These books have recognizable beginnings, middles, and ends. There’s the primary couple and the secondary couple. The friends and the sidekicks and the comic relief, the measured ways in which coincidence, lost opportunity, and hard lessons are meted out. Even the plot twists are somehow predictable. Inside these pages, I feel tucked in and at ease knowing that such books exist and continue to exist, that their characters endure.
In an unfortunate twist worthy of Hardy or Wharton, my father died a month before I became the editor of the Book Review. He’d taken such pride in my working for the Times. He took every chance to boast about it to friends, as if he’d had a hand in my success. Well, he had.
How happy he would have been to see me finally have all the books I wanted. To know that his indulgence at the Roosevelt Field Barnes & Noble had paid off. That he’d helped start something and nurture it along the way. When I look through the galleys as they arrive at the Book Review, I still feel the impulse to grab every new book about the Spanish Civil War or Catskills history, the latest John le Carré, the books he loved. When I read these books, I read them for him.
CHAPTER 21
Les Misérables
Why Read?
Not so long ago at a Kidlit book club gathering, one of our members asked a question that stopped us all: “Why do you read?” She asked this during an animated debate about the relative merits of the book under discussion (a children’s book, of course), one that had inspired widely divergent reactions. It may be that we responded to the book so differently, she implied, because we were after different things.
“I’m serious,” she repeated. She happens to be a psychologist, so naturally she pressed us to really think about our answers. “Why do you read?’
This was asked of a group of hard-core book people. Most of us were literary agents, English teachers, editors, or authors. We should have known the answer more or less by heart. Yet each of us looked slightly dumbstruck, as if we’d been forced to gaze inward and justify our very existence on the spot. It was obvious. Why hadn’t anyone thought to ask this question before? We paused to think. Then we went around the table and took turns giving answers.
“I read for sheer entertainment.”
“I read to learn.”
“I read to make sense of the world.”
“I read to find out something new.”
“I read to escape.”
“I read because it makes me happy.”
“I read for discovery.”
For each of us, there seemed to be one core need that drove us to read on. But it was more complicated than that, as the ensuing conversation soon revealed. Everyone experiences most of these urges at different moments, or during certain periods of our lives, which is why most good readers read widely, even if they tend to go deep into one genre or another.
And one’s primary reason for reading can shift over time, sometimes quite suddenly. A death, a divorce, an empty nest, a health crisis—these kinds of life changes might pivot that central motivation. Not surprisingly, several people at the dinner table offered tiered answers. “I used to read because I was looking for answers, but now that I’ve reached middle age, I fundamentally read for pure enjoyment,” one person explained. “I’m no longer looking for confirmation,” another said. “I want to be challenged.”
When it was my turn, my first answer was, “I read to be transported.” It has always been this way. At base, I want to enter a world apart. To take off. Perhaps it’s that insecure desire left over from childhood—the wondering what it would be like to be someone else, some other kind of heroine, pursuing adventures more worthy and interesting than my own. Given the chance, I want to go elsewhere in time, place, perspective—whether to present-day Algeria or 1980s Montana or pre-Code Hollywood.
It’s not exactly about escape. It’s about experiencing something I would otherwise never have the chance to experience. To know what it’s like to be a merchant marine in the South Pacific precisely because I never will be a merchant marine in the South Pacific. To experience a Norwegian boyhood in the early twentieth century like Roald Dahl’s because I would otherwise never know what it meant to grow up just outside the Arctic Circle, to walk miles to get to the nearest dentist, to be beaten with a cane by a cruel headmaster. Books answer that persistent question, “What is that really like?” By putting you in the place of a character unlike yourself in a situation unlike your own, a good book forges a connection with the other. You get to know, in some way, someone you never would have otherwise known, to live some other life you yourself will never live.
This is probably why I rarely feel the urge to turn to fiction about contemporary American family dysfunction or the saga of someone working for a newspaper in New York or doing the old work-life-family tango. Maybe because I live it, I don’t exactly find it gripping material. Or especially enlightening. The Norton-driven need to fill in the gaps and accumulate knowledge, however fleeting, still percolates within, insatiable. I’d rather know more about what I don’t already know.
In November 2015, I returned to Paris for the first time in eight years. With the advent of e-mail and Skype, staying in touch with the Mathieus electronically would have been easy, but we almost never corresponded. Though it’s difficult to achieve with a full-time job and three children, I far preferred to maintain the relationship through physical presence and place. It was a relationship founded in total immersion and identification, and keeping it that way felt right. I hadn’t been to Paris since I was pregnant with Teddy, a trip marred by horrendous morning sickness. On one especially surly afternoon, I’d stomped around the city in search of something decent to eat; the only thing I could tolerate was bitter dark chocolate ice cream without hazelnut. Why was there nothing to eat in Paris?
My French sister, Juliette, now a biogeneticist at the Institut Pasteur, had come to visit during a conference in New York a few years earlier; since then, she’d had two children. The apartment where I’d stayed as a student was now hers. My French brother, Paul, had become an architect like his father, married his Romanian girlfriend, and had three kids. He’d been fourteen when I lived there; now his hair was gray, and he lived within walking distance of the atelier he shared with Bertrand. The youngest Mathieu, Margot, only ten when I first lived in Paris—the same age as Beatrice—had moved to Brussels with her husband and two children, where she worked as a child psychologist. There were seven brand-new Mathieus and I’d never met any of them.