All you have to do is get the books
Dear Readers,
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the sixth one.
Boredom. Some of my “scholarly agenda,” as we say, is based on contemporary Jewish American writers. This makes me feel like a total fraud because I don’t really know anything about the religion of Judaism. I’m not saying I don’t know anything about being Jewish…but how defensive that sounds! The major thing that gets in the way of, say, reading straight through the Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, which I often open to check things I’m too embarrassed to even mention here, is how boring it is. It makes me squirm with boredom, intellectually; when I get too close in content to the religion of Judaism, I reverse course and write a peer-reviewed paper about Henry James. Jewish American writers are so interesting, pointing at American literary traditions from this indirect angle, but the content of Judaism seems to be not doable for my mind. What is wrong with me? as Nicholson Baker memorably asks himself in U & I, one of the best books in the world. Perhaps because I wasn’t raised with religion, my mind revolts against it. Organized Religion. The way my parents said it made it sound so boring, and well, organized! And literature is so disorganized, a mess. Almost everything I know about Judaism is from Gerald Stern (whose magnificence I will write more about in a future newsletter), this edited collection called Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, which I refer to for every Jewish thing I write, and Muriel Rukeyser, whose poem “To be a Jew in the twentieth century” I wrote about this month for Jewish Book Council. The Rukeyser essay is a numbered list, and I think I needed to use an experimental form here for the same reason Rukeyser used a tradition form for “To be a Jew in the twentieth century”: to get away with what I was trying to say.
Horror. My uncle Rob Biederman, one of the best readers I have ever encountered, came to visit last month. I mentioned Adrian Nicole Leblanc’s Random Family to him, and he said he hadn’t read before, so I’m going to write about it here to make sure you know about it. I have never found another book like this. It’s a nonfiction book that is often called novelistic, in part because it’s so aggressively interesting, but also because it has such a huge amount of compassion for its characters. I assign this book to my students like crazy. When I taught English Composition at South Louisiana Community College, I found many of my students had never read a book cover to cover. So I threw away the syllabus and made a list of books they could choose to read. With the list, I was trying to show that if you don’t like reading, you’re just not choosing the right books. The list had only books that I thought were almost disgustingly interesting, like Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, Women by Chloe Caldwell, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (a huge hit among the students who had seen the movie—and they liked the book better!). The list had mostly short books, because I wanted them to get the sense of accomplishment that came with finishing a book, but it included Random Family, too. There isn’t a page of this book that isn’t interesting. One student, a young woman who missed class often because of childcare issues, stopped me in the parking lot after class. She was holding the book with reverence, like it was something so special to her. “Is there another book like this? At the end of every day, I just lie on the couch and watch TV, I’m so tired. But I started reading this book instead, and I, I just loved it.” It killed me to be like, “No, there’s no book like this.” Matthew Desmond’s excellent Evicted comes close in places, but Leblanc never even appears in Random Family. She lived with this family for ten years and she doesn’t offer a single opinion in the entire book, not one moment of soaring rhetoric (Evicted ends with some seriously Upton Sinclair-style flourishes). It’s the most extraordinary act of authorial self-effacement. This semester, my first-years at Heidelberg, who loved to goad me by telling me how boring books are, got a similar assignment. Everyone ended up being envious of the students who read Random Family. I watched this book literally change their minds over the weeks they read it. It’s about some of the most brutally disadvantaged people in American life, poor young women of color in the Bronx. Being human, my students immediately drew sharp lines between themselves, their morals, their lives and backgrounds—and those of the people the book depicts. They scrunched their faces about how many children Coco and Jessica had, too young. They said they would have found a way out, away from danger, no matter what. But at the end of the semester, when it came time to present this book to their classmates, they were like different people. They fielded disapproving questions from their peers. Someone asked the women in the group if they would ever be like the women in the book, and one of the women responded, “It’s really easy to say no, never. But I don’t know. Of course I want to think I’d be different, I’d get out, I wouldn’t bring kids into that place, I wouldn’t have kids so young, I wouldn’t expose my kids to what these girls did. But when you read the book, you see it another way. You see them get knocked down again and again and again. That doesn’t mean they’re not people, not worthy of love. I can’t say what I’d do.” The rest of the group nodded. Tears filled my eyes. They had touched the horror of someone else’s life. I don’t know if life, in the normal course of things, can do this. But books can.
Glory. Next month, I’m going to Penn State to see part of Black Sparrow Press’s archive, because it includes this one story of Joyce Carol Oates’s, published as a little book, titled A Posthumous Sketch. “Descriptions in the popular press of Joyce Carol Oates’s literary career tend to focus on Oates’s prolific output; scholarship on Oates has focused on readings of her novels and stories that underscore Oates’s feminism, use of violence, and engagement with American literary history” (I said in my research proposal to get the grant to do this). But (I argued in the proposal) there’s so much Joyce Carol Oates beyond that: the small press writer, the tweeter, the scholar, the experimentalist… She is more expansive than I can understand, but I want to try to see as much as I can. I found this beautiful description of her in Eve’s Hollywood, last month as I was tearing through every Eve Babitz book at the public library (not because I loved them, but once I started I couldn’t stop):
Don’t let anyone tell you Joyce Carol Oates is not Shakespeare; she knows everything just like Shakespeare did. She knows what it’s like to be beautiful and what it’s like to be in a car accident and what it’s like to be a doctor removing gall bladders and what it’s like to be a gas-station attendant planning a robbery. She knows. And if you want to find out, she’ll tell you. All you have to do is get the books. The only thing she doesn’t know is how to be funny or charming. Shakespeare had it all over her for those.
I’ll tell you what I discover at Penn State.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: U & I, Nicholson Baker, Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, ed. Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris, The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, Evicted, Matthew Desmond, Random Family, Adrienne Nicole Leblanc, Women, Chloe Caldwell, The Color Purple, Alice Walker, Eve’s Hollywood, Eve Babitz
Unrecommended: Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, Zombie, Joyce Carol Oates, Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage, Eve Babitz