Non-Fiction

I feel myself slowly but inexorably turning towards non-fiction. I’ve read three books in the last three days, all of them memoirs (Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down – of Paris, obviously; January First – of raising a daughter with child-onset schizophrenia; and Give Me Everything You Have - of stalking). In this same three-day period, I’ve given up on two fiction books within 20 pages. This worries me, to feel annoyed at most imagined stories, callused against many plot devices, seeing only character tropes instead of fleshed-out representations of some portion of the human psyche. I fear the same thing that happened with high fantasy novels – I read a surfeit of them, and the appetite sickened and died[1] – is about to happen with the whole of fiction, and that would be distressing.

Maybe it’s like yogurt: sometimes it's all I want to eat, and sometimes I can't get away from it fast enough. There are phases, times when I’m overjoyed to eat yogurt, happily snarfing that creamy, fruity goodness, mixing in everything from granola to fruit chunks to cereal. Then there are times when I just can’t stand it – the yogurt is slimy, the fruit gag-inducing, the taste and texture combining into one giant disgust. I flip between these two extremes for no discernible reason. Here’s hoping the fiction/non-fiction thing is similar, and it'll flip back to imagined stories, that I’m not so cynical and ease-seeking that stories no longer hold wonder.

I read an article once, that of course I can’t remember well enough to find (on second thought, maybe it was Film Crit Hulk about movie-goers[2] , but the principle holds for readers), that talks about different kinds of readers. There are those who read to recapture that joy of childhood abandon, completely absorbed by a story, overwhelmed with adventures and sentiments other than your own – a sort of legal way to dissociate from your pain and angst, a way to get away, a drug (in the nicest way possible). Then there are others who read to learn something, read informative books or classics, for the purpose of gaining a new skill or understanding the zeitgeist or whatever. And finally the people who read with an appreciation of the craft, who recognize a book as valuable because of superb plotting or awesome character development. Those people can appreciate and enjoy a book for more reasons than just, “It moved me,” which is my main criteria for a good book. They can say, This is representative of the culture of that historical moment, and as such is interesting and important. They can say, This book has taught me something about myself or humanity in general, now I will go put it into practice. They say, This literary device is fresh, this is the first time a novel has been constructed thus and as such is historically important. They can place a book in a larger scheme – cultural, political, historical – and appreciate it in relation to the system as a whole.

I admire these people, I suppose, on some level.

But I must admit, a lot of I want is to be transported. To see only the story, and not the framework. That's why all the non-fiction: even if there is a narrative framework and tropes (which there must be), it feels more real, less contrived, more true. I want the magic, the illusion of reality, and not the man behind the curtain. I want to feel what those characters feel, see their point of view, drown in their surroundings and not come up for air until the book is finished. I want to be somewhere else, if only for the space of a novel. To leave the everyday  concerns, forget about the laundry, leave my anxieties behind, be consumed by a tale.

The best are those whose plotting and ending you can’t imagine to be anything other than what the author wrote. That is, they gain a certain reality and one can’t think of altering them, because at their most fundamental level, they are the truth. You get to the end, and any other end or series of events to get  you to that end is inconceivable. The author wrote the truth and you experienced it.

This is all a very juvenile way to go about reading, I know. I know it doesn’t make me look like a stellar reader, or terribly scholarly, or particularly wise. (Hopefully it at least makes me look self-aware.) But we all have our vices, our penchants, our idiosyncrasies and oddities. I can argue literature with the best of them: I’ve spent countless pages analyzing Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, As I Lay Dying, on and on down the classics list. To an extent, I enjoy that; enjoyed it enough that I’m going through re-reading and doing some lite literary analysis on Paradise Lost. It’s engaging and stimulating.

Nevertheless, at the bottom of my secret soul, I long once again for a story that will sweep me away from myself, into the dark and enchanted forest of narrative dreams.

xo, 

Devo

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[1] Bonus points for naming that Shax play

[2] I’m summarizing pretty broadly, having read the article several weeks ago, and as I’m not really intending to do a critical article analysis, am not going to go back and re-read it. Please forgive any discrepancies between me and Hulk.