Dan Brown & Summer Reading, as a Writer

Here is the kind of reading predicament I get into in the summer: choosing between the literary masterpiece I have been meaning to read for years, and the entertaining pop thriller I finally got for $2 at Half Price Books. It's Rebecca vs. The Lost Symbol. [More on Rebecca later.]

Partly I am embarrassed to be seen reading Dan Brown. Or embarrassed to read alone in my apartment without even being seen. But why should I be? I read the other books in the series, and I enjoyed them. But for the past three years I've been surrounded by brilliant scholars of high art, and I still have the doubt that they would judge me. Because, let's be honest, this is not high art. I've spent the greater part of my life studying plot, character, language, and meaning in literature. The Lost Symbol is not literature, I feel fairly confident about that. Literature is important. However, I'm also certain there is a place for non-literature on my bookshelf, and whatever we say about him in regards to his writing, Dan Brown is a good storyteller. And summer is the time for stories, right? (I'm picturing Dan Brown beside the campfire now, and thinking about our expectations for the aural art of storytelling, and how those expectations are different, although obviously length would be an issue in this case, and anyways, this would lead me on a tangent about the oral tradition of poetry, which is really not what I intended to get into right now.)

I don't believe in the idea that to be a good writer (or reader, or student, or person, or whatever) you have to read only "good" books. I think any reading at all is useful--and I am nothing if not a utilitarian--in that it entertains, or informs, or makes you think, or distracts you from whatever it is you want to be distracted from. I'm pretty sure the reason I read and wrote as a child was to escape my own life. Mary Yukari Waters visited a creative writing class I was teaching several years ago to talk about her book of short stories The Laws of Evening (which I highly recommend), and admitted she reads everything, from classic novels and stories to gothic romance novels. One of the thing she said that stood out to me was that she doesn't allow herself to feel guilty for skipping over parts of books or skimming through (which we all do at times, right?), because she does so actively, as a writer. Which is to say, she doesn't just skim parts and move on--she pays attention to why she skimmed. She questions what about the writing was boring or uninteresting or irrelevant to her as a reader, and makes note of it. This is, of course, part of what we mean when we say "reading like a writer." This may not be useful advice to people who don't consider themselves writers (I mean, everyone writes, but only some of us invite the daily struggle of making words work for love or money). And if you're not a "writer," or an academic, it's much easier to go along with a story without questioning what's on the page, or just to toss the book across the room if it sucks. Because a story that's not working, just isn't working. It doesn't take a PhD scholar to determine that. Maybe it takes some training to question the why part (why isn't this capturing my attention? why don't I buy what's happening?), and a little more to come up with the how part (how could it be better? what would make it work?), but it's probably true that only a certain kind of person even cares about the answers. Even when she doesn't want to care about the answers. Like in summer, by the pool, with the $2 hardback in her lap. This is ultimately what being a writer is to me: never being able to turn off my analytic brain. I may want to escape into the world of international intrigue and historical conspiracies or whatever Dan Brown and whoever else is selling me, and it may be a successful sell or not, but either way, I'm never going to truly be able to escape into that world because my writer brain is always asking "why isn't this working?" or "why is this working?" I'm always going to find myself talking aloud to the page at some point, whether it be in disbelief, disgust, amusement, or wonderment.

I remember the first time I had the conscious realization that I was really "reading as a writer," and that I would never again be able to not read this way. I was reading the story "Snow" in Charles Baxter's collection A Relative Stranger. The characters--a young boy narrator, his older brother, and the brother's girlfriend, are out on a frozen lake looking at a car trapped under the ice. There's a moment in reading the story when I became very nervous that the ice would break, and characters were going to fall in. I saw it coming, and I resisted this turn even as I read. But just at this point, the narrative jumps forward to the future, to a time when all of them are older and the brother and girlfriend are no longer together, when the boy would run into the brother's high school girlfriend at the store where she worked (or something like that, I don't remember exactly). But anyway, the jump forward is just enough to assure the reader that yes, everything will be okay. Sort of. Not magical, not perfect, not as anyone might have expected in their younger days. But it will be fine. And that is what the story is really about--not the danger of falling through the ice, or the fear of it, on their parts or ours, but about being in that moment, in that time and place, and having a particular experience with particular people that will never be captured again. It was such a strangely wonderful move to make the jump in time at that moment in the story, and it's all I could think about as I was reading, and after I finished reading, and every time I go back and read that story again. Granted, I've been in school, taking or teaching writing workshops for the past fifteen years, which constantly reinforces this kind of attention. And I feel a little like I lose the magic of stories like this by focusing so closely on "what's under the hood." But it also means I have a great appreciation for, and admiration of, a well-crafted story, which makes me enjoy the reading even more. Even if I can't totally get lost in the world on the page the same way I used to be able to.

--HP