Life if short, don’t I know it, and that terrible knowledge can lead to some pretty awful decisions, usually centered around various Happy Hours and the seductive realization that someday there will be no more Happy Hours, at least for me personally, and so I’d better enjoy the ones I have to the fullest extent of my liver’s capabilities.
Knowing that life is short can also have a strange effect on your reading decisions, or so I’ve noticed, in the form of a fear of wasting your time on a book that is ultimately disappointing. This is usually in conjunction with a ‘serious’ or ‘difficult’ novel, because the idea of investing some days or weeks or months in reading a thick book that requires you to keep notes and do ancillary research, only for it to be something less than perfect or genius, is kind of horrifying.
For example, I recently read Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year. It’s a stream-of-consciousness narrative often compared to Ulysses in terms of complexity and wordplay, and usually (if kind of inaccurately) described as one single run-on sentence.
I’ve noticed that when I mention the book to some folks, their reaction is suspicion — mainly the the odds are pretty good they’ll find the whole thing pretentious and the ‘gimmick’ unsatisfying. And so they just refuse to read it in the first place, as if you can’t stop reading a book 100 pages in and throw it across the room.
Here’s the thing: You absolutely should read a book even if you think there’s a high chance it will frustrate you.
Beautiful Failure
It’s easy to be cynical. As a writer, I find it sadly easy to be cynical about every other writer who isn’t me, actually, and to assume they’re all hacks who are stealing my advance monies. And as a consumer of entertainments I find it easy to assume that any book that is ambitious is doomed to failure.
But here’s the thing: So what?
This idea that a work of literature (or a song, or a movie, or what have you) must be perfect or else it’s a waste of your time is kind of nuts. So is, by the way, not writing a book or what have you because you’re not sure you can pull off the trick or gimmick or genius reinvention of narrative tropes you have in mind.
So read the weird, complicated books and worry about whether they worked or not later, whether you like them or not later. Not everything you read has to be enjoyable for you, or even successful. And not everything you write will be successful. If you insist on waiting until you have an idea that is guaranteed to be a success you’ll be waiting a long time. Sometimes you just have to take the chance.
And a novel you didn’t enjoy is not a waste of time, because you’ll probably take something from it, if only a better sense of what you enjoy — or maybe a trick you can use in your own writing; I’ve had a few stories stem from observing a literary trick that I thought I could do better (I usually can’t, but not for lack of trying). And a novel you wrote that doesn’t work out isn’t a waste, either, because you probably learned something from that as well.
Ducks, Newburyport is fascinating, btw. And kind of surprisingly enjoyable!