In any case, it was a hardcover. Nonmanagerial employees received a 5 percent discount on merchandise, the barest acknowledgment of our contributions. The closest B. Dalton came to giving workers a free book was during inventory. On these evenings, the store stayed open late and in the cloak of darkness stripped those mass-market paperbacks deemed unsellable and shipped them off to be pulped. Under Dan’s supervision, we tore their covers off, lobbing the denuded copies into a dumpster.
The whole thing was upsetting. Books were sacred objects, something I wouldn’t dream of throwing away. Well trained by the library, I considered the idea of defacing a book, even with thoughtful marginalia, a punishable offense. I couldn’t believe an item of such import could just be torn apart, its carefully designed cover ripped ruthlessly from its guts, and jettisoned to a place where no one would read it.
We weren’t supposed to take these rejects, though Dan uncharacteristically gave me a pass. The trouble was, shorn of their casings, whatever allure these books may have once held—and there was little; they were, after all, trashed for a reason—was lost in their newly abused state. I felt sullied in the process, as ripped off as the books themselves.
My B. Dalton career, in the end, only whetted my appetite. What were all those books about, why were people buying them, and when could I?
Meanwhile, upstate where he and my stepmother escaped the confines of their middle-income housing complex, my father had developed a library-sale habit, scooping up reams of former bestsellers for pennies. These books, though used, somehow felt found rather than lost. He gathered old James Micheners, well-worn histories of the Catskills, any book about the Spanish Civil War, photographic collections of military hardware, and what felt like more than enough copies of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. He had a weakness, which I contracted through osmosis, for books that had enjoyed a moment of wild popularity decades earlier and then managed to fade into obscurity. (My brother Roger inherited this same tendency, assembling a Library of the Absurd in his living room, which included such treasures as the complete oeuvre of Phyllis Schlafly.)
I combed my dad’s newly stocked shelves and there, nestled between Ulster County histories and books about the Lincoln Brigade, I came across a used mass-market paperback of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a book that struck me as an especially sophisticated choice for a high schooler. It was not a classic in the English-class sense of the word nor was it a children’s book. It was just a book grown-ups read. I wanted to partake in that, not for edification but for fun.
Catch-22 was a book about war and geopolitics—about which I knew precisely nothing. But more than its unfamiliar subject matter, its distinctive associative style, its circular structure, its repetitive and escalating iterations were completely unlike the straightforward narratives I’d trained on. Perhaps even more important, Catch-22 was the first book that made me laugh out loud (apart from giggling over picture books). Hungry Joe, who dreamt every night he had a cat sleeping on his face and finally woke to find he had a cat sleeping on his face, made me spit out my food.
When I wasn’t upstate, I worked weekends in the city. I’d read on the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station, stop briefly at one of “my” Barnes & Nobles, on the corner of Thirty-Fourth and Seventh, then take the subway uptown to Madison Avenue. There I worked at a small French clothing store, selling one-size-fits-all viscose dresses in loud patterns, mostly to keep up my language skills. I chatted with my French colleagues during the largely empty hours and, an incorrigible mimic, wound up speaking English in a haughty French accent whenever a customer walked in, a habit that endeared me to exactly no one.
I worked so hard at all of these jobs, not because I loved them but because they were a means to an end, one that had nothing to do with the jobs themselves or adding value to my college application. What I wanted was resources and freedom, the means to buy books and to know which books to buy.
The core of Catch-22 is, of course, its titular phrase, one used to describe an unsolvable logical dilemma that keeps people in their place, typically a lowly one. This idea entered the popular vernacular and took hold with such ubiquity that it’s hard to understand how we ever got by without it. My personal catch-22 was the unquenchable yearning to own books—to own books and to suck out the marrow of them and then to feel sated rather than hungrier still. I couldn’t have been more deluded.
CHAPTER 5
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
Required Reading
Denounce the canon all you want; it’s hard to shake the conviction that certain books are meant to be read. Books you may have to struggle to finish. Books that everyone else seems to have read and anyone who dares consider himself a reader, or at the very least “well read,” will also have read, whether they enjoy the experience or not. It’s why everyone gets defensive when you bring up the subject of James Joyce’s Ulysses. People still feel that to be a real reader, you have to … someday. (For the record: I haven’t.)
As a child, I assumed one of these books was the encyclopedia. In its entirety. It was just a matter of hunkering down, and I actually thought I could do it. If only we’d owned the World Book. Instead we were cursed with a yellowed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, passed down from some forgotten relative, its infrequent and uninspired black-and-white line drawings a pale comparison to the enviable full-color splendor of the World Book. Time and again I would set myself to read one of its mouse-brown volumes, almost hairy with age, and find my mind traipsing off elsewhere within paragraphs.
The canon also included, in my youthful estimation, any book with “classic” on its cover, a word imbued with near-magical powers, no matter how abridged and watered down the rendition. (A series of “chunky” classic books, adorable in their four-by-three-inch format, with pen-and-ink illustrations and sold on a stationery-store spinning rack, led me to believe I had polished off The Three Musketeers and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.) The canon included anything by a Great Writer, someone famous enough to be an occasional character in a movie or TV show or another book. It included anything associated with Western civilization, the only civilization I’d learned about from school.
Part of this imperative stemmed from insecurity. If you’re going to be a bookish child, you had damn well better be good at it, and I feared the prospect of being sniffed out for my lapses. Someone always has to be the person who has never read Trollope, but it damn sure wasn’t going to be me. When a book wasn’t assigned at school, I assigned it to myself.