Leafing Though

Reading is a curious thing. It takes much more time than, say, watching a TV programme. It also offers much less immediacy, since when watching TV you see the characters that in reading you have to make up in your head. It's an isolated and isolating activity.

And yet we do it. You're reading this right now, for example. And if you are, you chose to, rather than doing something like talking to a friend, which would

seem a much more enriching activity. And not only do we do it, but we talk about it, and not only do we talk about it, but sometimes we are interested to hear about it even if we haven't done it. O.M. was telling me last night that she'd been reading Catherine Millet's new book, and even though I haven't read it and she didn't tell me the plot (which I already knew, from reading articles about it), I wanted to know what she thought of it. B. wrote to me from Russia telling me he'd enjoyed Our Man in Havana: I haven't read it, but I quite like Graham Greene and, although I have no plans to read Our Man in the near future, I was interested to hear that someone I liked had read a book by someone I'd liked. In that case, it was partially because I now will make a mental note to read it, but it was also because just generally I like to know if you're enjoying the book you're reading or not.

What is it that makes reading so enjoyable, I wonder? And what is it that makes it for some people, in a world where there are many other options besides reading books, a thing they still do as a matter of course? You get drawn into other worlds, certainly. And you have to do some of the drawing yourself, which I really think is part of the attraction: you envision the characters and the situations, and so you're more interested and invested in them. But at the same time there's the fact that the author is doing a good deal of the work - most people have favourite fictional characters, for example (the man who appears in Markheim, for me, or Henry Tilney, whom my friend K and I decided in college would be the perfect husband, and for whom I've always maintained a residual fondness), which suggests some authors do especially good jobs of creating characters, or at least that character - and the fact that that work is being done, and an experience offered to you, is very soothing. Certainly this passive reception is a large part of the attraction of reading, but so is the active reception. And then there's the thinking. I don't just mean the thinking about larger issues that a novel might raise - I mean even just the simple act of going back over the plot in your mind, thinking about what the characters have done and what you've particularly liked.

Following on from that, as I've said I'm currently reading Tender is the Night. It's certainly depressing, yet...I like it ("I like it; I like it"). Essentially, I like

Fitzgerald's writing very much. I sometimes think that I pay a lot of attention to the way in which literature is written - the use and placement of words and the effect those have on tone or weight - because I'm a writer myself, but really it's probably just something that's happened as I've got older. In any case, Fitzgerald is very good in this way in Tender: he deploys words to effect extraordinarily well. Also, he's a very keen observer of human emotion, and a very good comprehender of it. For example, the main character, Dick Diver, is deeply attracted to the young Rosemary Hoyt, but even as he embarks on an affair with her - or wavers toward doing so - he retains his belief that his wife is the most beautiful woman he knows, and that they are deeply and necessarily bound to each other. His desire for Rosemary is fresh, but his love for his wife is deep, and seems (at the stage I've reached, anyway) to outweigh his desire. Yet his desire pulls and haunts him. Fitzgerald clearly comprehends that and how that this might be the case, and not only does he comprehend it, but he portrays the feelings vividly enough that the reader accepts them (understanding them is a different story).

There's a really marvellous portion of a chapter, in which Diver is haunted by a description of an at least sensual encounter Rosemary may have had in a train compartment: he imagines a request to pull down the curtain, eagerly granted, and the question, "Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?", becomes a refrain he can't get out of his head. It comes to him in several different situations, and with several different metaphorical meanings, in the next couple of chapters, and one gradually comes to see the way in which lust - or at least an utterance that inspires lust - can become a kind of warning against itself: "the curtain" gradually, metaphorically, becomes the veil that Diver draws in front of his desire for Rosemary, or his tendency to imagine her in this arousing situation, so the words that indicate arousal themselves become a warning against further arousal. Very well done on Fitzgerald's part.

Yet the book has very little apparent style, or perhaps it might be better to say very little apparent idiosyncratic style. All that Fitzgerald deploys stylistically seems designed first and foremost to give reader clear access to the situation and the characters' experience of it (not that this always works, I hasten to add, and some plot developments seem very odd. There are some bits I don't get at all). And thinking about this in the kitchen tonight while I was making my milk, I thought that perhaps that's the sign of a great prose writer: a great prose writer makes style secondary to the desire to communicate his or her world. Which is not to say the style need not be apparent, or even foregrounded. But the goal is always to make it do service to the communication, so that even overt style is used for a purpose, a purpose of clarity.

In any case, as the woman in the play does not say, You've a way with you, F. I'm sure I like it.