A crossing
Alright, I think I can conjure something. Writing always comes to me in a mad rush, formed nearly whole. Here’s some, I guess. A short Thing about books. In order to make sense of it, I need to lay out three pieces.
Exhibit A. One year ago, determined to convince myself that I could rescue a patchwork attention from the shreds the internet (and, yes, children) have rendt, I read a long novel. A Western. Here is what I wrote at the time:
Last night I finished Lonesome Dove, the 1986 Pulitzer fiction winner, and it is excellent, truly transcending its genre. The writing is plain and forthright, with an effortless quality about it, and the story it tells is all the more vivid for it. Recommended, if you’re ever in the market for an 840 page cattle drive in 1870s USA.
Then, I read the Other Famous Western released in the same year, which will form our Exhibit B. Here’s what I wrote.
Having finished the one 1985 western epic, I felt honour bound to read the other: Blood Meridian. To Lonesome Dove’s straightforward yet painterly prose, Blood Meridian is all evocation, insinuating a plot, saving the details for the horrors. If Lonesome Dove is raging at the dying of the last wild light, an epic quest, a heroic last stand, then Blood Meridian is a nightmare fever dream, a descent, an embrace of the primal. I think it’s fair to call both books critical of Manifest Destiny, but in the former the criticism is delivered, understatedly, by the reflections of the characters, in the latter, by the revulsion of the reader. Blood Meridian feels at once meticulous in its construction — everything placed just so — and also absolutely arbitrary in the winding and gore-soaked path of the nominal protagonist. War is God.
The third piece, Exhibit C, has nothing to do with westerns, or hadn’t at the time. It’s this:
House of Leaves was a formative book for me. I went deep. I was decoding messages. I was scrawling notes and calculating words that ended up not being messages at all. I was in The Forums about it, circa 2010. I still think it surpasses its “experimental” trappings.
That’s all. So, our syllabus is formed: Lonesome Dove, Blood Meridian, House of Leaves. Non-required reading to the tale, which takes place in but an instant.
Now, I’m in New York. I arrived about two hours ago. I got to my room, dumped my stuff and high tailed it to the nearest bookstore (McNally Jackson above DeKalb Market Hall), arriving a mere half an hour before close. This to buy a hard copy of a book I’d already bought once today, to e-read on the transatlantic flight. (Which I did, until the battery of my aging e-reader gave out. An absurd thing, the battery of my book to fail).
Savvy readers will know, that book is Tom’s Crossing.
Mark Z. Danielewski has done the Western. And at only about 13% of the book read, it’s good. I recommend it. I recommend all the books heretofore mentioned, you’ll be the richer for reading them.
The physical book itself is a handsome object. 1200-odd pages is a lot of paper, but the pages are beautifully typeset, smooth, and flimsy enough that the book is not burdensomely deep. It feels—and I’ll bet it is no accident—like nothing so much as a bible. It has heft, density. I am very excited for the battery not to run out on this one on my return flight.
And that’s the story. It’s barely a story at all. I am excited to have a hard copy of a book I’d thus far failed to source in England.
But a story is never really just a bunch of happenings. I felt compelled to lay this out because the urgency with which I sought out this book struck me as important. To be this enraptured by the feelings one gets reading words… it’s the stuff of life.
Foster this in yourself. Find the words you like and revel in them. Find others, learn about yourself.
Among my many complaints about gestures at the horrors is that they feel so illiterate. Could these flavours of politics be perpetrated by people who read? It takes an act of significant caring to immerse yourself in a novel. You’re consenting to view the world through another’s lens for a time. These days, caring about anything feels like an act of resistance. It’s an absurdly, comically small act of resistance, to read a book you like. But stoking in yourself the willingness to engage with the stories of others seems, to me, vital.
Here’s to the next thousand pages.