In 47 days, the literary-nerd equivalent of Halley’s Comet will arrive: a new novel from Jeffrey Eugenides. He publishes about once a decade, so after this, we’ll probably next hear from him in the middle of the second Cory Booker administration.
I’ll have to snap up The Marriage Plot, then. Bits of it have already dribbled out, most recently in the New Yorker, but I’ve been waiting for it since the mid-90s, when I first met one of the three central characters in “Air Mail,” a story Eugenides placed in the Yale Review. (You can read the opening pages via the site for a terrific little anthology, The Beach Book.) It was a lodestar for me as an apprentice writer: “This is a story; this is what you want to do.”
But I don’t know if I’ll buy it as an e-book, even though it’s a great candidate–at 400+ pages, unwieldy for carting around on public transportation, and likely to cost $15 more for hardcover than as a download. Yes, if I go with the Google Edition, I can steer a few dollars to Changing Hands instead of Apple or Amazon. But if I do that, and it turns out to be a book I really love, I won’t actually be able to treat it like a book I love: no dog-eared pages, no scribbles in the margin, and no passing it along to a friend when I’m done.
That last element that’s lost with the e-book is what interests me most. For as solitary an activity as reading is, there’s that paradoxical capacity of a great book to matter deeply in a relationship. (I’m of course saying nothing new here; look no further than the opening lines of The Marriage Plot for a more elegant tribute to the emotional power of books.) And they matter most when you physically give them to another person. I remember the first novel Anne shared with me and the first book I gave to her. On a shelf in our living room is a signed copy of Gloomy Gus that I was looking at the other day; My parents gave it to me for Christmas in 1982, a few weeks after Walt Morey had visited my elementary school.
These days, a birthday gift that’s a coupon to the iBooks store? Nice, and not something I’d turn down, but a little… chilly. A hardbound copy of Why I Came West, beat up and wrapped in newspaper and masking tape? You have my heart.
—
One morning after my dad died last summer, I was upstairs at my parents’ house, in the room that doubles as their office and guest bedroom. Above the desk, my dad had mounted some bookshelves on the wall, I think four shelves, reaching almost to the ceiling. They were crammed full, and held all sorts of things–a few dozen issues of educational journals to which my dad subscribed, a bunch of children’s and adolescent literature, a box of old 3.5-inch floppy disks, a polished piece of a geode, made into a book-end.
On the second shelf up were ten or fifteen books of poetry, and I looked them over, pulled some down, and put a few in my backpack to bring home. They’re on a shelf in our bedroom now, and over the last year I’ve taken them down from time to time to read, sometimes when I’m missing my dad or turning over in my head some question about him, sometimes when I’m just looking for a change of pace. Sharon Olds and Pablo Neruda and Wendell Berry are good for that.
I took one other book, one that I need to return. It was A River Runs Through It, which, much as I love the writers of the West, I had never gotten around to reading. (There are an embarrassing number of holes like that one in my reading history. And each year, probably 200 new books are published that would be well worth my time. Ah, Sisyphus…)
It’s a delightful short book–three stories, the longest being the title novella. It’s rough–Maclean writes much more like what you would expect from a ranger for the Forest Service than does Aldo Leopold–but rough in an enjoyable, often surprising way; there are turns of phrase you would never have chosen yourself that turn out to be poetry.
I don’t know how far my dad read into the book. He was an amateur fly fisherman, and “A River Runs Through It,” that first story, is the one in the book about fishing. What I saw was that every few pages throughout it, my dad had made marks in the margins. He hadn’t written any words, just drawn faint lines with a pencil beside sentences that resonated to him for some reason. The notes stopped on the last page; maybe he was drawn away from the book, maybe the two stories that followed didn’t hold any attraction for him.
Even with such bare-bones marginalia, though, my dad’s notes colored my reading of “A River Runs Through It.” It felt, simply, like we were reading it together, which was wonderful. I watched his attention drawn to brief passages about the art of fishing:
Every different kind of trout is on a different speedometer, and the correct timing will vary also with the stream and even the weather and time of day.
And passages about family:
My father always felt shy when compelled to praise one of his family, and his family always felt shy when he praised them. My father said, “You are a fine fisherman.”
My brother said, “I’m pretty good with a rod, but I need three more years before I can think like a fish.”
And passages of pure fun:
“Izaak Walton,” he told us when my brother was thirteen or fourteen, “is not a respectable writer. He was an Episcopalian and a bait fisherman.”
And passages of pure glory, like those famous final two paragraphs:
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
Maclean’s acknowledgments are placed at the beginning of the book, and the very first sentences my dad marked were on the first page of the acknowledgements:
For one thing, writing makes everything bigger and longer; all those stories are much longer than is needed to achieve one of the primary ends of telling children stories–namely, that of putting children to sleep. However, the stories do give evidence of retaining another of those purposes–that of letting children know what kind of people their parents are or think they are or hope they are.
Later, my dad had noted the spot where Maclean precisely nailed my dad’s philosophy of life:
Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart–I don’t know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep. Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.
Each time in the last fourteen months that I have learned something more about who my dad was and what his convictions and longings were–and that education has happened in a variety of ways–I’ve been flooded with gratitude. Obviously, when someone dies, the surprises can be terrible ones; what we learn after the fact can be devastating. But my dad was deeper, better than I knew.
I have to return the book to my mom, though. Or at the very least, I need to ask her if she would like it back. On the inside of the front cover I found the only words my dad wrote in the book:
from Pat
birthday 1999
That was twelve years ago today.
