“After dinner, if there were no visitors, Ivan Ilych sometimes read some book of which people were talking, and in the evening sat down to work, that is, read official papers, compared them with the laws, sorted depositions, and put them under the laws. This he found neither tiresome nor entertaining. It was tiresome when he might have been playing bridge; but if there were no bridge going on, it was at any rate better than sitting alone or with his wife.” — The Death of Ivan Ilych

“I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me…” — A Farewell to Arms

Having recently joined the Big Read team, I had some catching up to do — re-reading old favorites like The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Death of Ivan Ilych; cracking open known but hitherto unread classics like The Age of Innocence and A Farewell to Arms; and diving into titles unfamiliar to me, Bless Me, Ultima and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Reading this material in rapid succession, your mind makes connections that it might not otherwise. One that sticks out to me is the proliferation of the card game bridge. In addition to the two quotes above, there was reference to bridge in another Big Read book that escapes me now (The Shawl? A Lesson Before Dying?).

I’ve never played bridge. None of my friends play bridge. My parents don’t play bridge. Maybe my Aunt Rosemarie plays bridge? If so, she’s my only connection to the game. What struck me was the casual way bridge is talked about in these books, woven into the background fabric of life. So much so that it is supposed to be the simplifying half of the metaphor for Catherine and Henry’s complex love affair. Bridge is assumed to be universal. Maybe today a writer would reference Sudoku or video games or another soon-to-be anachronistic entertainment.

[Disclaimer: I realize that bridge remains popular in some circle so, bridge players of America, please don’t flood David’s inbox with letters of protest, it’s merely that bridge has escaped my sphere.]

The prevalence of bridge in these great books begs question of how people spend their leisure time. As Reading at Risk showed, they’re not reading, and in my experience, they’re not playing bridge. It has been suggested that they are watching television, consuming digital media, and/or otherwise technologically occupied. This might be the case, but there are other considerations as well. Ivan is an aristocrat, Henry a wounded solider — they had plenty of time on their hands.

The thing about leisure time is that it’s a finite resource. We work most of the day, get home, have dinner, and then spend our 3 to 4 unclaimed waking hours decompressing with TV or with friends, going to the gym, or for some of us, reading. How can we persuade people they should spend more of their precious leisure time reading? It seems there are two modes of thinking on this. First, the Eat Your Vegetables school — reading is good for you — and second, the Reading is Rad school — My Ántonia is totally as much fun as Grand Theft Auto, dude. The trick, and what the Big Read is attempting to do, is to combine these two methods and take it a step further. Not only is reading good for you and fun, it goes beyond just you the reader. Reading can be a community event.

Bridge, unlike Solitaire, is a social game. It takes at least four people to play. Reading is more flexible. It’s for players 1 - 1 million. However you spend your leisure time, there are few activities that span millennia as popular choices. Reading is one; perhaps the only one that is timeless, good for you, good for others, and, in every sense, radical.

August 28, 2007
Washington, DC

Did you see that piece in the New York Times last week about JT Leroy, the abused-kid-turned-truck-stop-hooker who transformed himself into an acclaimed writer of literary fiction — until he turned out to be a female freelance writer who’d transformed herself into the totally fictitious JT Leroy? It’s a bottomlessly interesting story, one I may return to for the ideas it shakes loose about the pernicious practice of reviewing author’s bios instead of their books.

For now, though, I’m curious to look at literary fame and its possible effects on productivity and talent. The 21 Big Read authors describe a pretty broad spread on the spectrum of literary celebrity, from Harper Lee at one end — so retiring that she effectively retired at 35 — to Leo Tolstoy at the other, of whom it was once said that Russia had two tsars, and that Tolstoy was the more illustrious of the two.

Somewhere in between is Ernest J. Gaines, who scribbled in obscurity until Tracy Keenan Wynn adapted The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman for CBS, maybe even until Oprah Winfrey anointed A Lesson Before Dying with the gilded halo of her first initial. In a recent conference call with our inhouse NEA book group, Gaines sounded like a remarkably modest man, unimpressed by his accolades and — maybe for that reason — one of very few writers whose later books surpass their precursors.

Then there’s Marilynne Robinson, who takes her sweet time. In 1980 she published Housekeeping (which also recently joined the Big Read list) to rapturous reviews. She didn’t come out with another novel till 2004’s Gilead, which won her the wide readership that had previously eluded her — and the attention that she in turn had eluded.

Four famous writers, four different reactions to fame. Harper Lee ignores it and falls silent. Tolstoy revels in it as a younger man, then walks away. Gaines works hard, succeeds, then works even harder. And Marilynne Robinson gets it right the first time, raises a family, teaches, and then comes back as if she’d never been away.

Why does success paralyze some writers, help others by giving them time to write more carefully, and leave others almost unscathed? When all else fails, look at the books:

1) At the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, the sheriff argues that “taking the one man who’s done you and this town a great service an’ draggin’ him with his shy ways into the limelight — to me that’s a sin.” Should we be entirely surprised that Harper Lee shares Boo Radley’s aversion to the limelight?

2) In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the title character enjoys the trappings of bourgeois success until he finds himself entrapped. Is it any wonder that Tolstoy reveled in his own fame until at midlife, like Ivan, he finally heard the soft, crunching tread of the one reader nobody ever snows?
3) Or look at Gaines. The protagonist of A Lesson Before Dying works at a thankless job until he finds a way to love it. Is that so different from his creator, who plugged away at fiction for years until success, when it came, was almost beside the point?

4) One more and I’ll stop: Marilynne Robinson, whose Gilead consists of letters from an elderly, ailing father to the young son he won’t see grow up. You don’t have to be obsessed with the lineaments of literary reputation (in other words, you don’t have to be me) to read that novel as a meditation on what it’s like to write a book as wonderful as Housekeeping and then wait, in vain, for the childlike gratitude such an achievement deserves.

Okay, I’ll stop. There’s an entire branch of voguish pseudo-French criticism waiting to be christened that would read each new book as a writer’s further rumination on his or her own flickering renown — careerisme? — but I’ll not christen it today. Just know that good writing, whether pseudonymous, anonymous or just unsung, is always synonymous with hard, selfish, lonely work…

August 24, 2007
Washington, DC

When I was in graduate school at San Diego State University, I took a seminar in Edith Wharton and Willa Cather that changed my life. The course changed me because it provided the chance to concentrate on the best novels of two truly exceptional writers; to compare their controversial lives and literary themes; and to do it with an excellent teacher and enthusiastic classmates — what could be better for a “Literature Specialist” like me?

But there was something missing. As a child growing up in North Hollywood, California, the childhood places of Willa Cather (Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley) and Edith Wharton (New York City, Italy, and France) seemed fascinating and exotic. Cather’s family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was ten, and Wharton bought land in Lenox, Massachusetts, to build her home, The Mount. Red Cloud and Lenox seemed as far away as Uganda or Switzerland to a young girl like me who traveled often in the realms of gold, but never on planes or trains. Yet because of the sensual, vivid way these writers described the plains of Nebraska, the valleys of Virginia, the bustle of New York, and the hills of Western Massachusetts in their fiction, all these unfamiliar places felt familiar through my imagination.

“This place of ours is really beautiful… the stillness, the greenness, the exuberance of my flowers, the perfume of my hemlock woods, & above all the moonlight nights on my big terrace, overlooking the lake…” –Edith Wharton in a letter to Bernard Berenson, August 6, 1911 Photo by Erika Koss

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions, but for 2007 it was time to make the journey to Cather’s beloved prairie and Wharton’s first real home. My work on the Big Read materials for My Ántonia and The Age of Innocence fueled this abiding desire to travel to Red Cloud and Lenox. But for reasons more personal than professional, I suddenly needed to physically inhabit these places that transformed two of my favorite writers — if only for a couple days.

Reader, imagine my joy to travel from Washington, DC, to Red Cloud, Nebraska, in March, where Betty Kort, Executive Director of the Cather Foundation, and I took a walk through Cather’s prairie. Then imagine my delight to travel to Lenox, Massachusetts, in July with Betty, where we met Stephanie Copeland, the President and CEO of the Mount, and ate lunch on that “big terrace” that faces Wharton’s splendidly restored gardens, under her unconventional green and white awning, which protected us from the unexpected rain. Imagine my excitement, when the wonderful Mount librarian, Molly McPhee, took Betty and me for a private tour into Wharton’s restored library, where I was allowed to hold her copy of the French translation of The Age of Innocence — bound by Wharton in green and yellow with “EW” inscribed on its leather cover! Imagine my pleasure when I slept for two nights in a beautiful home set in the quiet forest not far from the Mount, finally understanding why Wharton left her fashionable New York City and Newport homes to design, build, and decorate an isolated country estate of her own creation.

“If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land…I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven.” — from Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia Photo by Erika Koss

I hope Big Read organizers for My Ántonia and The Age of Innocence will consider such a pilgrimage, and that high school teachers anywhere near Red Cloud or Lenox can afford to tackle the frustrating tasks of buses, chaperones, permission slips, and classroom time missed on required exams to give their students a first-hand experience with the sites that shaped these great American writers.

For although my passport now holds stamps from countries as far as Uganda and Switzerland, two places that I love best are right here in America.

August 21, 2007
Washington, DC

Are all books created equal? Or are some books more equal than others? These are the questions we stumbled into last week when I made a careless suggestion: Why not mount “quality challenges” to those books in local libraries that offend standards, not of decency, but of quality?

When last we left our hero, which is to say me, I was getting beaten about the head and shoulders for thus implying that some books might be better than others. Swinishly, I dragooned one of the best playwrights in the English language into my corner. Tom Stoppard, it so happens, has a monologue in The Real Thing about great writing where he allows as how, “It’s better because it’s better.”

In the opposite corner, in the Prince-purple trunks, weighing in at 97 pounds sopping wet, is Nick Hornby — the author of High Fidelity and Songbook, of which I once wrote, “Why doesn’t anybody write about books with the same personal, visceral immediacy that Hornby brings to writing about songs?”

Maybe somebody at Believer noticed, because next thing I knew, Hornby himself was writing in that fine magazine about books with the same personal, visceral, etc. Here follows the first of two grafs that my colleague David forwarded me, from Hornby’s own thinking about good books and bad (from The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, Viking/Penguin):

“And please, please stop patronizing those who are reading a book — The Da Vinci Code, maybe - because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us knows what kind of effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others. And, anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. I don’t mean we should all be reading chick-lit or thrillers (although, if that’s what you want to read, that’s fine by me, because here’s something else no one will ever tell you: if you don’t read the classic or the novel that won this year’s Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do). I simply mean, that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find that you can’t, it might not be your inadequacy that’s to blame. “Good” books can be pretty awful sometimes.”

There’s another graf after this which I’ll probably cite in a few days, but you get the idea. Bad books are good, and not just as a gateway drug to better books, but also in themselves, as a gateway into other minds, other lives, other horizons beyond our own. I agree with Hornby completely — maybe even more completely than I agree with Stoppard.

And maybe this is one definition of good writing: It convinces you, even if it contradicts what convinced you just a minute ago. The usual literary defense of such logical absurdity falls to Walt Whitman, who’ll definitely belong near the front of the line when The Big Read gets around to poetry next year. But I think I prefer F. Scott Fitzgerald on the subject, as quoted by John LeCarre in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Nowhere can I find where exactly Fitzgerald said this — any answers out there? — but it certainly sounds like the author of Big Read favorite The Great Gatsby. Heaven knows nobody else ever has. What’s your definition of good writing? More on this soon, since how can you hold two opposing ideas in mind without striking them together to watch the sparks?

August 16, 2007
Washington, DC

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery is to Canada what Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder are to the United States. And I have just returned from communing with her. As well as with Anne Shirely, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, and of course, Gilbert Blythe. I have been to Avonlea. I have been to Green Gables.

Somewhere in my growing up between Little Women and Little Men, and The Little House on the Prairie there was the little red-haired girl from Prince Edward Island (PEI) known to millions of girls around the world as Anne of Green Gables.

Anne Shirley was the creation of Lucy Maud Montgomery, who as a very little girl was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Cavendish, PEI, Canada following the death of her mother. Cavendish, and the nearby farmhouse of her elderly cousins, David and Margaret Macneill, became her models for the imaginary town of Avonlea and for Green Gables.

My husband, who can tell you anything you want to know about any character created by Ian Fleming, was happy to accompany me, and came away curious enough to want to read Anne of Green Gables. (He’s also happy to come shopping with me and he does the dishes. Can you say “Prince”? But I digress.)

What’s gratifying about a trip to Cavendish is that for the 12-year old girl in all of us (yes, all of us.), it’s all there, just as you imagined it. You can hike through the Haunted Woods, stroll down Lovers’ Lane, and walk through Green Gables admiring the tidy kitchen, the spartan bedrooms (people not only were shorter then, they had much less closet space and nothing so tacky as a home entertainment center.) and the well-appointed sewing room. The gardens are in full bloom, the barn is equipped to house a cow and make turnip mash — don’t ask — and the hayloft is stocked for winter.

Down the path through the Haunted Woods lies the actual home site of Lucy Maud Montgomery. The house is gone, but the foundation is there, as are the gardens and interpretive installations detailing her life there. (Anne of Green Gables isn’t on the Big Read list of selections, but wouldn’t it make an excellent young readers’ companion to My Antonia , which is?)

Green Gables in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Photo by Towle Tompkins

As a member of the NEA’s Big Read Team (I’m the one who talks to books and the characters in them, remember?), it was exciting to see so many people from across Canada and the United States flocking to this literary landmark. The license plates in the parking lot were from as far away as Manitoba and British Columbia and as near as PEI and Maine. (That one was ours.) We at the NEA often talk about the transformative power of literature. Here’s a wonderful example of just that. People who read a book, most of them years ago, were moved and excited enough by that book to travel to the ends of the continent to connect with its origins and its author.

And to my knowledge, Lucy Maud Montgomery and Anne Shirley achieved this fame without ever checking into rehab for multiple DUIs.

August 14, 2007
Washington, DC

Errato, the muse of blogging is, a harsh mistress. In addition to the typos, misattributions, gaffes and goofs that keep sneaking like gremlins into seemingly pristine copy, never forget the other, less forgivable kind of goof: saying what you meant to say and then realizing how wrongheaded it is.

Luckily, my invaluable colleague David Low — in addition to feeding the gerbils whose exercise wheel powers this website — is around to keep me honest. After my last post, in which I exhorted readers to mount “quality challenges” against the mediocre library books that tend to crowd out better ones, he found it “troubling that we’d post something suggesting that our Big Read list represents “good books” and that libraries (and bookstores) are full of “not so good books” that millions of people are buying, borrowing and enjoying.”

He’s right, of course; moreover, he can shut this blog down with an errant elbow any time he chooses. As if justifiably calling me out for elitism weren’t mortifying enough, he quoted against me one of my favorite contemporary writers, Nick Hornby, whom I’ve reviewed favorably twice, and glowingly three times. I’ll save the Hornby quote till my next post because it’s on the long side, and also because I haven’t found a good public-domain picture of him yet.

Meantime, forgive me for pulling a Terry Teachout (cultural omnivore, exemplary blogger at www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/, National Council on the Arts member, and past master of the well-chosen quotation) by quoting in my feeble defense another favorite, Tom Stoppard. The occasion, in his play The Real Thing, is the playwright Henry Boot’s wife’s infatuation with a bad writer. Frustrated by her annoying inability to agree with him, he takes a cricket bat down from the mantel and tries to demolish the idea that quality is relative:

Oh, one other thing first — “MCC” is apparently (i.e., per Google) the Marylebone Cricket Club, and “Lords” is the pitch where they play:

HENRY: This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly… [He clucks his tongue to make the noise.] What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might … travel … [He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.] Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting Ouch! with your hands stuck into your armpits. This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you get on.

Is Henry right? Are good books better just because they’re better, and if you can’t hear it, tough toenails for you? Or is David Low right, and enjoyment hard enough to find without some smartypants critic making you feel guilty for finding a book you actually, harmlessly like? What do you think? What does Nick Hornby think? Tune in for copouts, honest vacillation, and split differences, when next we meet…

August 9, 2007
Washington, DC

No two people ever read the same book. Partly, this is because few people ever read the same two books in a row. Every book we read, we also read juxtaposed against the book before and the one after.

For example, if you read the first 21st-century novel on the Big Read list, Tobias Wolff’s Old School, back to back with Big Read mainstay The Joy Luck Club, you might come away reflecting on the ways two very different short story writers have transmuted a few rudiments of their personal histories into their first acknowledged novels. (Wolff had a rookie effort he’s not real proud of.) But if you read a doubleheader of Old School and, to pick another Big Read title, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, what jumps out at you might be how two self-deceiving male protagonists look back on their lives and justify their mistakes.

The Banned Authors monument in Berlin. Source: Flickr

I mention this because the importance of reading juxtaposition also goes for newspaper articles. Here’s a quote from a piece in the August issue of The Hill Rag, a better than average neighborhood newspaper here in town, about D.C.’s retooled Southeast Branch Library:

[Some readers, like Friends of Southeast Library’s] Wendy Blair, believe the Southeast collection now suffers from citywide library policies that sell readers short. “The idea that a library is a repository of the books you can’t buy or keep at home seems to have been shelved,” said Blair. “And the choice of which books — lots of Danielle Steele, no Jane Austen — seems sad.”

Taken by itself, this is interesting enough. It recalls the flurry of attention in the Washington Post and elsewhere last year when it came out that a Virginia library system was weeding its holdings based on circulation numbers. (Sadly needless to add, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and many other American classics were taking it on the chin.)

Now, watch what happens when you read that Hill Rag graf alongside this, from a recent issue of the South Jersey Courier-Post:

“The [school] board also passed a resolution affirming the use of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club in the high school English curriculum. The vote was 6-2…A committee reviewed the novel, which details the lives of Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters, after a resident complained of passages described as sexual in nature.”

This, too, shouldn’t shock anybody who’s already noticed the curriculum wars bedeviling American school districts lately. But read it within a few days of that library-weeding piece, and it gives rise to the following modest proposal:
What would happen if an American library user (or parent) challenged a book, not on grounds of obscenity, or sacrilege, or any of the other reasons usually trotted out with the best of intentions — but because the book stinks?

Put another way, what if somebody challenged any of the widely read but unspectacular novelists whom libraries regularly stock in quintuplicate, solely because the potboiler is just flat-out not as good as the one copy of Sense and Sensibility it would displace?

Whoa, you say. Doesn’t that put local boards in the position of making subjective judgments? Yes — but that’s exactly what they’re already doing! Deciding whether a book qualifies as profane or blasphemous is every bit as subjective as weighing in on its literary value.

Unlike “appropriateness challenges,” though, “quality challenges” would get cities and towns talking about what really matters in literature, e.g., how much fun it is, how interesting it can be to talk about, how good language can work a reader over on frequencies, and at depths, that nothing else can quite reach. That, or it’ll make a mockery of book challenges altogether, which might not be so bad either. Either way, it’ll get people talking about books in terms of how good or bad they are, in addition to how godless or dirty.

All I’m saying is, if somebody else gets to challenge a venturesome book because the sight of it makes them want to cover their eyes, then I should have the same privilege because a bad book makes me want to hold my nose. Whether I have that privilege, we’ll find out when I visit the Southeast Library this week and try to challenge the worst book I can find…

August 6, 2007
Washington, DC

“Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys [foul] up again, I’m going to get mad. Goodnight.”

Sometimes, when you can’t get a quote out of your head, the only thing to do is print it out and tack it on your wall. Mark Twain once prescribed a different remedy in a great essay for the Hannibal Courier-Post called “Punch, Brothers, Punch.” In it, the narrator can’t get an annoying, singsong streetcar conductor’s refrain out of his head. “Punch, brothers!” it goes. Punch with care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare!”

The author of our 2008 Big Read addition Tom Sawyer communicates the sheer contagious obnoxiousness of this ditty so expertly that I hesitated to quote it here, but, well, tough. Now you’re stuck with it. I feel justified in quite possibly infecting you with this tiresome rhyme, since Twain’s own implicit advice when you can’t shake some irritating ditty or quote was to pass it along to someone else.

In my case, for several months now, the quotation obsessing me has been the one prefacing this post. I suppose I could challenge readers like you to identify it, but Google has long since taken most of the fun out of trivia questions. The line comes from William Goldman’s script for All the President’s Men, as delivered by the late Jason Robards as editor Ben Bradlee to Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein. I’ve always loved that line’s grandiosity, its simultaneous invocation of noblest patriotism and shameless but self-aware egomania.

Now, whyever might this remind me of the Big Read? I can’t imagine. But if you twist my arm, I might just have to jettison the jokey, self-deprecating air I wear like a threadbare suit and declare what the Big Read means to me personally: that is, almost everything.

For reasons that don’t bear elaboration, but pretty much boil down to procrastination and stupidity, I am a childless 43-year-old man. I have one demonstrable skill, book reviewing, which has become increasingly unmarketable. My one real stake in the future is the Big Read, a daft, longshot bet on literature — both as a force of social cohesion “in a murderous time,” as the poet Stanley Kunitz once wrote, and also as a non-negotiably good thing in itself.

In other words, nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, fate of American literature, the survival of reading as a cornerstone of citizenship, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys — or, more likely, me — [foul] it up, I’m going to get mad.

I’m sorry to unload on you like this. I’ll be back on Tuesday with another dose of breezy unsolicited advice and amateur public-domain photography. But, in between how fun and challenging and occasionally overwhelming the Big Read is for the NEA and all you sainted partners out there to work on, it’s worth the odd reminder that if efforts like ours fail, you can say “Goodnight” to a lot that’s worth cherishing. And that, if we succeed, the NEA as an institution will get more credit than it deserves, and all you Big Read contributors and volunteers, part-timers and overtimers, may get less.

That’s why, before I hyperventilate from messianic pretentiousness, my last words this morning to everybody involved in the Big Read are two that Ben Bradlee never says anywhere in All the President’s Men, and that I don’t say nearly enough — thank you.

August 1, 2007
Washington, DC

In the Temple of Literature it’s not always necessary to talk about books in order to enjoy them.

The Temple of Literature, Hanoi, Vietnam. Source: Flickr

I don’t really believe this, of course. My work for the Big Read, and before that as a book critic in San Francisco, is predicated on the insufficiency of reading literature without kicking it around afterwards. What sometimes makes me impatient is a particular kind of book chat that I’ve engaged in myself, and that can even precede other, more worthwhile sorts, but that still makes my heart sink when it’s invoked above all else. I’m referring to the discussion of “themes.” Or am I being unfair?

You’ve been there. We’ve all been there. Say the book is The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The discussants take their seats around a lopsided table, and a designated moderator lobs the fatal question: What themes do you see in this book? Right away, even the crickets fall silent. Somebody munches a cookie, and it sounds like a rifleshot.

“Er…identity?” someone ventures. Encouragement from the leader. Nods all around. Identity. Definitely lots of identity in there. The person who said identity leans back, on the scoreboard already.

Jealous, another one pipes up with “Loneliness!” This is going well, thinks the leader. More nods from the rest. Loneliness. Definitely lots of loneliness in there.

Teacher’s pet going once. Teacher’s pet going twice.

“Self-definition,” somebody blurts. Kind of like identity, but we’ll take it. Self-definition. Definitely lots of self-definition in there…

The only problem with this brand of discussion is, it’s not a discussion. And it’s hardly limited to book groups. You’d see it nowadays in too many book reviews, if “too many book reviews” were still an imaginable concept. Up until the recent crisis in book criticism made all reviews an endangered species, it wasn’t uncommon to find phrases in your morning paper like: “Wagstaff’s compelling new opus is at once a poignant exploration of his recurrent themes of alienation, angst, and needlepoint, and…”

This is reviewery by catalogue, the laundry-list school of literary criticism. Wagstaff’s novel may indeed be about all those things, but until a reviewer tries to explain what the author says about them, and how she says it, he simply hasn’t said anything at all. Big Read mainstay The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is about self-definition, loneliness, and identity (though I wouldn’t give you much for a book that wasn’t). Does that even begin to plumb the intricacies of McCullers’ character development, or how she generates suspense without giving you any idea where the story is headed, or any of a dozen other nuances? I don’t think so.

Again, maybe I just got up on the wrong side of the muffin this morning. Themes are an indispensable part of any literary discussion, and frequently factor into why a city or town picks a Big Read book in the first place. Besides, book discussion with strangers can be ticklish enough without one or more don’ts heckling around in your head. But for an icebreaker, I can take What themes do you see in this book? or leave it alone. Give me What did you think? any day.

Speaking of What did you think, what do you think? Am I being too hard on a tried-and-true way of kickstarting literary conversation? Or does theme-happy book chat get on your nerves too? What are your reliable ways of getting a book discussion started and keeping it going? More about this, including your ideas — plus how we came to develop the questions in our Readers Guides as a way to build on useful but routine discussions of theme — in an upcoming post…