Classical neurosis

James Hynes, whose latest novel KINGS OF INFINITE SPACE has been bugging me to read it for a while now, writes about his recent reading — for the very first time — of ANNA KARENINA. Aside from giving his take, he touches on a really important point: how to read a classic when it’s not exactly fresh news?

…this particular new experience, like everything else that’s new in midlife, has turned out to be both predictably melancholy and unexpectedly rewarding. Melancholy, because that pure joy of discovering a great novel on your own (the way I discovered "Lord Jim" when I was 10 years old) is greatly diluted by the fact that I’m denied the simple narrative pleasure of not knowing how the story turns out. And there’s another reason: Just as you’ll never fall in love again the way you did the first time, you’ll never read a great novel at 49 in the wholehearted way you would have read it at 20, if only because so much life, and so many books, have happened in the meantime. The younger me would have been more credulous, perhaps, would have taken the novel’s reputation as a masterpiece — maybe even as the masterpiece — at face value. The younger Jim would perhaps have read the book more meticulously than the older Jim just did, especially those long and frankly tedious passages where Levin — who has to be the most painfully self-conscious character in literature; he makes Stephen Daedalus seem like Mike Hammer — agonizes over, I dunno, the Slavic question, whatever that is. Jim Jr. at least would have paid closer attention to the footnote explaining exactly what the Slavic question is, while Jim Sr. just sighed and peeked ahead to see how many pages there were before we got back to Anna and the good stuff (and I say this as a Slav — I’m half Serbian).

The older me is a little more world-weary and streetwise: OK, Mr. Big Shot, Mr. Canonical Masterpiece, Mr. Greatest Fucking Novel Ever Written — what makes you so hot? Bring it on. And here’s the rewarding part — you saw this coming, right? — the rewarding part is that the book does bring it, after all. I don’t believe in fate, and I don’t even believe that you’re meant to read certain books at certain points in your life, but I do believe that you have to be ready for a great book if it comes along. The younger me might have read the more pedantic passages of "Anna Karenina" more meticulously, but he would have read the magnificent set pieces of domestic life with less understanding than I did.

This ties into something I’ve felt for quite a while now — that with all the new and upcoming releases I read — have to or otherwise — I’m lagging behind on older works. Classics, literary stalwarts, even crime fiction staples that by rights I should have read by now, but haven’t as yet. I haven’t read KARENINA either; instead, I ingested its flavor and plot by osmosis. I’ve done that with a number of the classics, likely because my brother devoured them in high school and college and since we had a habit of talking about anything and everything, his infectious enthusiasm for authors like Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens made me feel like I’d read them myself. Especially when I would later go and try to read certain books and find that not only did I not have the patience to get through their entirety, but that deja vu had visited itself upon me time and again.

And because there are so many older novels I’ve yet to read, even though I have this awareness, I feel like a fraud. Why didn’t I take the time to educate myself when I was younger? What was I doing in high school (oh yeah, reading crappy YA books and singing in amateur choirs and music festivals) or college (studying science and reading enough journal articles to fry my brain and using mystery novels as an antidote) or after that? Well, never mind. Plenty of compelling reasons, but there’s just not enough time, is there?

It’s just that I’m a strong believer in knowing what preceded me. Not just on a personal level, so that if I make mistakes I can learn from them, but in life and especially writing. Nothing’s new, so I should learn from those who mastered craft and explored ideas that were fresh and new at the time. And if we’re lucky, the books will indeed hold up generation after generation, which each successive one discovering their not-so-secret thrills. Sometimes you really do have to go directly to the source — or at least, an earlier one.

I suppose I’ll just have to take one of those metaphorical vacations where I can lock myself away with a bunch of fat books and discover their thrills anew. Or wait 20, 30, 50 years, when I’ve had my fill of contemporary crime fiction — at least for a little while — and go through them then. But now? That TBR pile’s out of control enough as it is…

(original link via Maud)