Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (3 page)

Some characters certainly seem more autonomous than others. Memorability, that repeated capacity to leap out of the general mist of our past reading and take center stage in our minds, is often but not always the sign of a great literary character. The characters that stick with us for weeks and months and even years after we close the book tend to be larger or at least more exaggerated than life, but they are also lifelike: they come back to us, in part, because we are reminded of them by the people we meet as we go through the rest of our lives. It’s not so much that we encounter these characters in the flesh as that we encounter their memorable qualities transferred onto living people, sometimes including ourselves.

This is especially true of Dickens’s characters, and it is the minor characters in Dickens, the ones that re-enact their distinctive habits over and over again, who tend to be most memorable in this way. The figure I recall most often from
David Copperfield
(and it is a novel filled with ghoulishly memorable characters: Mr. Micawber, Mr. Murdstone, Steerforth) is the eminently creepy Uriah Heep, who oozes oily fake-helpfulness and disgusting false humility even as he ushers his kind, oblivious employer into the poorhouse. If the other characters come back to me once a year or so, Uriah Heep recurs ten times as often. Nobody in life is
exactly
like Uriah Heep, of course, but there are many who share at least some of his irritating qualities. And such is Dickens’s power that when I meet these Heepish people, I can somehow imagine them rubbing their clammy hands together and calling themselves “’umble” even if that is something they would never do.

We recognize Uriah Heep by the way he expresses himself, but even characters without language can be memorably embodied in words. In literature as in life, the nonverbal or the preverbal can be powerful and moving figures with their own particular points of view. Anyone who has ever owned a dog, and many who have not, will consider the dog Bendicò a central character in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s marvelous novel
The Leopard
. His master, the Prince, certainly does; and so, it seems, did his author. In a postscript to a letter Lampedusa wrote about his only novel, belatedly added to the outside of the envelope, he scribbled, “N.B.: the dog Bendicò is a vitally important character and practically the key to the novel.” Even without this scribbled note, we would sense this, for it is the stuffed carcass of the long-dead dog, tossed away onto the dustheap, that ends this sad, funny, feelingly ironic novel about the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy.

The ten-month-old baby whose point of view is briefly taken by the narrator of
The Old Wives’ Tale
is another case in point. Though he is a much more temporary figure than Bendicò (in that he is only a wordless baby for a relatively short time: like most of us, he soon grows out of it), he is quite notable during the brief moment when Arnold Bennett captures him, lying on a soft woolen shawl laid over his parents’ hearthrug. “For ten months,” Bennett tells us, “he had never spent a day without making experiments on this shifting universe in which he alone remained firm and stationary. The experiments were chiefly conducted out of idle amusement, but he was serious on the subject of food. Lately the behavior of the universe in regard to his food had somewhat perplexed him, had indeed annoyed him.”

In other words, he is being weaned. Only a single page of this long novel is devoted to the baby’s viewpoint, but in it we see the hearth fire, the family dog, and the surrounding giant adults from his exhilarating, strangely philosophical, endlessly wondering perspective, before Bennett returns us to the mundane life of his parents. This single page is the one that has most strongly stayed with me through all my many decades of reading and rereading this book. Yet it was only on my last reading that I realized this baby eventually grows up to be the character who could be Arnold Bennett’s own jaundiced self-portrait—a skeptical, cosmopolitan young man who fails to be sufficiently interested in the lives of the two women who are at the heart of the book, his mother and his aunt. But even if this is indeed an autobiographical character (and of that we can never be sure), Bennett did not use the faculty of memory to create that baby on the hearthrug. One can’t, after all, remember one’s own ten-month-old existence in detail, and this version of the experience is largely projection and imagination. That is as it should be, for the passage
feels
interior even as it proclaims with its language that it is not.

Lampedusa’s Bendicò and Bennett’s baby (to which one could add the anthropomorphic tumbleweed in Andrei Platonov’s astonishing story “Soul”) are novelties: great novelties, irreplaceable novelties, but not what we normally think of when we think of literary characters. They show what certain authors can do even with seemingly unpromising character material; they chasten us in regard to our usual presumptions about psychological complexity. And they make us realize, once again, how closely a fictional character is tied to whatever surrounds him—how much is needed, in the way of scenery, action, and interaction with others, to bring even a single tiny character to life.

*   *   *

Or to kill him off. When Henry James refers to plots that “pretend to interest us only in the fashion of a Chinese puzzle,” he is alluding, I take it, to mystery and thriller plots. In his own time, that would have meant the mysteries of Wilkie Collins and, somewhat later, Arthur Conan Doyle; by the early twentieth century, he might have had access to John Buchan’s brilliant thrillers, which began to appear just before James died. But it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that we received a flood of masterpieces in this vein, culminating in works such as those of Eric Ambler and Patricia Highsmith (to give just two examples—and very different examples at that, since one writer belongs firmly to the espionage-thriller camp, while the other specializes in the domestic murder mystery). Sentence by sentence, a novel like
A Coffin for Dimitrios
or
Ripley Under Ground
is as good as almost any book written during that time, and I venture to say we will be reading these novels for as long as people read John Updike or Toni Morrison.

In fact, there are certain things that thrillers can do better than serious novels. What these are will depend partly on the country of origin and the historical period, but in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in America and Western Europe, one of those things is definitely politics. When the serious novel of today attempts to cover subjects like terrorism, global warming, international financial shenanigans, civil unrest, and government corruption, the political side of the novel tends to feel like a superimposition pasted onto the “real” theme of a psychologically realistic interior life. In such novels, the parts about the characters’ love affairs or family conflicts or tense work environments ring absolutely true, because that is what contemporary authors of naturalistic fiction have trained themselves to think about. But when they extend themselves into the larger political arena, the novels tend to go off the rails: the violent deaths and conspiratorial plots feel slightly cartoonish, especially when set beside the slowly accumulating, carefully investigated psychological portraits of the main characters.

In contrast, the novel that sets out to be a pure thriller takes as its starting point the violence or corruption of the political world. Such a novel has characters—in Ambler’s case, for instance, they can be quite amusing and sympathetic characters, in an ironic, low-key way—but these characters do not exist primarily to display to us their personal, private, domestic inner lives. Instead, they function as players in the international scene: sometimes by mistake, to be sure, when an erroneous identification or a misunderstood message catches them up in the intrigue, but more often because they have worked in some capacity that connects them to the political world, as journalist or spy or government official of some kind. And this experience means that when violent deaths and mortal threats impinge on their lives, the events mesh naturally with their personalities. It is not just that they are equipped to deal with such things, but that they are practically
expecting
to deal with them, which means that we in turn, as readers, have this expectation as well. Instead of feeling tacked on in a well-intentioned but finally unsuccessful way, the political aspects of thriller novels feel integral to the plots. And if they are “good enough” thrillers—that is, works that satisfy a fairly high standard of literary style, as many do, despite or perhaps even because of their plainspokenness—we can read them with a kind of interest that is comparable to, though very different from, the interest we might bring to more purely psychological novels.

All novels are premised on a certain degree of suspense: we keep reading because we want to find out how things turn out. In mystery novels, it’s just that the contract with the reader is slightly more explicit. By the end of the book, we are assured, we will not only know everything of importance, but we will also be able to renounce any future concern about the fates of the characters involved. According to this contract, there will be no plotlines left dangling—as there so notably are, for instance, in the last sentence of Henry James’s
The Bostonians
, where he says of his heroine’s emotional tears: “It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these are not the last she was destined to shed.” The marriage for which we have on some level been hoping throughout the novel, though in a somewhat mixed and perhaps skeptical way, has arrived to seal the plot of
The Bostonians
, but it turns out that this is only the beginning of another plot, one that we won’t be around to witness. James’s novels often end this way. A decision has been reached, an option has been closed off; the plot is, in that sense, terminated. But since life always offers more decisions, more options, we know that something else is going to happen to these characters after we leave them, and what that will be, we cannot really guess. Even when the authorial voice seems willing to prophesy, we can’t fully trust it. After all, from whose point of view is Verena Tarrant’s marriage to the ambitious, impoverished, irrepressible Basil Ransom considered “so far from brilliant”? Whose anxieties are expressed in the politely reticent “it is to be feared”—Verena’s, about her own potential happiness, or society’s, about her choice of husband? How strongly can we take the word “destined” when it comes to us couched in such ironic, particular, socially placed and therefore nonauthoritative language? In this final sentence, is James speaking to us in his own person, or as the ventriloquist of the society he’s somewhat mockingly representing? There are no firm answers to questions like these, and to answer “Both” is simply to beg them.

The mystery novel, as a rule, ends more firmly than this. It asks a straightforward question—which might be “Who committed the crime?” or possibly “Will the murderer be caught and punished, or will he escape?”—and then it proceeds to answer that question to our complete satisfaction. There are notable exceptions to this pattern, such as Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall’s
Rosanna
, where we never discover who committed the murder, or Jo Nesbø’s
Redbreast
, which solves one aspect of its mystery plot but leaves an equally important element unresolved. But even these exceptions confirm the rule, by hastening on to multiple sequels in which the plots
do
get tied up, as if to say to us, “Yes, yes, you’ve been very good, tolerating this amount of ambiguity, but we promise not to ask it of you again.”

The mystery, despite its general gruesomeness, is designed to reassure. It asserts the existence of an author who knows the answers (who has almost certainly, in fact, arrived at those answers before constructing the plot) and who will eventually give them to us. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, too. John le Carré’s Smiley books reassure us with their control—of plot, of language, of “tradecraft”—even as they undermine any faith we might have in the governmental powers-that-be, for in George Smiley’s world the worst offenses always turn out to come from inside his own security-keeping system. And in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, the standard version of reassurance gets turned on its head: here the murderer himself is the continuing character, and the investigating officers are just flies to be brushed off as each new episode passes. Playing on our own indwelling anxieties, taunting us with the nerve-wracking possibility that Ripley might be apprehended, Highsmith pushes our strange desire to empathize with a villain about as far as it can go, and that turns out to be very far indeed. We feel, reading her books, as if something bad we have done will be exposed and our guilt will be revealed. (She may
seem
to be talking about Ripley, but from our point of view she is really talking about us.) But even here, a kind of reassurance arrives at the end, because Ripley always vanquishes the police investigation and survives to kill again, just as Smiley solves the crime even when he can’t bring the true criminals, his MI6 superiors, to justice. Is this reassurance, or its opposite? In the best mysteries, there is always a residue—of doubt, of anxiety, of concern about our social welfare. It is this residue which distinguishes the rereadable mysteries from the run-of-the-mill one-timers.

*   *   *

Perhaps it will seem perverse of me, in a book devoted to the subject of literature, to refer repeatedly to murder mysteries, a notoriously trashy form. But quality is not hierarchical. Judgments can always be made at any level; and though there are certainly good books and bad books in the world, they do not line up neatly according to rank, with good books filling the approved high genres and bad books the despised lower ones. If only stick figures inhabited the novels of Wilkie Collins and Patricia Highsmith (not to mention John Buchan, Ross Macdonald, Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, Henning Mankell, and all the other great mystery writers of the last couple of centuries), our interest in those books would greatly diminish. They would become simply like crossword puzzles, something ingeniously designed to kill time. Instead, they constitute one of the more essential forms of reading. Our own literary tradition might be said to have begun with the investigation of a murder (I’m thinking of Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex
: yet another story, like Jim Thompson’s
The Killer Inside Me
, where the detective turns out to be the murderer), and I suspect it will end that way, if it ever does.