A Walker in the Suburbs

It’s a gray, rainy day, perfect for endless cups of tea and a good book (or books). I have a pile of tomes beside me now: a memoir, a biography, a book of poetry and a novel. I keep checking books out of the library even though I already have a pile of unread volumes at home. And not just one library, either — I borrow from several.

All of this has brought to mind something my parents said to us when we were kids. Whenever we went out to eat, especially to cafeterias (those monuments to overeating that I still sometimes hanker for), the rule was you could take as much as you wanted from the line but you had to eat it all. Groans of “I can’t eat another bite” were met with the adage, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”

I stare at my pile of books. I’d like to inhale them, to have an immediate transfusion of their knowledge and inspiration into my starving brain. At the same time I don’t want to forgo the pleasure of savoring each page. I am sated but unbowed. My eyes are bigger than my stomach.

My office is closed, the year is winding down. I wake up and realize: There is no place I have to be, nothing I have to do. And so, I read.

I just finished Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell. Subtitled “A Memoir of Friendship,” it chronicles the author’s relationship with the late Caroline Knapp. I read Knapp’s book Drinking: A Love Story a while ago and enjoyed it so much I immediately searched for other books she’d written. I was sad to learn of her death of lung cancer at age 42. Especially sad because Knapp had beaten anorexia and alcoholism — only to be beaten by cancer.

I approached Caldwell’s book warily at first, since she covers ground Knapp covered in her writing — addiction to alcohol, love of dogs. But I warmed to the author and to the friendship she shared with Knapp and by the end of the book was completely hooked. By sharing her fears and her inside jokes and even her occasional spats with Knapp, Caldwell brings her friend to life, the slant of Knapp’s back as she rowed on the Charles River, her habit of playing computer solitaire during a boring phone conversation.

Like all good memoirs, though, the book is about much more than the subjects at hand. It is ultimately a lens through which we view ourselves and those we love.

“Every story in life worth holding on to has to have a spirit line. You can call this hope or tomorrow or the ‘and then’ of narrative itself, but without it — without that bright, dissonant fact of the unknown, of what we cannot control — consciousness and everything with it would tumble inward and implode. The universe insists that what is fixed is also finite.”

I’ve been reading Shirley Jackson’s memoir of raising kids in an old house in a small Vermont town and marveling at how well she captures the endearing chaos of family life. “Madcap” is a word that comes immediately to mind, an “Erma Bombeck’ish” word that describes a certain style of postwar mothering that is loving but off-handed. And Life Among the Savages is certainly madcap. “Surprising” is another, because Jackson is known for her horror stories (she wrote the short story “The Lottery”).

Some of my favorite scenes in the book are set around the dinner table — one child demanding, another pouting and still another floating around in her own imaginary world. There’s a rise and fall to the dialogue that is exactly like the real thing. It makes me nostalgic for our own madcap days. Most of all, though, it makes me smile.

A few weeks ago, at back-to-school night, I saw the list of books our high school sophomore will read for English this year. I had to bite my tongue not to say “Oh, we have those, somewhere…” — because usually I can find every other book but the ones we need. Someday we will discover a box in the basement containing every missing selection on the high school curriculum: All Quiet on the Western Front, The Jungle, The Scarlet Letter.

Meanwhile, the books that I do find are distressingly yellowed and priced at 69 cents. You must open them carefully, so that their bindings don’t crack and their pages fall out. Along their margins is such English major scrawl as “obsession with the body shows the importance of the physical” and “dichotomy of city and country echoes Romantic themes.” But I’m proud of these books, and of the occasional comments the girls have reported back to me from their English teachers: “I used to have that edition when I was in college” or “I can see your family holds onto things.”

The late Susan Sontag said of her library of 15,000 books: “What I do sometimes is just walk up and down and think about what’s in the books, because they remind me of all there is. And the world is so much bigger than what people remember.”

It has been a while since I read a book in 24 hours, but I just did that with Nothing Was the Same, a memoir by Kay Redfield Jamison. I got hooked on Jamison’s prose when I read An Unquiet Mind, which chronicles her struggle with bipolar illness. Nothing Was the Same is about the illness and death of her husband, Richard Wyatt. The book combines raw grief with an elegant reflection on that grief.

Jamison, a psychologist and professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, has studied the disease from which she suffers and she compares it with grief. Grief does not alienate as depression does, she says; grief is more useful. “Grief, lashed as it is to death, instructs. It teaches that one must invent a way back to life.”

Jamison takes you through her journey of abandonment and fear, and gives you hope that not only can people survive such journeys, they can even be transformed by them. “It is in our nature to want to hold on to love; it is grief’s blessing that we come to know that there are limits to our ability to do so.” To hold onto the love she has for her husband, she had to transform it. So she wrote this book. “I would write that love continues, and that grief teaches.” It did, and it does.

For years I’ve had the luxury of reading any book I choose all the way to the end, every precious word. But now I’m involved in a project that requires reading a lot, reading fast. Which means that I must also read selectively. Must be able to skim text for the main idea, glance at headlines and subheads and topic sentences and go from there. (Even writing this makes me shiver, so close is it to SAT-speak.) But skim I must. Part of the problem is that I know how hard-won words can be. To rush past them seems disrespectful. But I’m learning to get over this. Otherwise the tower of books will topple over on me!

So into this age of iPhones and iPads and Kindles comes Nicholas Basbanes’ book A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World. And we think we have problems. In ancient times, books were threatened by scarcity of materials, by fire-loving fanatics, by bookworms (the real thing) and by textual transmission. Instead of a book failing to jump from hardback to paperback or paperback to e-book, in the fourth century books might not make the cut from papyrus to parchment. My mind is filled this morning with phantom books of the past. What wisdom do we lack because some ancient author didn’t make the grade?