AS A TEENAGER I READ INDISCRIMINATELY. AT THE library, as I’ve said, I usually chose books by their size—the fatter the better. Although that meant that I discovered Victor Hugo and Tolstoy and Dickens by the time I was fifteen, it also meant that I read—and, I admit, loved—Irving Wallace, Jacqueline Susann, and Harold Robbins with equal fervor. In one week I might read Anna Karenina and Hawaii, the next Les Misérables and Valley of the Dolls. I devoured Evan Hunter’s Paper Lions with as much intensity as I did Great Expectations. Doris Lessing could have been talking about me and my reading habits when she said, “With a library you are free . . . it is the most democratic of institutions because no one—but no one at all—can tell you what to read and when and how.”
When I look back on the books that shaped me, the ones that taught me how to think and live and dream, a surprising one keeps coming into my mind: A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins. The cover screams bodice ripper. A raven-haired beauty half reclines on a bed, wearing a silky black slip and stockings held up by garters. Below, a glistening shirtless Danny Fisher stares down at a man he has just knocked out in a boxing ring. When I began to reread it again a half century later I could hear the advice I give writing students: don’t overuse the action of looking; don’t repeat words; don’t use ellipses; stay in the point of view; avoid sentimentality and melodrama—all of which Robbins employs on every page. The plot revolves around Danny, a young Jewish boy who at eight years old moves with his family to a home he loves in Brooklyn. He acquires a dog and friends in short order and soon even learns that the older teenage girl across the street likes to leave her shades up so he can watch her undress, something that makes him feel filthy. Danny punishes himself by taking showers so cold they hurt.
There’s lots of sex in A Stone for Danny Fisher, though often I couldn’t tell if he had just kissed someone, actually had sex with her, or just felt her breasts. More than once I had to reread scenes, confused by Danny’s feelings of guilt after being with a girl. But second and even third reads left me just as confused. Perhaps these vague sex scenes were just right for my na?ve teenage self—enough to titillate but not enough to terrify me.
One night, Danny’s parents and sister go to the movies, leaving him home alone. Mimi, the girl who sexually taunts him from across the street, comes to his house and tries to seduce him in one of the strangest seduction scenes I’ve ever read. Of course, as a fifteen-year-old, confused by sex myself, it must have seemed sexually charged and exciting to read. Mimi holds a tumbler of cold water, then puts her cold hands on Danny’s face. He doesn’t move or respond. So she presses her lips against his and bends him backward across the sink, at which point Danny grabs her by the shoulders and squeezes so hard that she gasps in pain, which makes him laugh. “Don’t fight with me, Danny,” Mimi tells him. “I like you. And I can tell you like me!” They hear a car in the driveway and Mimi leaves. So why is Danny racked with guilt? What did they even do that made him feel “soiled and dirty”? Not only does Danny take one of those frigid showers, he also slaps himself so hard that he doubles over in pain. Often these scenes are followed by such cruelty toward the girl that Danny seems almost insane. When Danny sees Mimi again the next day, he stares at her coldly and then tells her, “I hate your guts.”
Surely, I thought after I read this scene as an adult, I had read this book over and over as pure escapism. Although I didn’t have very discerning taste as a fifteen-year-old, I could see this book for what it was. Even now I like to sometimes indulge in the guilty pleasure of reading a book that literary snobs would never consider reading. And I enjoy them, those paperbacks I don’t mind leaving behind on an airplane. They make long flights pass pleasantly. I don’t have to marvel at the use of language or metaphor or puzzle over how the author pulled off such a mind-bogglingly intricate plot. I just read it and forget it, perhaps a habit I learned back in high school when I read any book I could get my hands on.
But then why did A Stone for Danny Fisher come to mind immediately when thinking of books that shaped me, right beside The Grapes of Wrath and Rabbit, Run? I cannot say with honesty that when I read it back in 1971 or ’72 that I recognized it as a lesser literary achievement. In fact, I remember loving it, every word. I remember how hard I sobbed when Danny’s dog dies, and when he visits the Brooklyn home his family was forced to leave, when he dies at the end, and at the book’s final line: “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.” I also remember that after reading it several times, I took out other Harold Robbins books and couldn’t even finish them. I didn’t like them at all. No, this novel spoke to me.
As I reread A Stone for Danny Fisher this past summer, slowly I understood. I believe that magically the book we are supposed to read somehow appears in our hands at just the right time. This happened for me when I struggled to manage multiple points of view as I wrote my first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine. Perhaps out of fear of writing an entire novel, I’d considered the book as interconnected short stories. But here I was, trying to make those stories a novel. Pages covered my living room floor in my Bleecker Street apartment. What was I thinking, trying to use so many points of view? Convinced I would never figure out how to make it work, and that I would have to give back my advance, I decided to take a long walk. I ended up at the Spring Street Bookstore in Soho, where I picked up a book by a writer I’d never heard of before—Anne Tyler. The book was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and it was written in multiple points of view, a detail I didn’t know when I bought it. Back at my apartment, I ignored all the pages on my floor and flopped, dejected, onto the couch. I read that novel straight through—enchanted, yes, but also, I know now, learning from it how to manage the narrative style. Recently I read that Tyler had originally written Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant as interconnected stories too. That book landed in my hands at just the right time. And now I realize so did A Stone for Danny Fisher.