Recommendations are worth what you pay for them. I have wonderful friends, whom I adore and spend loads of time with, and they’ve recommended books that I’ve had to put down in fury, having forced my way through 100 pages out of respect for the friendship; and I have distant acquaintances who make an off-hand remark on social media and I know to chase it down immediately.
So it went with
The Secret History (by Donna Tartt), recommended by Ellis Creel. Ellis and I spent a fair amount of time
together when we both lived in Columbia whilst I was in law school. But then life happens, as it will, and what with
his marriage and child and career and my whatever-the-hell-it-is-I’m-doing we’ve
mostly dropped out of touch; other than the occasional interaction on facebook.
Ellis is quirky
dude. Which is good. I like quirky. I have a pleasant disdain (yet appreciation)
for the “normals.” I’m glad they’re there. I’m glad there are a lot of them. I
know we need them. I just don’t want to have too many mucking up the particular
social circles I’ve cultivated over decades.
Ellis is an auto-didact.
Very imaginative. Quirky, as I said. When I was in Afghanistan, he sent me out
a Hugo Award-Winning novel. I’m not anti
sci-fi, but I don’t seek it out. “Spin” was a lovely read. Much appreciated. It
wasn’t what I would have picked out myself, but that was kinda why I liked it,
and was pleased Ellis sent it my way. Opened up an unexpected avenue. Good stuff.
Earlier this
year, he posted that The Secret History was the best book he’d read this
year. That alone made it worth a taking a
flyer. In addition, I’m attempting to
re-start my pleasure reading. I ordered
it off Amazon and it arrived.
∞
I’ve had a
peculiar relationship with reading. My
family tree is full of professors. My houses have all been full of books. My father, with his two PhDs in British Literature
(focusing on Swift), wanted me to be his little genius and tried to get me
reading too early and all that resulted was a stutter and gargantuan temper
tantrums if I didn’t understand things instantaneously. Ahem.
But, once it was the reasonable time for me to begin reading, I did and
I took to it like a duck to water. In
second grade, some girl and I in Mrs. So-and-So’s (God, how have I forgotten
her name; she was wonderful) class used to compete to see who could read the
most. I’d be holed up reading 200 page biographies (written for kids, mind you)
about Johnny Appleseed or John Henry or some such.
But then I got
a glitch. And the glitch was, if I was told to read a book, if it were for
class, it would take me foooooorrrrrrreeeeevvvvvveeeeeerrrr to read, or I just
wouldn’t read the damned thing. And there
were pleasure books I’d tear through (Hobbit, LOTR, Count of Monte Cristo, etc),
but I intentionally refused a lot of good things out of my contumacy. And when
I say it was a glitch, it was pathological.
In AP English,
the teacher, Mrs. Krauer (God, what a wonderful woman), called me out in front
of the entire class: “I’m not stupid enough to believe that André read the book
(Light in August), but he did answer the question, which is more than most of
you did.” (on a side note, I started laughing and laughing and Stacey Mulligan
got up out of her desk, walked up to me, and slapped me. She’d read the book
and hated every word of it, apparently.)
In college, I
couldn’t get myself out of the refusal to read. Oh, I was doing fine in
classes. I am clever, so figured out if I
was the first person to speak up/raise my hand, the professor tended to think I
absolutely knew what I was talking about and did the assignments. I’d spout
general b.s. and then listen to all the thoughtful students who actually did
their work (which, mind you, we were all paying money to do), and then I’d know
what I was supposed to have known before class.
I was disappointed
with myself and ashamed. I had to break this. So I signed up for Great Books of
the Western World. Finally, I’d put something in my very clever but mostly
empty head! The professor was a
wonderful woman from the Russian Department, Dr. Judith Kalb (new side note: Boy,
have I been lucky as hell with the wonderful teachers and professors I’ve had
over the years). Dr. Kalb was
enthusiastic and made the classes come alive. Perfect. Except, the internet was evolved enough, and
my glitch and laziness were strong enough, that I figured out how to find
chapter synopses and read those fifteen minutes before class and there I was,
fraudulently acing Great Books.
Ashamed, I
signed up for Great Books 2. Now I had
the added pressure of disappointment in myself, shame, and letting down the
wonderful Dr. Kalb, to whom I was fraudulently passing myself off as a topflight
student. And I did the damned thing again.
I managed to
graduate without reading much of anything in college. Somehow, that’s
impressive and repulsive. I was
commissioned in the Army, got stationed overseas, and then BOOM it
happened. I was away from friends and
family; I didn’t speak the local language; I had all the time in the
world. I re-found my reading
ability. I wanted to make up to Dr. Kalb
for being a fraud, so I started in with Fathers and Sons by Turgenev; then I launched
myself into The Idiot by Dostoevsky; then, then, then, then. In a year or two I went through most of the
Russian Greats.
Meanwhile, I
had managed to graduate with a degree in Classics despite having not much of
anything in my head. Oh, that doesn’t mean I didn’t know things. I was certainly
conversant, especially about Roman History, but not enough to justify telling
people I was a Classicist. I started in
on all the books I should have read in college.
And we went to
Iraq. And I took one or two footlockers of books. Yes, yes, there are explosions and danger,
but there’s also a ton of down time. So I read those, and then I got
transferred from my firebase to a desk job and I pounded out the unabridged “History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and started ordering Amazon to
send books to me in a war-zone.
I felt I had fairly well caught myself up.
And then in law
school I kept at it and started building a bookshelf that I didn’t feel too bad
about. And after law school, I couldn’t find a law job, so I went to Afghanistan
for 16 months, and by that point I was just being a bit much. I went down a
rabbit hole on the Byzantines, for crissakes. And when I got back I kept at it and my friend/roommate
Ben Baldwin, himself a voracious reader, became someone I trusted on recommendations
and I fell into John Fowles and Paul Kingsnorth and others and good stuff.
But…but…I got
significantly injured a decade ago, right as I was trying to get my firm off
the ground and aside from reading, my other great drive is writing and I spit
out an entire book in about six months while I was recovering, so no reading
then.
And yet one
more, “But”. But, the thing was I had another book of some sort welling in me
and I started it then, but (I lied about one more) I didn’t know what the hell
it was and it came in fits and starts and was kinda ruining my subconscious
(because when I’m not actively writing, my subconscious treats what I should be
actively writing as a problem to solve) and then my career started taking off.
So I had a lump
of book in my head and I was fortunate to pick up some very important cases,
and one, in particular, was so important that I kinda felt that any time I wasn’t
working on other cases, I should be figuring that case out, make it my
subconscious problem to solve and, hey, hey, hey, it worked, because I got a
very good verdict on that back in October of last year, but that was years of
not reading, and, frankly, not writing that lump of a book.
Now in my defense,
the lump of a book more than wrote itself in the decade it took to finally
shape it into a first draft. In fact, I ended up cutting 50% of the material I
had for it. I went to England for a
month in February, specifically, to get that draft done and did. I also took
books with me to read and didn’t make much of any headway in any of them.
I’ve had Cormac
McCarthy’s Suttree sitting on an end table for two or three years since my friend
Howard lent it to me. I like McCarthy. Blood
Meridian is one of the most challenging books I’ve read, but All the Pretty Horses
was a pleasure, and The Road was straight-forward enough. Once I got back from England, I kept picking
up Suttree and making a page or two headway and putting it back down and…
…I was worried
I had broken my ability to read like I used to be able to. But I’d ordered Secret History on Ellis’
vague recommendation and BOOM!
I raced right
the hell through it, which at ~550 pages, was quite pleasant. Unlocked again!
Good.
∞
Now, as to my
opinion on it. It’s a lovely enough
read, I get why people enjoyed it. I’m not disappointed I read it at all. But (there it is again)…but (again)…but (c’mon!)…
I cannot fault
a writer for not writing the book that I wanted in my head, instead of what he
or she wrote, but that’s where I stand with The Secret History. The fiction it most reminds me of, not so much
in what it is, but the idea of what I hoped it would be, was the first season
of True Detective.
The Secret
History does a wonderful job of building a world, but it absolutely aces a
feeling of impending dread and horror that verges on the supernatural in the
first half of the book. Just as people
theorized about Eldritch Gods and all sort of horror as True Detective was
barreling along that first season, I wondered if this literary fiction were
about to detour into cosmic pagan horror. There were fantastic set-ups for that
everywhere. I hoped it would be like Chuck
Palahniuk’s Diary.
And…just like
True Detective, it wasn’t. What it was was perfectly lovely. Went more in the
traditional Tell Tale Heart/Crime and Punishment direction. And did it well.
But that well wasn’t as good as what I imagined it could be. Alas.
But, most importantly,
it re-opened my true pleasure and ability in reading. And for that, I’ll remember
it fondly.
