Friday Forum: Is there an ethics of reading?

The idea of the Friday Forum is to take some idea, issue, or story from the week, think about it a little, and then open it up for discussion. Last week's discussion of why we care about authors was fantastic, but it's a new week, so time for a new topic.
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I saw a couple of posts this week that, while not on the same topic directly, both spoke to a larger issue.

First, from Rachel's post on reading guilt:

I read a lot. I read a lot of books that I’m pretty sure I’m going to like. When my constant refrain is “so many books, so little time,” doesn’t it make sense to choose books I’m pretty sure I will enjoy? How much obligation do I have – as a reader, as a book blogger, as a consumer – to discover and promote books that may not get as big of a voice as others because they come from small publishing houses or because they do not get as large a cut of the promotional pie in their big houses? And is the obligation to my readers, to authors who need the voice, or to myself ? Am I too comfortable in my reading choices? And is that okay?

Next, from Amy's thoughts on reading and diversity:

If your passion are the new big books I’m not saying you should abandon them, and I have nothing against people who read only review copies or only new books. But I do think, as Teresa said, that we all have to think about what our passions truly are and what we find important. We have to realize that these books are often white, heterosexual, cisgender, and North American or European. If you only request those books, what message is that sending to the publishers about what sells? Diverse books are being published (though not enough), so if new books are your passion there are still options to diversify if you are willing to try!

Both posts imply, quite correctly I think, that our reading time and attention as both social and economic value. Not only does what we read influence what gets published, but also what kinds of authors and ideas we let into our consciousness.

VIDA and Amazon: Charting Gender Bias in Reading and Reviewing

VIDA's study of gender bias in major review publications has put in numbers to what many of us have long felt: women writers do not get a proportional amount of attention from the mainstream press.

The study is well worth a look for all interested in contemporary literary culture, and I would also recommend reading Bookslut's on-going follow-up discussion about the matter. Frankly, I'm not surprised at VIDA's findings, but I am indeed surprised that anyone would be surprised about the findings. There's quite a bit more to be said about these matters, and I'm still mulling it over myself.

I will say, though, that VIDA's lede caught my attention: "Numbers don't lie. What counts is the bottom line." First, numbers may not "lie," but that's not the same thing as telling the truth. There are a host of reasons that these numbers might be misleading (though I don't think they are).

Second, and more interesting to me, is the idea of a literary "bottom line." VIDA suggests that review ratio is the ultimate measure of cultural attention, but is that the most telling barometer? I'm not sure that it is. Measuring the activity of the gatekeepers is interesting, but isn't what people are reading just as important, if not more so?

One could measure this in several ways (library lending, NY Times Bestseller Lists, Indie Bound Lists), but since Amazon will eventually do most of the bookselling in this country, I thought it would be a good place to start. So I looked at the 100 Bestselling Books, both overall and for Literature and Fiction, and here's what I found.

Of the Top 100 selling books, 47 were written by men, 39 by women (14 multiple-author books had an author of each gender or an institutional author).  

Of the Top 100 selling literature and fiction books, 54 were written by women and 46 by men. 

This suggests to me that what we see in the VIDA statistics is not overt gender bias on the part of readers and publishers, but by the literary-critical establishment, of which The New York Times, The Atlantic, et al are the most visible members. I don't have a totalizing explanation for why this might be, but I do have an idea for some part of it: the way we think about literature and literary history.

Literary criticism tends to be interested in influence and connection: we measure the greatness of today's work through what past great works it seems to be descended from. And the riverheads of literary history are overwhelmingly male. (Just as one example, The Modern Library's list of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th Century includes only six works by women. Time's list has 16. If we were to form lists for earlier centuries, this number would certainly decline). It stands to reason, then, that male writers are more likely to seem descended from the great (male) writers of the past.

What I am suggesting is that there is a bifurcation in literary "attention" between the male-centric world of capital-l Literature, and the habits and tastes of today's readers when it comes to gender (and probably a litany of other things). Which of these "bottom-lines" is more indicative and of what? I don't have an answer, but I suspect each individual's answer to that question say something about their position in the reading world.

Swinging in Somebody Else's Tree

Aarti over at Booklust has a recurring feature in which readers and bloggers talk about a favorite, perhaps under-the-radar book.

One book that you adore, that you prize, that changed your life, that you would save from a burning building, that you found serendipitously on a library shelf or at a used bookstore, looking lonely and ignored.  A book that thrills you but that, you have come to realize, no one else has really ever heard of, much less read. 

We offered The Hunters by James Salter, and Aarti was gracious enough to post it. Salter was well-known in the middle of the last century, but he is criminally under-appreciated now. So head on over and check out my humble exhortation to try The Hunters.

Review: You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers

One of the really great thing about book blogs is that they can talk about books in ways mainstream publications really can't. We can talk about them familiarly, irreverently, gushingly, and idiosyncratically. We can also, and this is maybe the biggest difference, talk about them waaaaaaaaay after they're current. Mainstream publications have to cover what's new; well. maybe they don't have to, but they do. But the fact of the matter is that there isn't something interesting published every week. 

For example, I was browsing the shelves at the Strand the other day and ran across Dave Egger's Zeitoun. The Ape has been looking forward to reading it, but it's not out in paperback yet and for some reason I want to read it in paperback (I'm getting a little tired of shoving hardbacks in my bag and dragging all over tarnation). Anyway, thinking about Eggers reminded me how much I like one of his earlier books, You Shall Know Our Velocity! and I've spend a few minutes remembering what I liked about it. So here's a review....6 years after its original publication.
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I don't know Dave Eggers. Don't know what he looks like, don't know what he sounds like, heck, I don't even read McSweeney's. I do know that he's sold a shitload of books and that he's a literary maverick of some sort (a lesser breed of maverick, the literary kind, but they do exist).

I know a little more about Dave Eggers as a writer. His first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, demonstrated a keen, flexible wit that tempered the potentially maudlin story of a young man taking care of his younger brother after their parents' death. And while that book is a fine achievement, especially the first half, it seemed a bit of a fastball-down-the-middle for Mr. Eggers. It was, after all, his story. Furthermore, the somber backdrop allowed him to perform his dervish-like literary flourishes without the danger of floating off into the same lighter-than-air domain inhabited by The New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs" section.

Eggers has selected a far more difficult task this go-round, and perhaps the most difficult task for any writer of fiction. For, despite a premise that would feel more at home in an undergraduate writing seminar, You Shall Know Our Velocity! is ultimately about the nature, and function, of story-telling itself. 

Most of the reviews I have seen of this book don't get much farther than laying out the premise (the narrator Will and his friend Hand + 7 days + 32k to give away + around the world) but, in my view, the intrigue of the plot device is more misdirection than meaning. The real narrative tension doesn't come until about two-thirds the way through when Hand provides an epilogue to the story right in the middle of the main action. Hand has several bones to pick; the most important of them is that their friend, whose death is the emotional springboard for their globe-circling, never existed. He goes on to quibble with his own portrayal and to note that Will's mother was dead before the time of the trip, though Will has created several extended phone conversations with her while they are abroad. 

I think the particulars of Hand's interlude are less interesting than the intellectual puzzle Eggers's constructs-a fictional character, interrupting a fiction (though framed as a first-person travel narrative) to remedy the factual lapses in the narrative. Peculiar territory indeed. When Will's narrative resumes, the texture of the book seems strangely altered. Are we to believe Hand? Does it matter? If so, why? If not, why not? I found this moment of re-entry to the most satisfying moment of the novel and its provocations have stayed with me quite strongly. This one moment is enough for me, though I would be remiss not to mention some of the problems that it causes. For one, the narrative leading up to the interlude is strangely uninteresting considering that Eggers's literary talents seem well-suited to turn the adventures of continent-hopping 20-somethings into more than is presented here. Indeed, Will and Hand spend most of their time waiting to go somewhere else, and most of the encounters with their beneficiaries are either anonymous or brief. 

Will's grief for Jack is likewise fairly colorless and non-specific; we get no real sense of who Jack was and thus it is difficult to feel the weight of the loss that Will feels. Hand suggests that Jack is an avatar for Will's mother, and this might explain why Jack's absence is so featureless (though not why Will chooses to change the location of his pain). While Will's displacement of grief, and its subsequent effect on the emotional center of the book may very well be intentional, Eggers's frustrating and inconsistent portrayal of Will and Hand is a real problem. Most of this frustration stems from Eggers's use of unspoken, imagined conversations between Will and Hand:

--I brought this all upon us Hand.
--Don't start.
--We beat up kids. We pushed them down ravines. We ran by the retarded girl, Jenny Ferguson, and we tore her dress on purpose. Remember that, asshole? We did that and this is retribution. There is balance. Everything lives is perfect Newtonian opposition.
--You are fucked.
-- I will have more coming. I acted with unprovoked
aggression and now it is enacted upon me I have done other
things. Things you don't know about.

These non-conversations perhaps are intended to capture the experience of being in contact without speaking, but replace any and all serious conversation between the two. This technique would be more effective in more limited use, and with a more limited narrative function.

Another source of consternation is Will and Hand's apparently fluctuating knowledge of the world. One of the principal pleasures of the book is watching Will and Hand encounter a world that resists their conception of it: "I knew nothing, basically, but couldn't bear the fact of the nations of the world, I had only ill-formed collages of social studies textbooks and quickly flipped travel magazines." And yet, they often make massive generalizations about the world like "rural poverty is always incongruous, amid all this space and air, these crippled homes, all half-broken, most without roofs, standing on this gorgeous, lush farmland." This kind of statement is surprising as it comes well into the novel, after Will and Hand have been routinely reminded that their worldviews are not only narrow, but often dead wrong. My diagnosis here is that this inconsistency is a product of Eggers writing characters who know significantly less about the world than he does, leaving little room for his own more sophisticated ideas and experience. A prime example is when Hand has sequestered himself in New Zealand to write his epilogue and is able to produce the following quotation from memory: "To string incongruities, and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American Art." This is an impressive display from someone who "is a scientist, really."

This seems an understandable, perhaps even expected, failing in the first long work of fiction by someone with such a distinctive literary presence. The third person would probably allow Eggers to write people who are not him and not have to suppress his undeniably provocative sensibilities. Ultimately, the questions about the value of fiction that Eggers is able to raise in the last section of the novel elevate the mildly interesting story into a kind of meditation on the novelist's task. In a way, You Shall Know Our Velocity! is the yin to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius's yang. Where A.H.W.O.S.G was a joy to read but left little mark, Y.S.K.O.V's pleasures begin after the final page has been turned.