Notes from a Helpless Reader

The Best and Worst of Times, by Peter Sourian. Doubleday, $3.95 The House on Coliseum Street, by Shirley Ann Grau. Knopf, $3.50 The Lime Twig, by John Hawkes. New Directions, $3.50 Among the several small compulsions to which I am given, perhaps the most insidious of all is reading. A kind of glaze comes over my mind in the presence of the printed word: I read the tax stamps on cigarette wrappers, the trademark information in du Pont advertisements, the Pass-over menus in the New York Daily News; I read production schedules in the Hollywood Reporter and have twice this year read through the merit-badge requirements in an old Girl Scout Handbook. At a lunch counter, my attention is fixed trancelike upon the described glories of muffins served with golden, creameryfresh, whipped butter; on a flight between New York and San Francisco, there I am, first perusing Profiles in Courage, then raptly scanning, in three languages, the instructions for obtaining and inflating life jackets.

Although my reading is clearly more a nervous addiction than an insatiable quest for knowledge, a certain selectivity does operate. I do not prefer the Hollywood Reporter to a really magnificently bad novel (say Hawaii, or Water of Life), but I do prefer it to a nothing novel. There is something peculiarly enervating about the kind of novel I have in mind; it lacks what the boys call “consumer benefit.” One finds oneself reading more but enjoying it less, remembering how great novels used to taste, wondering what happened to that deep, cool, kiss-of-the-hops prose.

JD

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Joan Didion

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The Best and Worst of Times, by Peter Sourian. Doubleday, $3.95 The House on Coliseum Street, by Shirley Ann Grau. Knopf, $3.50 The Lime Twig, by John Hawkes. New Directions, $3.50 Among the several small compulsions to which I am given, perhaps the most insidious of all is reading. A kind of glaze comes over my mind in the presence of the printed word: I read the tax stamps on cigarette wrappers, the trademark information in du Pont advertisements, the Pass-over menus in the New York Daily News; I read production schedules in the Hollywood Reporter and have twice this year read through the merit-badge requirements in an old Girl Scout Handbook. At a lunch counter, my attention is fixed trancelike upon the described glories of muffins served with golden, creameryfresh, whipped butter; on a flight between New York and San Francisco, there I am, first perusing Profiles in Courage, then raptly scanning, in three languages, the instructions for obtaining and inflating life jackets.

Although my reading is clearly more a nervous addiction than an insatiable quest for knowledge, a certain selectivity does operate. I do not prefer the Hollywood Reporter to a really magnificently bad novel (say Hawaii, or Water of Life), but I do prefer it to a nothing novel. There is something peculiarly enervating about the kind of novel I have in mind; it lacks what the boys call “consumer benefit.” One finds oneself reading more but enjoying it less, remembering how great novels used to taste, wondering what happened to that deep, cool, kiss-of-the-hops prose.