A Few Thoughts on Not Reading Novels

When I was a little kid, out in the car with my father, I used to marvel that my father could predict when a red stoplight was going to turn green.
When it dawned on me he was watching the other set of signals change from green to yellow, it was like finding a key to solving the world:
Look for the patterns.

I've been thinking about why I stopped reading novels in my forties, some dozen years ago. 
I still read some, but I used to read nothing but. 

I bet someone has written an incredibly insightful, spot-on essay about this––publishers know it's a predictable shift in reading patterns––but I want to try to figure it out for myself. 
So, I'm going to launch into it here.
(I've been musing on it for a while, so these aren't entirely new thoughts, but I haven't written them out fully before, so this is somewhat preliminary.)

I'm pretty sure it mostly has to do with me being old(er).
I have seen the patterns laid out in novels many times before. Often, I am either too bored, too critical, or too emotionally frazzled by real life to enjoy reading them again.

At any rate, it's not novels that have changed, it's me.

I used to read novels for entertainment. 

Much entertaining fiction stopped working for me. When I was a teenager, I read Gothic-y romances, for instance. I loved Mary Stewart! 

That was the first fiction I remember failing due to plot fatigue.

It seems predictable that people would tire of these formulas, but there's a pleasure in them too: romance and crime/mysteries are the top selling fiction genres. But I can't get into them.

Then, authors sometimes (often enough) get behavior and motivation wrong--just a little, which is all it takes to ruin a story. 
I recognize this more easily, being older: "That character is false."

I can't stand to read Charles Dickens anymore, for instance. Some of his characters--especially his women--are so ill formed, I just can't overlook it.

I suppose I'm becoming Charlotte Bartlett! 
In Room with a View, Charlotte Bartlett, the annoying older chaperone, says dismissively of a young man, "I have met the type before."

When I was young, I thought she was a killjoy. 
And she is, but, she's also right--because she's old and HAS met the type before.
How long are Lucy and the young man in question, George, going to be happy, after their marriage? (NOT that Lucy'd have been happier with her first choice, Cecil.)
But then, E. M. Forster has written a comic novel, not a tragedy.

I used to read novels for education. Why do humans do the things we do?
Not such a mystery at almost-sixty.
Human behavior is complex, and I'm still interested, but for years I've turned more to neurology and social studies (including economics) than tales of personal experience.

I used to be very interested, when I met people, in their personal stories, and I notice I'm not so much anymore.
Partly this is because I learned that people are not their own best interpreters. 

I wanted people to explain their political beliefs to me, for instance. Not what their political beliefs were, but WHY they believed them.
It's a rare person who can do that. Novelists are people too.

I used to read novels for escape. Take me away!
I don't feel that need so much anymore. 
I sleep a lot--that shuts down the circuits better and gives me time to process the stimulus of the day.

I used to read novels for emotional experiences.

Now, I don't want to put myself through that wringer. I've had plenty of it in my own life--I wouldn't choose it for entertainment's sake.

I started to read Madame Bovary last year. Right away, it was great! When Charles Bovary meets young Emma, she's darning a sock (darning!), and he sees drops of sweat on her bare shoulders.

"She worked with her head bent down; she did not speak, nor did Charles. The air coming in under the door blew a little dust over the flags; he watched it drift along, and heard nothing but the throbbing in his head and the faint clucking of a hen that had laid an egg in the yard. Emma from time to time cooled her cheeks with the palms of her hands, and cooled these again on the knobs of the huge fire-dogs.

"Some flies on the table were crawling up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider.  "

Oh my God. Those details--the way she cools her palms on the metal... TOO REAL! I can't stand to go on: I know how it goes, in the novel, and in real life.
I don't want to watch Emma drown in the dregs of cider.

I can't stand to watch Humbert Humbert destroy Lolita again, either, even though the writing is sublime.

And so on.

So--ha! Am I saying either the writing is too poor--I can't suspend my disbelief, or I lose interest--or it's too good, and I can't bear it?
Maybe so.

A Few Novels I Love

I do still read novels, here and there, and I still love some novels I first read decades ago.

Some fiction I've enjoyed recently, I've enjoyed for the nonfiction in it. A River Runs Through It, for instance.

The self-destructive brother? Yeah, yeah, I have met the type before.
But I knew nothing about fly fishing. I would not have read a how-to nonfiction account of it, but I loved reading about that in a fictional setting!

Then there are novels that tell a story in an unusually honest way that cuts through a common myth--and tell it well.

Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson (first published in Holland, 1947), about a Christian couple hiding a Jewish man, who dies of natural causes, and the couple has to dispose of his body--really about the daily annoyances of doing the right thing. 

Similarly, I  have never read anything like the amazing novel Life with a Star, by Jiri Weil (Czech, first published between 1945-1948).

Based on the author's real experience, this novel is about the daily annoyances of hiding from the Nazis. The protagonist, a Jewish man hiding in Prague, almost gives himself up to a round-up for transportation to a concentration camp ... for the relief of getting it over with! to set down the heavy burden of freedom, and to join everyone else. 
So human! 

There's a rare person, who knows that and can convey it:
I don't want to be free:
IT'S TOO MUCH WORK!
 
But... he does choose it.

The author did not go on to have a happy life, but he did survive to write this book, and others.

And, is it too flippant to say I was happy to see he had a cat?  >
 

Jane Eyre.

I reread this a few years ago, and it was an entirely different book than the book I'd read when I was twelve. Then it was about an unloved, almost unlovable girl who finds love––a Gothic romance, in fact.

Now it was.... mmmm... almost, like, A Guide to How to Become an Artist When Everything, Really Every Thing, Is Against It.

I suppose it's like Life with a Star,  come to think of it: a novel based on the author's lived experience of how much bloody work it is to choose freedom.

When I was young, I thought Jane should have stayed with Rochester, despite finding out about his secret wife. It took me several readings over many years before I saw what her choice meant.

I think it's hard for some modern readers like me to see, because social standards have changed so much, and Jane is being true to a standard that is out of fashion.
But it's not the standard she is being true to, it is her self.

The happy ending is, sadly, a bit of untruth. There was no conventional happy ending for Charlotte Bronte, anymore than there was for Jiri Weil. 

Maybe they had some happiness in having written a true novel?

Isn't it pretty to think so?

Heh--and there's a reason to read novels--for the sentences!