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Reading

The Leveret by Anna Goldreich.

A couple, Clare and Phoebe, have tried to have a baby. After several failed attempts, culminating in a stillbirth after IVF, they move to Phoebe’s grandmother’s house in the country. One day, whilst out walking, Clare finds an orphaned baby hare, a leveret, whom, grief-stricken, she believes to be their child. She adopts it, naming it Isla.

This novel is formally inventive in quite wonderful ways.

The chapters alternate between Clare's and Phoebe’s perspectives. Clare’s sections are rendered in a kind of uninterrupted interior flow, reminiscent of Claire-Louise Bennet’s Pond (I wonder if the name is deliberate in this way) or the Molly Bloom sections in Ulysses, which in some ways are the interior flows to which all interior flows refer back. These form the greater part of the novel (Phoebe’s are much shorter) and they are beautiful, claustrophobic, sensorily intense. I think a high point of these sections is Clare’s perception of social interaction, as when her and Phoebe’s families descend on their house, letting themselves in, aggressively cleaning things, forcing tea on Clare:

‘We sit outside. Plates are passed around, they orbit my head. Everyone is talking in layers. Phoebe, my mum, my stepdad, Phoebe’s parents and her brother, his wife, and their small children, Phoebe’s granny, birds in hedges, wind in leaves, the gate creaking, a piling-up of sounds. I think it’s the first time they’ve all been together. I am given tea and told I look well, I am given cake and asked if I want cream. I am nodding and making sounds, like yes and no and thank you, like how are you and isn’t it warm.’

Phoebe’s sections, in contrast, are written in free verse, and while this sounds more kind of avant-garde, they are actually the moments of sanity and normality of perspective.

Through Phoebe, we are able to watch Clare’s descent – and the consequent fracturing of their relationship – as if from the outside. By this construction, we are able to feel Clare’s frenzied experience of the world, whilst simultaneously being reminded that it is frenzied. As a reader, we become sort of crazed, and know that we are becoming crazed at the same time.

This is a triumph of a novel. I feel very privileged to say that I was there when some early sections of it were workshopped, though I don’t know that the workshopping did much, because it was all already there.

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Question

Why read fiction?

As in, why bother? Especially when it comes to ‘hard’ novels (serious-complicated-posh-literary novels). If someone who only reads Simon Sinek or Mark Manson asks you at a party, what’s the point in reading Proust, what should you say?

I ask myself this fairly often because I often find reading to be just plain hard. When I read Ulysses, for example, it was by no means ‘fun’ in the way that a Godzilla film is ‘fun.’ Like many readers, I had questions such as: what the hell is a ‘diaphane,’ and why are half the words Greek or Latin ones? So, if it isn’t ‘fun’ in the ordinary sense of the term, how can the hours and hours it takes to read and understand a book like that be justified?

In my experience, the most common reasons given are:

1. Reading, is, in fact, pleasurable. Difficult books offer acquired kinds of pleasures. If we do not feel the requisite pleasure, we must labour to acquire it.

For instance, Umberto Eco, in Reflections on the Name of the Rose, argues that the only difference between the lowest and the highest forms of literature are that they provide different kinds of pleasures. We read both Heartstopper and Ulysses for pleasure, except that the latter is of a more sophisticated, intellectual, and greater variety.

2. Reading can provide useful knowledge and understanding about culture/history/ the self.

We might call this the ‘cocktail party’ explanation. As in, we read novels to be interesting at cocktail parties. This view of reading is the raison d’être for the trope of the ‘performative male’ – a typically young man, dressed to cosplay a tradesman, who pretends to read Virginia Woolf in order to simulate a personality. This is also the motivation most often underlying high school English teaching, that if we fail to read Shakespeare, we will fail to understand the vague behemoth of ‘culture’ and therefore find ourselves lessers in society in some as-yet-unclear but inarguably essential way.

It is very difficult for anyone not to internalise something of these two explanations. Except, I think, both of them are wrong.

Or, at least, they are not the reasons I spend a lot of time reading fiction.

Sure, reading is often pleasurable, and difficult novels can be especially so; and, also, I can contribute occasionally interesting information when playing the purple category in Trivial Pursuit.

Except, for me, reading fiction has little to do with the actual experience of reading, and everything to do with what happens afterwards.

Put simply, reading fiction, and especially good fiction, makes me more receptive.

If I spend an hour reading on my balcony, for the rest of the day, I am more attentive to sight and sound and smell; I am conscious of the squirrel that seems to climb up the palm tree every day and scratch around in the fronds, presumably searching for food. It is a wonderful feeling, not dissimilar to the mind states that can occur during meditation.

I imagine this is because we come into contact with millions, billions of details every instant of our lives – the dust specks on our light bulb, the chip in a plank of the parquet flooring, the crease in the bumper sticker on the car in front of us – and, ordinarily, we notice almost none of them, we certainly do not describe them for ourselves; but, when some talented writer has done their best to pick out a few of them, and render them as accurately as possible in language, in service of making us believe in an imagined reality, then, afterwards, it is as if they have been named as a sub-section of our experience, and we recognise a far greater portion of them.

Reflection

Containers.

I’m using this term pretty loosely, and in a strict psychoanalytic sense, incorrectly. But what I mean by ‘container’ is something like: a habitual and/or social scaffold which helps an individual to continue with some practice or activity.

For example, a personal trainer is a container for a fitness practice. A recurring workshop is a container for a writing practice.

If an activity relies purely on motivation – that is, there is no set time or place or social ecosystem in which it occurs – then it does not have a container.

I did some journalling last week and the pattern I noticed was basically that the areas of my life which have containers are working pretty well, and those without containers are working less well.

There has been so much journalism in the last few years – related to COVID and the rise of remote work and so on – which couch problems in the terms of a lack of ‘third spaces’ and a lack of ‘soft ties.’

But I’ve found thinking in terms of containers to be a lot more personally productive, and I find it interesting that we intuit that it is socially appropriate to have containers for some activities, and not others. It is much easier to hire a coach and exercise more, for example, than it is to read more, write more, meditate more.

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See you in two weeks,

Blake