Читать книгу John Knowles' A Separate Peace: Bookmarked - Kirby Gann - Страница 8

“Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.”

—A Separate Peace

MORE THAN LIFE EXPERIENCE, MORE THAN INHERENT imagination, books come from other books. A Separate Peace arrived at a time when the power of books was only beginning to take hold of me, their quiet influence literally sustaining my mind and imagination for year, long before the notion of trying to write one, or write anything beyond teenage rock lyrics / ”poems,” reared its intimidating head. I cannot pinpoint precisely what age this happened to be—adolescence, at least; fourteen, fifteen, whatever is the conventional high school age for a freshman or sophomore in English class. At the time I was no more certain about my future as a writer, or what was required “to become” a writer, or even if I honestly enjoyed the act of writing, than I was certain about anything else at that age. Who is? 1982, 1983: there were many selves at work bouncing for attention, many other possible futures available when the county system bussed me downtown to start at Central High School, a morose yellow-brick structure that from outside looked more like a warehouse or factory than a place for learning, located in the center of the city beside the low-income housing of the Village West apartments. There, for a dollar, you could buy joints made mostly of tobacco with some weed mixed in from the older boys who hung out near their Cadillacs and BMWs in sleeveless undershirts across the street from the entrance to the parking lot. Making your way inside, half-asleep and bent under the weight of your book bag, you passed through clouds of acrid cigarette smoke and the heavier scent of pot, head down to insure you didn’t make eye contact with any of those upperclassmen who liked to snag freshman belongings and scatter textbooks across the pavement for a laugh.

Central was not a place that suggested auspicious futures or encouraged long hours of studious contemplation, the honing of young minds. It was a place to keep your head down, stick to your own side of the hallway, and move quickly to reach the relative sanctuary of the classroom.

I loved it. The charge of the atmosphere, the threat of violence either suffered or witnessed, the thrilling noise from multiple hand-held radios vying for prominence between classes, the shoulder-to-shoulder interaction with different races—whites were a minority there, and the school’s ESL program was flush in refugees from southeast Asia and the middle east—excited and intimidated me after a childhood in which the one or two black students in a class had made for a mild curiosity at first, and then became an unremarkable difference. Central, however, was the kind of place where a smart kid kept on the move, no time for stopping and staring for a second without being confronted by someone inevitably larger bellowing, What you looking at?

You can get used to anything once the newness wears off. You learn your place in the hierarchy of things. So long as you stayed there, you were fine. The atmosphere of tension and volatility in the hallways, cafeteria, and parking lot was one in which even a quasi-suburban white kid active in his Episcopal church and raised on poolside summers could come to thrive, once he learned where he belonged.

•

I was an impatient and hyperactive kid who ran everywhere anyway, even between rooms at home, lacking the discipline required to sit quiet for long. The patience and stillness required to write has never come naturally; it’s an acquired, self-trained behavior, an essential that in all honesty still fails me from time to time, my body unable to settle, the prospect of sitting down in a chair at my desk for what will be hours unappetizing. There are biographies of triumphant artists where the subject seems born to literature, ambitious with the pen and blooming verse and story even before puberty, indulged and encouraged by a doting mother, usually, and intellectually rapacious at the outset. This would not be me. To be the boy who scribbled away at stories and novels in personal notebooks, or wrote out plays to be performed for the family and neighbors, would have required hours of stillness and willful contemplation that my childhood self did not possess the capacity to undergo. I was impulsive, thoughtless, and often corrected, the kind of child forever being lectured on the necessity of considering the consequences of his actions, to try to think for once before acting.

Hints and intimations can be found, though, in retrospect. But hints found only with the knowledge of a life immersed in literature as an adult, only an eye in search of such roots would identify them as such; otherwise—should my adult self had found his way into another avocation—these same incidents and tendencies would be mere random facts of a childhood. My mother, a former elementary school teacher who for much of her life came dangerously close to being a hoarder, has kept samples of school assignments she found especially charming—or precious, to use her word of choice—from the early years of both her sons. These are rather humiliating to go over now, but something’s there, a preoccupation, let’s say, that implies a particular mind’s becoming. It seems I had a peculiar empathy for inanimate objects. When directed to write a story I must have felt the need to give voice to the voiceless, to the inner lives of appliances such as the washing machine and dryer, and the outdoor furniture, or even the rocks in the drainage ditch that ran between our back yard and the back yards of houses on the other side of the block. A thread runs through these pieces in their self-consciousness and the expression of boisterous anxieties, fears that the speakers couldn’t live up to what all was expected of them, their tasks thankless, exhausting, lonely, and often pointless. Having no memory of writing any of these exercises, what I glean from them is the mind of an unexceptional child stressing already over the threat of failing to meet expectations, coupled with an existential bent. None of these “stories” run more than twenty lines or so, and read as though dashed off—likely written under the demand to finish before being allowed to go outside and play.

Maybe it’s being too generous as well to call these assignments stories; the writing teacher in me now would call them character sketches, or brief monologues. What’s of some interest to me here is the recognition that this form is precisely how I begin work as an adult on any new draft: starting with a voice, a vaguely discerned character, and listening to what she or he has to say, my instincts out to discover their predicament. And these early exercises also display the same weakness that continues to cause me problems when drafting something new in that not a lot happens, it’s a recounting of what preoccupies the speaker without a word of what brought him to this moment or what he plans to do; there’s no arc to the drama, no concrete acts; mostly we read of a consciousness asserting its plight. Wishing to be understood. A washing machine asking the reader to understand the difficulties inherent to being a washing machine. The struggle to get something to happen on the page, evidently, has been my burden from the beginning; often I overcompensate for this shortcoming by making too much happen too quickly, without proper establishment of motivation or clear cause, whenever I’m not droning on about what some character is like, or what she thinks, until it feels like a reader could find more dynamic action in a Beckett novel.

Another early signal: in first grade the school held a poetry contest, with the winning poem to be submitted to compete against every other public elementary school throughout the county. I forget what they gave as a prize, or if they gave anything other than the recognition of having been deemed the best. (I speak of a time before kids received awards for participation; this was the early seventies, when public education wasn’t geared toward encouraging self-esteem. Rather the presumption was that second place or even outright failure were realities everyone needed to come to terms with early on, and if your self-esteem suffered accordingly then you were expected to try harder next time, or else come to accept your place in the implicit hierarchy of the class, the school, the world.)

The teacher passed out the wide-ruled paper that I disliked because of its grayish natural fiber and waxy finish—even then I liked bright white, high-contrast paper—against which the standard No. 2 pencil hardly stood out, and it felt awkwardly slick, too, so that your pencil slipped all over the surface. You had to press down hard to make a clear mark and the paper ripped easily and often. Maybe it had been designed for use with crayons; we used the same paper for the art projects that eventually ended up on the refrigerator door at home. Already I’d developed preferences for different paper bonds and finishes.

I don’t remember what we were told about writing poems or how much time the teacher set aside for us to come up with our verses. It seemed like a long time, and I wasn’t interested; I thought poetry had to be about flowers and trees and nature, and vaguely understood it had to be geared toward girls (or a girl), and love—all things I considered with great ambivalence. Every head in the classroom bent to the task while mine remained up, astonished by how everyone seemed to know immediately, judging by the rapid movement of their hands, what they wanted to say. There was a boy in the class whose name I’ve forgotten, but likely you know him, too—every K–12 classroom in my experience presented some version of him: the strange one with a body that looked put together with mismatched parts, skinny with outsized feet and pants that always revealed the snug white tube socks above his clunky black shoes, an obscurely unclean vibe about his being, his unwashed hair and bits of food in his teeth. When he spoke, saliva gathered and dried in the edges of his mouth. Let’s call him Steve. I noticed Steve had inclined his head toward his desk but, unlike the others, he was only pretending to work, his left hand making motions over the paper without the pencil touching it, the waxy finish reflecting the overhead lights. With his other hand he went about the real action: picking at a scab on his ear.

Steve had a serious compulsion about that ear. Twice already that year he had picked and pinched until it bled, once in copious enough amounts that stopping the bleeding became the classroom’s main concern until the teacher could get him out of there. He had two wounds high on the helix and parallel to one another like fangs had gotten to him, and I could see today he was committed to catching a break from this assignment via bleeding out again.

A poster banner ran three-quarters of the circumference of the room, just below the ceiling, on which we could see the world’s geologic eras depicted from the Precambrian to the Holocene. Like many kids, even in the 1970s, I was fascinated by dinosaurs, to the extent that I’d missed the phase of wanting to be a fireman or police officer when I grew up, and told any adults who inquired that maybe I’d be a “dinosaur man.” I remember asking if there were in fact jobs of this nature out in the world, which is how I learned the meaning and pronunciation of the words archaeology and paleontology probably earlier than most. A lengthy portion of the poster illustrated the Mesozoic and grew interestingly more detailed—at least to my eyes—at the Triassic and Jurassic periods, the best times, when most of the great dinosaurs roamed.

The teacher announced that we were closing in on the time to turn in our poems. She reminded us to write our names and classroom number in the upper right-hand corner of the paper. That classic fear, that surge of panic that came with being called to deliver at a moment of complete and woeful unpreparedness—an alarm with which I would come to grow deeply accustomed over the following years, to the point that it seemed a necessary stage to getting any assignment done—rinsed through me.

I hadn’t written a word yet and already we were near the finish. So I went with what what my mind held, blood and dinosaurs, and tackled the demands of rhyme with a kind of sprung rhythm:

Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs,

they’re what I know. Some

really did grow.

What did they do? They ate you.

Help!

I make no claims that my first literary effort revealed some inchoate genius, or even incipient talent. We all have to start somewhere. But the poem did go on to be selected as the representative poem from Hikes Elementary, grades 1–5, and then somehow won the county-wide contest as well. To the ecstatic thrill of my parents, one of the local papers printed it in the Metro/Neighborhoods section above my misspelled name, along with finalists. The first publication, and thus the initial step of this illustrious career. Here we could claim the young writer was on his way, the pathway forward set—my parents surely would—but in reality this small accomplishment was only something else that happened to a boy easily distracted, unfocused, and interested in so many other things. That the award had been unexpected, even unsought, gave it a unique charm. It brought a good deal of attention and praise from adults, and there was a satisfaction in seeing the newspaper column wafting beneath a single magnet every time I opened and shut the refrigerator door to assuage an addiction to chocolate milk. As a future “dinosaur man” in embryo, however, I had fossils to search out in the wide ditch behind the house. These took precedence.

•

I’ve voiced my belief that writers are more often made rather than born, but believe natural predilections must exist as well; aspects of character that contingency happens to nurture as we begin to take possession of ourselves. A factor common in a writer’s biography is a significant amount of time early in life spent alone, often in convalescence. Which probably accounts for why most people who don’t read picture the typical writer as some friendless pasty-necked geek. My own history contains both, although the stretch of convalescence did not occur until my early twenties when a severe back injury returned me to a floor in my parents home for several weeks, where gifted books piled up beside me. Writing had already captured my interest by then and so the physical suffering was offset by the opportunity to read for hours without interruption. But going farther back—diving deeper into my own navel is how this feels—I find many of my most lasting memories from childhood are steeped in imaginary lives. Every kid plays like this, inventing imaginary friends or reciting storylines for dolls or action figures to enact, and there’s probably some name for this stage of development that my childlessness excuses me for never having had to learn. Anyway, as we age and mature and reality begins to impose its incessant demands we indulge less often in such harmless myth-making, learn to put away childish things, etc.

A fiction writer, though, never gets around to moving on. Rather than being a stage of development, this habit of play settles in as an important facet of who one is. How else to describe the invention of stories populated by imaginary people but as a kind of semi-directed daydreaming? The lure of this kind of the play remains provocative, even compulsive and habitual; it clings to the same rites of fantasy but the focus changes, turns less whimsical and by necessity more coherent, oriented toward adult possibilities and concerns. In some way—and this is neither for good or ill, it simply is, as the nature of the process—one’s character remains deformed from that supposed maturity, reluctant (or unable) to move beyond the detailed imagining of other, vastly foreign selves. We can’t experience firsthand everything available, every interesting possibility, in this world. So through sympathetic imagination we invent other selves.

As Oscar Wilde wrote: “One’s real life is so often the life one does not lead.” Fiction writers try their hands at several different lives and try to get to the truth at the bottom of each of them—lives that often become more “real” than their very own, at least for hours at a time.

What I’m thinking about is different from the convention of, say, transforming into a star athlete while playing basketball with friends, when everyone takes turns mimicking the sports announcer with the game clock ticking down. I would call out, “Griffith picks up the ball and takes it to the hole” (Darrell Griffith being the name every twelve-year-old Kentucky boy had on his tongue the spring and summer of 1980, as he had led the University of Louisville to its first NCAA championship that year) and then move into the slow-motion of highlight films for a down-to-the-wire winning basket. “Doctor Dunkenstein again!” Someone else would be Dr. J, Magic Johnson, or Larry Bird, and for those instants in the game that’s who we were, bearing the glory of exploits seen on TV while knowing no more about the players’ lives than we knew of what our parents lives were like once they left for work. We might switch identities at a whim, just as a new name sprang to mind. Once the games finished, we returned to our regularly-scheduled identities, smiling at the thought of what it must feel like to be so unambiguously great at something as to inspire awe in everyone watching. None of this connects to what Wilde wrote; in fact this was its opposite, the impossible fantasy of those momentary lives being a large part of their allure.

On my own and left to my own devices, however, imagined selves could be so deeply inhabited as to replace the boy imagining them, accruing the details not only of storylines but personal histories: on the overgrown banks of that backyard ditch and stripped to a pair of shorts and no shoes, I might be an Indian brave cut off from his tribe by the movements of Custer’s army, trying to read daylight stars to find my way to safety while also making reconnaissance of the enemy’s location; a pirate from England, the only survivor of a shipwreck caused by the necessary mutiny which grew out of hand, living flotsam who kissed the earth once he washed ashore, only to be taken prisoner by local authorities who then made him a slave (I named my pirate Edward Bonney and even construed an ersatz pirate costume from ripped trousers and an old wine-stained tuxedo shirt of my father’s that was several sizes too big, a bright red bandanna wrapped around my head). Before the movies introduced us to Indiana Jones, I was an archaeologist named Clifton Banks, scouring the ditch for fossils while keeping hid from the primitive tribes who protected their ancestral land. This guise sank so deeply into me that it influenced my actual dreams. In one that recurred for years I stumbled into an extraordinary discovery there in the drainage ditch behind our house. Beneath the riprap stone of culvert ballast that we neighborhood kids deployed for the construction of small dams, I uncovered a hidden cave entrance. I slithered along a narrow passage—too narrow for an adult—to where the cave opened into a great hall, and on the walls there the skeletons of several dinosaurs, many never seen or recorded before, stood out perfectly preserved as if in amber, mutedly aglow as though beneath recessed museum lighting, so long undisturbed that even the pores of flesh could be made out embedded in the stone. The long hallway narrowed and seemed to close and then open again the deeper I wandered, an endless honeycomb of rooms reaching farther back in time with each successive cavern, the animal history of the earth portrayed in its walls as clearly as that poster remembered strung beneath the ceiling on three walls of my first-grade classroom.

A world underground and the possibilities to be discovered there proved a longstanding fascination. Maybe because the district in which we lived appeared so orderly, planned, every house with its eighth-of-an-acre lawn drawn with clipped boxwoods or taxus hedges and punctuated by a single oak or maple or holly, each house itself a slight variation on the ranch split-level template. Years would pass before I came to suspect that the real curiosities occurred in the lives of the families who resided behind the doors and bay windows of all that bricked and shuttered sameness. At my young age, though, what lurked out of sight and worthy of exploration lay under everyone’s feet. That’s where all the adventure awaited. Many times I dipped into the cabinet where we kept useful necessities for the eventual power outage—the usual thunderstorms or even strong winds could be counted on to return the neighborhood to the nineteenth century several times every spring and summer—and grabbed the flashlight along with replacement batteries (because you never knew how long the batteries in use would last), taking care to shut the drawer carefully so that it didn’t appear disturbed in case my mother swept by. I didn’t want to field questions of what I was doing with a flashlight in the middle of a summer day.

Then I would venture out alone into one of the many culverts embedded around the neighborhood, these concrete tunnels which in my imagination transformed into the interior of a lost ziggurat, a labyrinth to be searched for the treasures of a people mysteriously disappeared. Surely someone must have lived around here before the area was developed—didn’t people live everywhere, all the time? So went my thinking. It was a small step then to enter those dark passages that connected one to another, slink past the scribbled and sprayed graffiti beyond where the light gave out, and slip into a maze of cold concrete, the useful bandanna now wrapped over my mouth as protection against the moldy air. For hours I crawled or else walked hunched over into the darkness, guessing at my location by the faint light falling through the intermittent curbside grates, junctions walled by what seemed to be ancient red brick. No real reason why behind this desire aside from curiosity and a vague awareness that such adventures would be forbidden by my parents, and might not even be exactly legal; but I wanted to see.

You confront your fears when on your own in the dark. Throw a stone and it disappeared, clacking away without much of an echo. The rumble heard distantly and rushing closer could be a flash flood raging forth or a truck roaring by overhead. Switch off the flashlight and remain absolutely still, squatting at the knees and listening to a silence more absolute than ever imagined, take in the darkness so complete you cannot see your hand in front of your face, not even after several minutes of waiting for your eyes to adjust; only the memory of what was seen before extinguishing the light gives any idea of where you are and what’s around you. Even though you hadn’t been taking particular note of where you’ve been or where you were headed, your mind presents a map like an opaque blueprint and you find that just so very interesting, and wonder if everyone’s brain works the same or only yours. Consider what you would do next if you dropped the flashlight now, or found that it won’t turn back on. See how long you can go without freaking out before testing the switch. Try not to think about the possible difficulties of finding your way out.

Always the important moment came in which I recognized having reached a certain point where retracing my steps without getting lost still presented a plausible option; there were junctions everywhere down there, different tunnels, different directions to select. After a few such decisions it seemed unlikely I could make my way back without getting lost. I would pause a moment and replay where I’d made a right turn, where a left, always with the comforting picture in mind of how the distant light would look at the culvert’s mouth—faintly perceptible and infinitely small at first, then growing into a riotous beacon as I imagined scrabbling my way nearer. I say “imagined” because it had to be, I never saw this actually happen. Never once did I turn around to go back the way I came. For whatever reason the flashlight beam kept pulling me forward, a separate tunnel would present itself, and then another one and then another, and I moved ahead with the faith that an exit would be on offer when an exit was needed, a pliable manhole cover or loose grate waiting at the ready for when I made my way out.

Clifton Banks never made any discoveries of lasting note among the detritus scattered around down there. In those long pauses with the light turned off he would think of his children at home, of his wife who had argued with him not to go this time, that she had a bad feeling about him going to this unknown and ancient place. He would think of his family and wonder what they were doing at that exact same moment in which he hardly existed, breathing bad air through his trusty bandanna. He thought of his colleagues at the university and his uncertain position there, not confidant that he had their due respect despite that the department’s very existence owed much to the values of his earlier discoveries. He sat in that absolute dark and wondered what the likelihood was, should he die right now, that any-body would ever find him, or know what had happened to him—and he didn’t mind the prospect of this, it seemed fitting in a way, though he knew it would crush his youngest daughter Bettina, who believed he ruled the world.

My faith in finding a way out was always rewarded. There the story would end, as I regained my place in full sunlight and open air on some unfamiliar street, sometimes with an audience of other kids struck still by this person crawling out from underground, no longer the intrepid explorer but just another twelve-year-old in need of a shower once he figured his way back home.

•

There were other selves with lives as detailed as Bonney and Banks and Indian braves—a soldier in World War II (always in that war, never the more recent Vietnam, which seems odd to me now; maybe because of the landscape difference?), a traveling pianist with a taste for the blues; my mother claims that I used to regale her with stories of my life as a teenaged girl who had been killed in a car wreck, telling her about the boys I’d liked at school and my father’s job at a supermarket and totally weirding her out, though I have no memory of this at all.

The purpose of these selves and their stories—if “purpose” is a legitimate term to ascribe to them, and not simply me dispatching a meaning to them out of some need—probably has to do with figuring out the story of who I was. Which I submit as a primary cause in creating fiction at all: by throwing ourselves into other lives, we can get to the truth of who we are.

The question then becomes how to account for where these other selves came from; it wasn’t like my own life was not interesting, or lacked absorbing things to do. There was no boring or stressful reality to escape from, nor any reason for my paleontological interests and sewer explorations not to be carried out by the boy I was. Perhaps it’s that even at that early age the parameters of a single life felt too confining; I longed to be elsewhere and else-wise. For this I credit—or blame, depending on how one looks at it—books. We weren’t a family of heavy TV watchers except during the college basketball and pro football seasons, and my narrative tendencies must have come from somewhere, influencing me toward becoming a boyish Emma Bovary or a Don Quixote with a ten-year-old’s interests.

I thought any story or self by its nature required being far different from the story or self I was living. It wasn’t until the novel A Separate Peace that the possibility of a worthwhile story could be made from sources and details near to my own experience occurred to me—belatedly. So much of the intensity of an encounter with a book is wrapped up in the time we meet it, the moment of who we are and what’s going on in our own lives. It would be years before the John Knowles novel would make its way into my hands, but once it did, the impression was as though my entire reading life had been a readying to meet this specific story.

•

Books were a constant in our house, a presence in nearly every room, and never intended as mere decoration or furnishing but as active objects for everyone to engage with. Still no one would have described the family as a literary one. Despite the minor accomplishments asserted in the sections above, no one would argue that I’d been groomed to write. The parents would come to encourage and support the idea of having a writer in the family only later, once I’d finished college—a time when they probably felt need to praise ambition of any kind in their youngest, having grown alarmed by the lack of interest exhibited toward pursuit of a career deemed appropriate for any person “armed with a degree,” as they described it. How to make a living was an often-expressed concern as well. Our family presented no precursors to the vocation for comparison; there were no eccentric ink-stained uncles or aunts, no grandfather who spouted drunken verse at holiday gatherings, and we didn’t spend our evenings arrayed around the living room as father read us stories from the Bible or Twain or whatever. I never saw either of my parents write anything beyond a check, a letter (usually outraged) to a teacher, or a hurried note to tuck inside a thank-you card like any good upstanding Episcopalian would be expected to do.

What they did was practice a combination of enthusiastic support and “let them find their own way” over my brother and me throughout our childhoods, provoking us to discover our own interests by providing the opportunities to do so. In particular these opportunities broke down along the lines of arts, particularly music, and athletics: we were competitive swimmers before either of us had reached the age of ten, and although I never grew accustomed to that first cold bone-brittling smack of pool water that started each six a.m. practices, we became adept at the sport; my brother briefly held the city record for the fifty-meter backstroke. In middle school he took up cross-country running whereas I, reaching middle school two years behind him, took up soccer, being too small to make a go at football or basketball.

Our parents were of the type to attend every match or competition in which we engaged. They were vocal in the stands or along the pool, tribally loyal not only to their sons but to the teams they were a part of, our mother proud to have been a cheerleader herself in college. She believed in team spirit. She inspired, embarrassed, and probably even offended other parents who weren’t as gung-ho in their support of their own kids—so much so that she often received an award of her own at the end-of-season banquets for her displays and commitment, these awards she would laugh off as she made a point of congratulating us for the haul of trophies that seemed to come our way at the end of every season. Competitive sports took on a great coordinating force in our house and our parents were happy to encourage it, not only for the structure and socialization it gave but likely for its physically draining effects as well, which led to less violent competition between their two sons at home once the hormones kicked in.

But they did not want to raise empty-headed jocks, either: schoolwork, studies, and at least some exposure to the arts was mandatory. We took to to it naturally, I guess, the way most children do if introduced properly, without demand or pressure, but my brother Jamie set the standard. In fact looking back to this time one could be forgiven for predicting he would be the more likely to follow the line my own life has taken, as he was the more naturally inclined toward passing hours with books, kicked back quietly in his room with his feet up on the desk reading Frank Herbert’s Dune or anything by Tolkien, Bradbury, or Heinlein. Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat series was a particular favorite that he tried to turn me on to, but I could never get past the hokey silliness of so much science fiction—whenever starships and distant, invented planets or galaxies got involved, I lost interest. He was the one who took on the creation of adventures and characters for the role-playing games that were just beginning to become mainstream in adolescent culture, keeping file folders for the storylines to explore in Dungeons & Dragons, Starship Troopers, and the Western-themed Boot Hill. He was the one naturally inclined toward quiet contemplation, whereas I was a child constantly on the move. And even though the dynamic if our differences would change radically as we aged, to the point of having few differences at all beyond degrees of taste, I still think of my brother as having the more unique, interesting, and inventive mind. That he only got to explore and produce a fraction of what he was capable of is one of the great injustices I’ve had the poor fortune to witness, an injustice partially due to his own perfectionism and the ever-growing variety of interests that kept him from focusing on a single project to completion, and due also to the mistaken belief that he had at least an average lifespan over which to pursue those passions. His influence on me, however, in terms of stoking my curiosities, seeking the unfamiliar in order to grasp it, and also as a figure with whom and against whom I came to form my own identity, is irrefutable to my mind and probably a matter for another book.

Still, he never was able to instill in me much fascination for science- or speculative fiction. The only stories of the genre that spoke to me would be, first, the original trilogy of Douglas Adams’ novels, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which overwhelmed my generation of readers as each installment appeared, these small books passed among friends and quoted from, discussed, and debated in depth; and then later, toward the end of high school, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which struck my young mind as deeply philosophical and only tangentially related to the whole space-trip thing (Valentine, the “stranger” of the title, is a human who was raised on Mars, and is brought to earth, where the rest of the novel stays—a story more involved in cultural critique and our assumptions of the Other than any fantastical speculation that requires bending the space-time continuum). In general, the books found in my own room were detective novels and mysteries and comic books and pop music magazines. My first creative efforts—done in tandem with my brother—included the creation of comic books, stories in which we invented new heroes and illustrated ourselves.

All this seems normal to me, just part of growing up in a family of readers.

To write “a family of readers” makes us sound more serious and scholarly than we were in reality—a common, mistaken presumption that I bemoan in American culture in general: that to read means to be serious, or pursuant of the intellectual life and rarified tastes, the avoidance of the vulgar (TV), when in honest terms reading was just another way of killing time that wouldn’t die, hardly different from going to the movies. Books could be found in any given room. Dad read his thrillers, Le Carré, Ludlum, and “the kind of story where somebody gets killed every few pages,” as he liked to put it. Mom read courtroom dramas and loved the medical thrillers by writers like Sydney Sheldon, and also what she and some of her friends liked to call their “soft-” or “mom-porn,” such as Shirley Conran’s Lace—a novel my twelve-year-old self surreptitiously read in stolen moments while she was at work or, once I’d located “the good parts,” read while she was elsewhere in the house, hypnotized by a narrative that gave me extraordinarily distorted ideas about the sexual world of adults.