On Not Finishing, and Finishing, Books
Reflections on the ends of reading.
1: On Not Finishing Books
One of the most lasting lessons I learned in college was delivered by a dapper professor with whom I undertook the study of Anglo-Saxon. Appearing at first glance somewhat solemn (his Danish accent and northern European demeanor certainly contributed to this disguise), Hans Aarsleff proved to be a warm and congenial interlocutor who had a way of connecting small lessons of grammar to large ideas. Indeed, his book The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860, is a fascinating depiction of the development of conceptions about language in that intellectually adventurous age, which leads one down philological byways toward philosophical conclusions. Surprisingly enough, I finally found my own copy of this book, which I had previously only seen in the university library, some years after I’d graduated, in, of all places, Lake Tahoe, Nevada, on a table in front of a secondhand bookstore in a strip mall. I treasure the book because of the memory it sparks of Professor Aarsleff’s primary legacy to this student, which was his merry insistence — imparted to me one day in his book-lined office — that there was no reason at all to read every volume from beginning to end. While I don’t remember his exact words, his message was quite clear: find what interests you and enlivens your thought, and when it ceases to do either, put it down and pick up something else; there are too many books that can feed one’s learning and delight to waste any time slogging through unresponsive paragraphs (for writing, of course, should be an animate art). His directive was not a recommendation of lazy scholarship or sloppy thinking, but rather an encouragement to read always at the peak of attention and reward.
I thought of Professor Aarsleff’s enjoinder against dutiful but uninspired diligence in reading recently as I came upon this anecdote in W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson:
Mr. Elphinstone talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON. “I have looked into it.” “What (said Elphinstone), have you not read it through?” — Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his own cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, “No, Sir; do you read books through?”
As a longtime bookseller, I know that most any bookstore would be out of business if it depended upon its customers reading from beginning to end every volume they bought; and I am certain I am not a peculiar specimen of the inveterate reader when I reckon that many of the most treasured books on my shelves I’ve never seen through to completion, although I’ve spent hours in their pages, and months, even years, under the influence of their ideas and imagination (like — if truth be told — Bate’s Samuel Johnson, and Aarsleff’s The Study of Language in England). Our sensibilities seek nourishment wherever they can find it, and the cursory mode of reading offers an inexhaustible supply, as both Professor Aarsleff and Doctor Johnson knew. I toast them tonight with the glorious imperative of Randall Jarrell: “Read at whim! Read at whim!”
2: On Finishing Books
In an intriguing piece in the Financial Times a couple of years ago, Tim Harford wrote about how the sense of an ending shapes memory, with examples ranging from how, at a concert, the discordant ring of a cell phone had ruined the satisfying conclusion of a difficult work of chamber music to how a glass of grappa, delivered gratis after the bill, had raised, in retrospect at least, a group of diners’ estimation of an unremarkable restaurant meal. True to the heading of his FT column — “The Underground Economist” — Harford goes on to invoke the research of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman into the “peak-end” rule of resolution, which posits that memory of an event is governed by the most intense moment of the experience — and what happens at the end.
Extrapolating on what transpired at the aforementioned chamber recital, Harford writes: “Of course, it is no coincidence that the best bit of the music was at the finale: composers, like novelists and film directors, try to end on a high.” This is certainly true of film directors, and probably composers as well, who own their audience’s attention for every moment of its engagement with their creations. In each case, the audience is held (happily, one hopes) captive for a clearly demarcated period of time.
But, as we read on Wikipedia, “The peak-end rule is applicable only when an experience has definite beginning and end periods” — as Citizen Kane or a symphony certainly do, but not so much a novel, or any book at all, with a caveat: there is a class of fiction that artfully and, for the reader, pleasurably exploits the peak-end rule, and has reduced it to a formula. One could cite authors from Agatha Christie on down who have intuited the import of peak-and-end theory to fashion entertainments as predictably unpredictable, and as comfortingly suspenseful, as any movie — to our delight as readers and insomniacs. (In fact, the modern master of such artifice, James Patterson, published, around the time of Harford’s consideration of this matter, the first of a series of books — ”Bookshots: Stories at the Speed of Life” — designed specifically to concentrate consumption of a novel to a single evening, as if — no, not as if, undoubtedly — with sharp-witted and unabashed embrace of the peak-end heuristic.)
More generally speaking, movies and music marshal time in ways novels, or most books, do not. Our investment of time in reading is not only more self-directed and protracted than our consideration of a string quartet or a film, it is different in kind. Books, be they fiction or non, don’t have a definite start and end time, and there are epiphanies and even resolutions at the level of sentence, paragraph, page, and chapter. What stays with us from a long work of fiction or a substantial biography, memoir, history, or cultural or scientific study is personalized by our interests, appetites, and apprehensions. A book speaks — adheres may be a better word — to different parts of our moods and minds, and it does so differently to different readers.
That adherence of ideas and meaning occurs even if we don’t make it to the end of a book; but even when we do, we often find the ending is not the sum of all the parts that came before, but only the stop of our own absorption. Novels of great stature can limp to a conclusion — and all too often do — without their disappointing denouements detracting from the richness that preceded it, elements of which can inhabit corners of our intelligence for years to come.
Some novels don’t limp, but crash to an ending, like Philip Roth’s magnificent American Pastoral, a book about trying to make sense of the world, from the playgrounds of boyhood to the floor of a glove factory to the riot-ravaged streets of a ruined city, from the enigmas of family to the confusion of generations to the regret-soaked affection for lost time that memory breeds. In its pages, Roth reanimates each stage of a life with incredible power, though the longed-for making sense never coheres in anything that could be called resolution, and despite the fact that Roth, or rather, brilliantly, Nathan Zuckerman, the novelist within the novel who tells us the tale, is not quite up to imagining an ending commensurate with what he is trying to comprehend.
It’s hard for me to remember the endings of any Dickens novel, much as I’ve loved them all, but that amnesia does nothing to diminish the hold they keep on my imagination. Even the meticulous artificer Henry James ended his masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady, on a dash rather than a period, much less on an exclamation point (metaphorically speaking), with Isabel Archer spiriting herself back to Rome to — to do what, exactly, we’re never told. But in refusing to fix her in our minds, or his own, and perhaps not in hers, James bestows a starker aspect of reality on her than the rest of the book’s 600-odd pages supply. As the virtual reality pioneer Jared Lanier writes in You Are Not a Gadget, “What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.”
Add to the words on the page the lights and colors of a reader’s awareness as it wanders at its own pace through the wood the words create, and you recognize there may be no way out, even when the last page is turned. For the reader is using every phrase to engage the truest and often remotest parts of herself in a heart-to-heart conversation, and may never want to reach a clearing.
