them to us. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, too. John le Carré’s Smiley books reassure us with their control—of plot, of language, of “tradecraft”—even as they undermine any faith we might have in the governmental powers-that-be, for in George Smiley’s world the worst offenses always turn out to come from inside his own security-keeping system. And in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, the standard version of reassurance gets turned on its head: here the murderer himself is the continuing character, and the investigating officers are just flies to be brushed off as each new episode passes. Playing on our own indwelling anxieties, taunting us with the nerve-wracking possibility that Ripley might be apprehended, Highsmith pushes our strange desire to empathize with a villain about as far as it can go, and that turns out to be very far indeed. We feel, reading her books, as if something bad we have done will be exposed and our guilt will be revealed. (She may seem to be talking about Ripley, but from our point of view she is really talking about us.) But even here, a kind of reassurance arrives at the end, because Ripley always vanquishes the police investigation and survives to kill again, just as Smiley solves the crime even when he can’t bring the true criminals, his MI6 superiors, to justice. Is this reassurance, or its opposite? In the best mysteries, there is always a residue—of doubt, of anxiety, of concern about our social welfare. It is this residue which distinguishes the rereadable mysteries from the run-of-the-mill one-timers.

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  Perhaps it will seem perverse of me, in a book devoted to the subject of literature, to refer repeatedly to murder mysteries, a notoriously trashy form. But quality is not hierarchical. Judgments can always be made at any level; and though there are certainly good books and bad books in the world, they do not line up neatly according to rank, with good books filling the approved high genres and bad books the despised lower ones. If only stick figures inhabited the novels of Wilkie Collins and Patricia Highsmith (not to mention John Buchan, Ross Macdonald, Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, Henning Mankell, and all the other great mystery writers of the last couple of centuries), our interest in those books would greatly diminish. They would become simply like crossword puzzles, something ingeniously designed to kill time. Instead, they constitute one of the more essential forms of reading. Our own literary tradition might be said to have begun with the investigation of a murder (I’m thinking of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: yet another story, like Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, where the detective turns out to be the murderer), and I suspect it will end that way, if it ever does.

  Dostoyevsky did his best to push it all toward an ending—both literature and the murder mystery—in his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. There is a murder here which provides the engine of the plot, but does anyone recall the solution? No, because the solution is not what’s important. If I ask you to remember several years after reading the novel whether Dmitri Karamazov killed his father, you might not be able to tell me the correct answer. That is, you will possibly think, as I did at the beginning of my recent rereading, that Dmitri committed the crime. The novel itself does not come down firmly on this question. It suggests that someone else was the guilty party, but it also implies that Dmitri could have done it, was morally capable of it, and therefore felt and acted guilty for a reason. (But then, Dmitri exists to experience guilt: that capacity, that outright need, is the essential element in his character.) We may continue reading the novel partly to find out who killed the horribly embarrassing, graspingly avaricious, ludicrously lustful old Karamazov—a singularly repellent and not-at-all-missed character to whom Dostoyevsky has wryly given his own first name, Fyodor—but if this is the only reason we are reading it, we will find The Brothers Karamazov a bizarrely unsatisfying work of fiction, filled with inexplicable digressions and seemingly endless speeches. We care about the novel because of what it tells us about Alyosha, Ivan, and Dmitri, those three brothers who are simultaneously themselves and larger than themselves.

  Dostoyevsky tests to the limit the idea that evil characters are the most memorable, because in Dostoyevsky (as in Shakespeare, but even more so) the violent, destructive, self-loathing characters are the ones we are most drawn to. This is obviously true of Crime and Punishment, where the murderer Raskolnikov is the central character, the focus of our deepest sympathetic interest. But it is also true of a strange work like Demons, which seems at first not even to be a novel at all, but rather a series of pointless conversations—about radical politics, domestic alliances, intellectual disappointments, petty rivalries, and everything else that made up nineteenth-century provincial Russian life. Yet even here the villainous characters stand out: not just the petty demons who enact all the devious crimes, though they are interesting in their own right, but above all the large-souled villain, the fascinating Stavrogin, who cannot help punishing himself for, but also with, his cruelty to women.

  Stavrogin is the kind of character who can only exist in a Dostoyevsky novel. However much his characteristics may have been borrowed from real people (and Joseph Frank, in his masterful biography of Dostoyevsky, goes into great detail about who those models might have been), he stands apart as an unduplicated, unduplicatable figure, unlike anyone we will ever encounter in the flesh. With his intense self-hatred nestling beside his loathing for the rest of society, his profound sense of honor coexisting with his tendency to lie and deceive, and his moral corruption underlying and perhaps even reinforcing his supreme attractiveness, Stavrogin is a captivating original. Intelligence is not enough to explain his appeal (though it helps: a stupid Stavrogin would be inconceivable). Nor is physical beauty, because we can’t actually see him, though the women who flock to him in the novel may in part be responding to that. In contrast to the distinctly life-sized figures who surround him in his mother’s village—that anxious and commanding mother herself, her saintly young servant-companion, Stavrogin’s ridiculous and impoverished old tutor, the tutor’s scoundrel of a son, the marriageable daughter of neighboring landowners, the local radicals and spies, the pretentious village bureaucrats, even the idiot-girl to whom Stavrogin turns out to be married—he seems to glow with an excess of reality. They are all believable, and often pitiable, and in some cases loathsome, but he is something more than that: utterly present to us, yet beyond the reach of our normal, cathartic, fictionally inspired feelings. It is as if we can do nothing for him, because his fate is completely predetermined by his own personality, his own situation, and so we are helpless in the face of him. (Of course, it is literally true that we can do nothing for any fictional character, but our feelings tell us otherwise; in Stavrogin’s case, they tell us the truth.)

  On the whole, literature—in this respect much like history, or for that matter daily life—draws us toward the kinds of people who dominate, or at least attempt to dominate, their own circumstances. I’m thinking now not only of Stavrogin, but also of other great characters like Henry James’s Kate Croy, or Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, or Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, or Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, o
r Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei. These memorable figures all forcefully, or at any rate willfully, take certain actions that result in their having the lives they ultimately have. (And this is true even of the great characters who reign by their inactivity: think of Melville’s Bartleby, for instance, or Goncharov’s Oblomov, both of whom issue a comprehensive “No” to the routines of other people’s existence.) One might say of these people that they make their own plots. And the suspense, for us, lies in seeing how they will negotiate all the different fixities that confront them: not only the author’s willful predeterminations, and not just history’s oblivious ones, but also the relentless immovability of their own characters.

  * * *

  One source of suspense is not knowing how things turn out, but an equally powerful source is knowing how they turn out and waiting for that to happen. There are certain novels that hinge, in part, on this kind of foreknowledge: their authors actually let us know the plot beforehand, not so much to ruin suspense as to heighten it. In Richard Ford’s Canada, for instance, the elderly narrator, reflecting back on his childhood, tells us in the novel’s first sentence that his parents robbed a bank, and then tells us again, repeatedly over the course of many pages, until we finally get to the event itself, about halfway through the book. At that point, having had something definite to look forward to, we find ourselves in freefall, with no certainty at all about what will happen next. Plot takes over, but not wholly: the role of memory is still ever-present, and we are never allowed to forget that the endangered young boy in the story turned into the older man who is telling us the tale. The novel as a whole possesses a cunning and unusual combination of forward movement and retrospective musing, with the result that the anxiety of the suspense somehow becomes infused with, or confused with, the calm of remembering.

  In a different way, Shirley Hazzard’s omniscient narrator in The Transit of Venus gives us forecasts we don’t know how to use until the very end of the novel. Quite early in the plot, this voice announces to us that one of the main characters, the astronomer who is in love with the female protagonist, will end up dying by his own hand before he reaches the pinnacle of his career. Much later, toward the end of the book, the narrator lets fall that an extremely minor character, a doctor who appears in one brief scene, will die three months later in an air crash. It is not until the final page of the book that we understand how these facts come together and why we needed to know them, but in the meantime we have undergone a great deal of anxiety wondering which possible betrayals and discoveries (and there are several) could cause the astronomer to kill himself. Only at the end do we learn that all of our anxious guesses were wrong: the true course of events, as so often in life, turns out to be one we didn’t expect.

  To watch the predetermined plot unfold, like a recurrent nightmare that we are powerless to alter or avert, is a rich and compelling experience for a certain kind of reader. What is anxiety-provoking in nightmares—the arrival of the inevitable—becomes its exact opposite in a book, where knowing what is about to happen makes one more attentive, more alert, more open to the moment-by-moment texture of the experience. This is why I frequently reread both Patricia Highsmith and Henry James. This is why I take pleasure in the kind of narrative foreshadowing practiced by Richard Ford and Shirley Hazzard. And this is why we all read works whose plots we may well know in advance, like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, David Malouf’s Ransom, and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

  Milton based his Paradise Lost on the familiar Garden of Eden story (though, granted, its familiarity to us now is at least partly thanks to Milton). In both the Bible and its Miltonic elaboration, the serpent tempts Eve and, through her, Adam to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge, an act of disobedience that leads to humanity’s ejection from eternal paradise. The book-length poem has now been around for so long that it seems natural for it to exist, but think how odd it must have been for Milton to undertake it in the first place. An epic retelling of a brief story from Genesis, couched in unrhymed iambic pentameters and intended to “justify the ways of God to men”—only a courageous madman, or an unconventional genius, would imagine he could accomplish such a thing. And yet it works, even three or four centuries later, and even for nonbelieving readers like William Empson and me. We may have to rejig the motive slightly, turning Satan into a heroic rebel and questioning God’s degree of justification. We may feel unexpectedly moved and uplifted by the ending, which is supposed to be a tragedy of punishment, but which instead seems to view Adam and Eve’s new life with something like hope, or even excitement:

  Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

  The world was all before them, where to choose

  Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:

  They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,

  Through Eden took their solitary way.

  The common arguments about whether Milton intended us to feel this way—supportive, empathetic, almost optimistic about the possibilities open to the fallen mortals—are neither here nor there. It doesn’t matter. The poem, leading us in its own direction, exists apart from its maker, just as Adam and Eve existed apart from theirs.

  Nobody reads Paradise Lost for the plot, of course. But knowing what will happen lends an essential element to the experience of reading, in that it creates the exact tension between predestination and free will that Milton is attempting to explore in the poem. We know where these characters are headed and yet, minute by minute, we feel no sense of moral or epistemological superiority to them. On the contrary, we undergo their fates with them, as if in real time, or perhaps even a stretched-out version of real time, a version that mimics eternity. It takes forever for them to fall, and we hope for every moment of that forever that they will resist; then, when they have fallen, we hope they will get away with it. Our foreknowledge and our sympathies are completely at odds, just as God’s would have been (or ought to have been, if he was a good God). If this mixed reaction on our part doesn’t finally justify Him, it at any rate makes even His position more sympathetic.

  A different kind of courage—somewhat less crazy and ambitious, but nonetheless intense—must have been required for the Australian writer David Malouf to produce his marvelous short novel Ransom, based on an episode from the Iliad. For writers, Homer is almost as much of a god as God, and to tinker with his perfect stories requires hubris of a notable degree. James Joyce possessed that hubris in grandiose form, and we can feel it exercising its assertive presence all the way through Ulysses. But Ransom (which understands that it comes not only after the Iliad, but also after Ulysses and Moravia’s Contempt and all the other twentieth-century works based on Homer) is almost the opposite kind of work. It is small, and delicate, and intellectually modest. It does not trumpet its substantial intelligence at us.

  Ransom takes as its departure point the section of the Iliad in which King Priam goes forth from Troy to collect the body of his son Hector from Achilles, the Greek enemy who has slain him. Achilles has always been viewed as a great character, and centuries of writers, from Euripides to Shakespeare to the moderns, have built great roles around him. Priam has not; only Malouf has been alert enough to ferret out his inner life in this subtle way. What he does is to hinge the whole novel on the relationship between Priam and his cart driver, a man whose name the king can’t even remember (he repeatedly miscalls him by the name of his former driver), but on whom he comes to depend completely and, one might say, lovingly. Through the sensible, tender behavior of the cart driver—who, like Priam, is also a bereft father—we come to sympathize with the grief and fear and uncertainty of the otherwise inaccessible king.

  It does not matter, in reading Ransom, whether you already know the story from the Iliad or not. Either way, the novel will cast its spell over you, because what keeps you going is not the larger plot question (whether Priam will or will not get his son’s body back), but the step-by-step psychological moments that lead to that outcome. And “outcome” is
too thin a word, in any case, for what happens to the characters, and to us, by the end of Malouf’s novel. The result is not everything; the process is part of the result. This is one of the key realizations that accrues to Priam in the course of his quest.

  The same realization, though achieved through very different methods, dawns on us as we read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which is itself a work about achieving results. Mantel is a master of using history to create fiction: she does so to great effect in her excellent novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. But in contrast to that earlier book, which covers ground that is basically in the international public domain, this more recent novel deals with a passage of English history that is at once broadly familiar and completely obscure. Mantel focuses on the period from 1527 to 1535, when Henry VIII was figuring out how to dispose of his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn; in order to do so, he ended up breaking Catholicism’s hold on England and naming himself the head of the church.

  Everything you think you know about these events turns out to be inadequate to the discoveries made by this fictional work. By centering the narrative on Thomas Cromwell—a blacksmith’s son who rose to become one of the king’s most powerful advisors, and whose great-grandnephew eventually became the Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell—Mantel gives us a whole new perspective on the era and its machinations. Cardinal Wolsey, with whom Cromwell got his start, becomes a much more complicated and appealing figure than usual, and Sir Thomas More becomes downright hateful: not at all the saintly martyr portrayed in A Man for All Seasons and in Catholic theology generally, but a ruthless, narrow-minded egotist who cannot imagine the possibility of his own error.