The reading life
Nine pages into Will Schwalbe’s “Books for Living,” its author mentioned a book I wanted to read: Ruth Ozeki’s novel “A Tale for the Time Being.” No matter that Schwalbe had over 200 pages to go — his book had scored with me.
Just as foodies turn to cookbooks for recipes, readers turn to books about books to find books. The author of “The End of Your Life Book Club,” Schwalbe had me steadily adding titles to a list for my next sortie to the Strand Book Store.
Schwalbe’s objective in writing “Books for Living” goes beyond squeezing more volumes onto the crowded bookshelves of compulsive readers. As its title indicates, the book considers works that will affect people’s lives, as they did Schwalbe’s. He writes about books that have sated his “hunger ... to find the right questions to ask, and find answers to the ones that I have.”
Among the books Schwalbe covers are the well known (“The Girl on the Train”) and the largely unknown (Lin Yutang’s “The Importance of Living”). There are classics (“The Odyssey”), children’s books (“Stuart Little”) and cookbooks (“The Taste of Country Cooking”).
Schwalbe’s essays, alas, are uneven. He is forthcoming with telling details that he draws from his personal life and he writes smooth prose. Yet the reader only occasionally stops to savor a phrase, as when the author, writing of a friend with whom he shared many enthusiasms, writes, “[W]e always had more to talk about than the hours allowed.”
Also, with some of the books he considers, Schwalbe doesn’t find a lot to say. In a brief essay on Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon,” Schwalbe writes that if he reduced his vast collection of books to the 100 volumes most vital to his life, he’d include “Song of Solomon” because it reminds him “what it feels like to read something truly great.” He caps a fascinating discussion of “Wonder,” a middle-grade reader, by suggesting that the book challenges us “to live more kindly.”
Other essays are lopsided, centered more on the effect of a book rather than on the book itself, with mixed results. I was happy to see here an essay on Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” a thriller not written about as much as it once was. Schwalbe’s consideration of what he terms “a book about loneliness,” though, is cursory and disappointing. Even so, Schwalbe uses the gothic thriller as the kernel for a telling profile of a self-destructive friend, Terry, a gossipy fashion designer whose acid wit alienated him from his friends. “No surprise,” Schwalbe writes, “that Terry loved a book where a gown is at once a garment and a weapon.”
Schwalbe’s affecting reminiscence leads to an image of Terry, alone, drinking himself to an early demise and hiding behind a “blizzard of Facebook posts.” Indeed, throughout “Books for Living,” Schwalbe looks askance at a world tapping on devices. “Books,” he writes, “are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity.”
There are, on balance, some essays in the collection in which Schwalbe gets everything — the sense of a literary work and how it affects his life — exactly right. Two pieces, in particular, score as first-rate.
The first of these centers on Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” It’s refreshing to see anyone writing about this story, which seems not to be discussed, or anthologized, as much as it used to be. Perhaps its prose is too dense for the Twitterites.
Set in Wall Street in the mid-19th century, the story follows what happens when Bartleby, a scrivener, or copyist, tells his employer he “prefers not to” do his work.
Schwalbe sees Bartleby’s peaceful strike as a defense for quitting, an act a success driven America looks down upon. Schwalbe writes that “many people kept going years after they should have stopped. Many people bankrupted themselves and their families pursuing a dream they had no chance of achieving. And in a culture where no one is allowed to fail, it’s preferable to lie about where you are than admit that you are in trouble.”
By far the best essay in the book is on James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” In a full and charming bit of memoir, Schwalbe recalls finding his way to the book through a school librarian, Miss Locke: “[S]he… always had a kind word for me — a funny, sly one, something that told me we were on the same side, that we understood things others didn’t.”
Miss Locke begins leaving on a cart books she thinks Schwalbe will like. Eventually, she leaves a copy of “Giovanni’s Room.” Gay at a time when no teacher or student at his school was openly gay, Schwalbe found that the book, and others Miss Locke left for him, “helped me create a vision of a life that I could look forward to with something other than dread.”
“Books for Living” may not have the tweedy, offbeat charm of Michael Dirda’s “Browsings” or the stylistic panache of the essays by the slate of writers in Bethanne Patrick’s “Books That Changed My Life,” two other recent books on books. But Schwalbe’s enthusiasm for what he covers is contagious. He suggests enough fascinating books to keep you reading well through 2017.