THE OCCASIONAL READER–WHY YOU SHOULD READ “DIFFICULT” BOOKS
Why you should read difficult books
Reviews of All the Pretty Horses; author Cormac McCarthy and The Cat’s Table; author Michael Ondaatje
I can hear the screams already, “Clark, get your blankity blank story straight. Last summer you recommended we read for whimsy—reading books not because we should but for the pure fun of it. Now you think we should read difficult books. Which is it?
Well, to tell the truth, I think you should do both.
I confess that there are times in life, when I need the comfort of reading predictable and comfortable books, like finding an open McDonald’s at midnight when you are starving or downing that second glass of “not half good” house Pinot. After a tough week I’ve consumed more than one of Susan Grafton’s Alphabet murder mysteries—with relish. But, there are also times you don’t want the same boring experience—think, paella instead of a burger.
To be clear, when I say difficult books I’m not talking about wasting precious time on badly crafted fiction, long Russian titles found some college professor’s literary bucket list, or those thick philosophic or political diatribes disguised as fiction.
Rather, the books I suggest as good but difficult novels are first of all, great stories. These stories may be occasioned by sweeping world events or the smallest mundane moments but are always tales that entice or propel us past the known or expected, provoke disturbing doubts or questions, and if the reader is fortunate will leave a sense wonder.
But, the kind of story I’m describing in this second and more positive sense also requires the reader to do more. Just as creating great cuisine requires more time, effort, and attention to detail than popping a frozen dinner in the microwave, great stories make demands on the reader. Difficult books always require increased concentration or patience; a willingness to suspend skepticism or judgment; and a taste for dwelling in the messy, uncertain, and frequently unresolved issues of the human heart.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses—a novel written twenty years ago and made into a mediocre movie starring Matt Damon and Jennifer Cruz—is, on the surface, a cowboy story that contains elements of both a “coming of age” or “quest” story. However, when the sixteen year-old John Grady Cole and his side-kick Rawlins leave their West Texas Ranch and cross into Mexico, the story morphs into a much thicker narrative about love and justice and place.
This is not a novel that can be described as a “feel good” read. As with all his novels, McCarthy has written a book teeming with unexplained suffering and awful evil like Cole and Rawlin’s unjust imprisonment in a hellish Mexican jail, a Dante-like inferno with unrestrained inmates bent upon killing them. At times these events are so profoundly disturbing as to be the stuff of horror films or our worst nightmares.
McCarthy is also a contrarian who writes novels that defy most standard grammar rules. But, I rarely notice this flaw because Cormac McCarthy is a master storyteller. Like a great movie, this novel moves adroitly from vivid scene to vivid scene, images stack one upon another, linked together and evoked by beautiful description and pitch-perfect dialogue. But unlike a film, the novel uses reflection and summery to provide a thicker story, more fully developed and three dimensional than is possible in a movie.
All the Pretty Horses remains, even after twenty years, a distinctly counter-cultural novel. In an era that favors positive thinking and TV dramas solved within 41 minutes or less, McCarthy has written of a journey through pain and evil and disillusionment—a modern tragedy that does not posit a solution or redemption. This is a captivating but unsentimental story that challenges our imagination without providing a tidy ending or certain answers. “All the Pretty Horses” is, at the core, a novel about the human heart and a story that renders a truthful and painful prose portrait of good entwined with evil, the mixture we encounter in our raw and beautiful world, a mixture we know is found in deep in every heart.
While All the Pretty Horses could be considered difficult reading because of McCarthy’s non-standard grammar or because we don’t read much tragedy these days, I think the principle reason may be because I do not wish to consider the subject of evil, especially the notion that evil lurks in me. I can close my eyes, struggle to deny or discredit or ignore John Grady Cole’s story, but this narrative retains true images of humanity, images that we know contain shards of our own stories. It is not often an author creates a novel showing such powerful close-ups of the human heart. This novel will haunt my thinking and perhaps my dreams for a long time.
Michael Ondaatje, author of the novel The English Patient and the memoir Running in the Family, has recently written another novel, The Cat’s Table. This new novel describes the 21-day sea voyage of an eleven-year old boy traveling from Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka) to England. The Cat’s Table was the slang title given to the dining room accommodation farthest from the prestigious “Captains Table.” The twelve disparate and low status diners at the Cat’s Table are the novel’s principle characters.
Although Ondaatje claims this story to be fiction, his previous memoirs relate a similar story. The author left his native Sir Lankan grandparents by steamship to meet his divorced English mother and attend English boarding school. The novel’s story is told from the perspective of a boy on his own for the first time and like All the Pretty Horses, is superficially another “coming of age” kind of tale. The Cat’s Table contains all the signatures of the excellent writer: thick character studies, vividly drawn action scenes, and precise dialogue that not only imparts information and advances the plot, but adds detail to the characters portraits.
However, it Ondaatje’s management of time that gives The Cat’s Table a unique voice and can also disorient the reader. The first half of the novel is straight forward, all the scenes located on the ship. In the novel’s second portion, the narrator’s voice alternates between speaking as an eleven year old and as a grown man some 35 years later. This kaleidoscope of added reflection, summation, and changing perspectives allows the reader a much thicker insight to the characters who dined at the “Cat’s Table” and a better understanding of the dramatic events that occurred during the original trip.
Ondaatje uses these abrupt and sometimes unheralded time shifts to create an “other worldly-like” confusion. The careful descriptions of an ocean voyage, a trip that did not encounter land for weeks, often experiencing storms or fog that obscured even the sight of ocean and sky, provided an “atmosphere” that amplified the author’s dizzying time shifts. These surreal and isolated landscapes produced a perplexing magical realism in which the reader is sometimes not sure what is fact and what is simply imagined.
C.S. Lewis in his essay “Stories” suggests that successful fiction writers create a net of events. That is, stories are a series of linear time-constrained events: “this happens to the protagonist” and then,” this happens” and then, “the protagonist acts,” and then, “something else happens.” Each story event compounds and interlinks like the crisscrossing lines constructing a fishing net. If the story net is crafted well, according to Lewis, it will catch “bigger less time-constrained ideas” like the nature of death or ego or love without actually having to explicitly discuss or summarize or argue.
McCarthy’s story All the Pretty Horses creates a net that “catches,” issues such as finitude, evil, and love (or its absence). Ondaatje crafts a novel that “catches,” without formal discussion, bigger non-event ideas like the ephemeral and fugitive memory, the nature of the “emigrant experience,” and persistent colonialism.
Some readers might protest, reasonably suggesting that reading about “big idea” topics is more efficient in the non-fiction format. While perhaps more efficient, not reading great but difficult” fiction would, I think, provide a much thinner experience and in the end, less meaning and understanding.
A major element stunting contemporary imagination and creativity is the tyranny of sameness. This is a sameness caused by surrounding ourselves exclusively with people and words and ideas that agree with our own. In politics, this homogeneity of opinion produces an inability to see an opponent’s point of view, while in the reading project the ability to predict how a book might “be or end” produces comfortable boredom. However, by choosing to read “great but difficult” novels we are allowed, sometimes with an element of unease, to imagine unconsidered circumstances and events and ideas, finding conclusions or solutions that previously might have lain fallow.
Author D.G Myers said of reading fiction, “Fiction demands that you either identify with the character’s decisions or distance yourself from them, and this has a powerful effect. In doing so you shape your own moral experience.” It is true that reading difficult but great books will make you less boring at the next social event. However, the most compelling reason to read these more difficult novels is the process will spawn a more robust imagination, and that is an outcome we all need.
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