What makes a reader?

And two posts turn into three.

Jonathan Franzen once penned a famous essay in Harper’s titled “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels.” There is a helluva lot to chew on in that article, but among them, there is also this smidgeon of empirical research on readers that I really found interesting.

“Shirley Brice Heath is a former MacArthur Fellow, a linguistic anthropologist, and a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford; she’s a stylish, twiggy, white-haired lady with no discernible tolerance for small talk. Throughout the Eighties, Heath haunted what she calls “enforced transition zones”—places where people are held captive without recourse to television or other comforting pursuits. She road public transportation in twenty-seven different cities. She lurked in airports (at least before the arrival of CNN). She took her notebook into bookstores and seaside resorts. Whenever she saw people reading or buying “substantive works of fiction” (meaning, roughly, trade-paperback fiction), she asked for a few minutes of their time.

“…her research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First, the habit of reading works of substance must have been “heavily modeled” when he or she was very young.

“…According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest.

“…I told her I didn’t remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.

“Without missing a beat Heath replied: “Yes, but there’s a second kind of reader. There’s the social isolate—the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don’t like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you—because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read.

“…According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety.”

What They Were Reading: Jonathan Franzen

A continuation of yesterday’s theme, from The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction #207:

INTERVIEWER

What books were you reading in those years?

FRANZEN

Everything. I read fiction four or five hours a night every night for five years. Worked through Dickens, the Russians, the French, the moderns, the postmoderns. It was like a return to the long reading summers of my youth, but now I was reading literature, getting a sense of all the ways a story could be made.

But the primal books for me remained the ones I’d encountered in the fall of 1980: Malte, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Magic Mountain, and, above all, The Trial. In each of these books the fundamental story is the same. There are these superficial arrangements; there is the life we think we have, this very much socially constructed life that is comfortable or uncomfortable but nonetheless what we think of as “our life.” And there’s something else ­underneath it, which was represented by all of those German-language writers as Death. There’s this awful truth, this maskless self, underlying ­everything. And what was striking about all four of those great books was that each of them found the drama in blowing the cover off a life. You start with an individual who is in some way defended, and you strip away or just explode the surface and force that character into confrontation with what’s underneath. 

Jonathan Franzen on the Overrated and the Underappreciated

    

Casting Call Round 3

Time for another author look-alike post. Previous entries can be found here and here. Let’s get to it.

Though he's cast in shadow here, there’s something in the laugh lines, angled eyebrows and prominent cheekbones of Aldous Huxley, that reminds me an awful lot of a young Frank Sinatra.

Here’s Ivan Doig and the old man from Home Alone (Roberts Blossom). Give either one of these guys a snowshovel,  galoshes and a garbage can full of salt, and it would scare the crap out of me.

I’ll admit this one’s not an exact likeness, but work with me here: focus first on the lips…

…and then on the concerned-eyebrow face, and try to tell me there’s no resemblance between Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moranis:

And while we're on the subject of crazy eyebrows and exact likenesses, did anyone ever see Robert Frost and Andy Rooney in the same room together? Ever?

Finally, some might say Nathaniel Branden is the “heir” to Ayn Rand. Others will argue for Alan Greenspan. Me? Steve Buscemi all the way:

Got any of your own? Add them in the forum, here.

First Line Friday!

It’s time for “First Line Friday” again!

So, turns out that perhaps the most buzzed novel of the last several years, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, actually has a pretty stunning first line:

'The news about Walter Berglund wasn’t picked up locally - he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now - but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times.'

Read it again slowly, as if it’s all you have to depict the purpose of the novel. Here is what I love about this first line:

• I love the name Walter Berglund. Not sure why. It’s cumbersome, to be sure, but it sticks. Walter Berglund. Sounds American. Sounds like a protagonist.
• I love how much this sentence says: There is a guy named Walter, he had a wife named Patty, they had lived in St. Paul, then moved to DC, and there is some unforeseen “news” that we’ll learn about later in the novel. It’s actually quite a lot of information for one line, but it’s smooth and eloquent. Not unruly or overly burdensome.
• I love the phrase “the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill.” The phrase so accurately depicts white people coasting through St. Paul in an Audi on their way to Starbucks prior to attending their daughter’s lacrosse game. It says all of that in 6 words: The Urban Gentry of Ramsey Hill. Love it.

As for the rest of the novel, I am still torn almost a year after reading it. It has glimpses of greatness, but also has lulls of meaningless. But that’s a topic for another post.

Just enjoy the first line today.