On Novels in Time

Today as I was out having a smoke on the red, rainy Mac-quad picnic table, someone looked at the copy of Infinite Jest I had in my lap. The book is a stout thousand pages, and I am a little more than halfway through; I read the first five hundred pages on winter break and am finally, finally getting back to it. Anyway, this boy asked: "Are you reading that for one of your classes or for fun? It's huge."

I have had a fair amount of experience reading through huge novels "for fun." I put 'fun' in quotes because reading a big, fat novel tends to be a commensurately big and complicated experience for me. Everything about these novels, these fat-ass, inflated, mostly nineteenth-century novels is big (except the print): big characters, big, involved storylines, big voices narrative or otherwise, big arcs. Each one of them has a different set of experiences attached. One thing that runs consistent through an array of novels as diverse as The Adventures of Augie March and Anna Karenina, though, is the length of time it takes me to read them.

I've shopped Phillip Fisher's class "The Classic Phase of the Novel" twice in my almost-three years here, each time dropping out after the first lectures, too intimidated to read a Big Fat Novel every week. I can't remember if Phillip Fisher said it or my brilliant friend Spencer Lenfield did, but something also rankles my nerves about trying to cram all that prose into my head every week. It's entirely possible that I am making a virtue out of my own vice of slow reading, but something strikes me as a little off about trying to apply the values of industry and desperate effort into the act of novel-reading. Which is not to say that I haven't had to do my fair share of reading under duress--that's definitely an integral part of my experience as a comparative literature student. But something about Big Fat Novels demands the succor of an extended period of time, at least for me. It took me eight months to read Augie March in senior year of high school; I would dip into Bellow's dense, antic, rolling prose for an hour each night, or less, with many-week intervals in which I simply went around the business of my life and came back to it when I remembered.

The result of that attachment is a kind of sentiment that links the book, somehow more intimately, with the time I read it. It's true that rapid reading, which I often engage in and allowed me to devour The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, hungrily, on buses in one weekend and practically lick my fingers, leaves a vivid and dreamlike impression. The product of years of writing falls feverishly on you, leaving a knotted jumble of images and incidents, a muzzy sense of "style" enveloping your memories of the book without individual phrases and sentences. But slow reading--lazy reading, unindustrial and casual, spread out over months--confers an unseen benefit. Reading Augie, I had the sense of a life running parallel to mine. Neatly in the confines of the book, Augie had the air of an occasional confidante, someone I checked in with once in awhile. I was desperately enraged at that book at one point: Augie spends the first three hundred pages or so in dense, urban Chicago, pinging like a stoop-ball through the city having unlikely adventures. Then midway through the book he follows a black-haired woman to, no shit, write about iguanas in Mexico. This was practically the last straw for me; I threw the book across the room and let it lie dormant for a few months. Then I came back, penitent, and sat with Augie through Mexico and the iguanas and his flight to France. At the end of the book Augie is sitting on a train. He left me then--on the train past the end of the book, perpetually in motion. The feeling I had then was a feeling of bereavement--that Augie, my antic, nomadic hero, was finally still.

The Magic Mountain, a Thomas Mann mammoth which took me a similar period of time the next year, had a different feeling almost. The book takes place in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and chronicles in exasperating detail the experience of one Hans Castorp, in the sanatorium for seven years. Almost nothing happens. He speaks to the woman of his dreams, a fellow patient, exactly once. In untranslated French. He smokes cigarettes without relish (all the tuberculosis patients smoke, gotta love the 1800s) and has interminable conversations about ideas. I complained bitterly about this book (my family will attest to how much I complain over my books) but finished it out of some dogged sense of duty and curiosity. In the end, Hans also leaves the sanatorium. On a train. Indefinably changed. I read the book on my year in Israel, miserable over the expectation that I would learn Torah for twelve hours every day and even more miserable at my failure to live up to that. The big, humpy mountains, like dried-out breasts, lowered their slanted brows at me, and the date trees withered under the sun. The plows were grey with dust and the cowbarns were biley with shit. I liked to dip in to Hans's sanatorium, watch him eat platters of smoked meats and steal the X-rays of his beloved and babble on and on about philosophy. It was a kind of exasperating peace, a restless stillness to contend with mine. I battled that book to the quick through three consecutive copies (one fell apart and one was lost and one remains on my shelf at home, with the rest of my spiny conquests). A novel read over time creates a sense of parallel universes. Creates a distilled past that enters the bloodstream of your present, and makes your life a queer amalgam of both.

Reading, in the conventional wisdom, will shortly be or already has become a rare experience precisely because of the time it takes. In a digital era of ease and leisure so it goes, the time that a novel takes up has become demode, burdensome, impossible. I guess it's no surprise to anyone that I am a Luddite about everything and especially my books (no surprise Kindle presents please), but to me it's precisely that burden--or gift--of parallel time that give novels their value. It reminds you of the arc of your life, present as it passes, logs the growth of its characters in a way that reminds you of your own growth.

One of my favorite Big Books as a kid was "Sophie's World," a novel that was also an introduction to some of the major ideas of Western philosophy. Fittingly for a book that dealt with the quandaries of being, the novel ends with the heroine discovering she is in a book and having an attendant crisis that dissolves the narrative. Reading that growing up -- well, it freaked me out, but also made me wistful. Like a lot of articulate and highly self-centered people, I've often imagined being a character in a book, with the end of the novel being my death. But something that intrigues me about these novels is that the novel doesn't end in death; the death is implicit, in metaphor, but it isn't written out. The fact that the novels end before the life does--just as I finish a novel before I finish my own life--implies that there is living beyond what can be captured on the page, any page, even a perfect one. I cherish the illusion that Augie and Hans Castorp and Vronsky and Levin are all alive somewhere, animated by the act of my reading, like Neil Gaiman's idea that gods we believe in are physically created by that belief. Regardless, I've had the pleasure of living in their lives as well as in mine for awhile, a gift granted to me in exchange for the time I put in, the months I colored with their adventures. To me, great novels (although Fat Novels are not always great novels) retain their relevance precisely because they demand an outmoded sacrifice of time. I hope to always be ready to give that to them.