Read This Next

Howard Mittelmark, Sandra Newman

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062020222
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

Are you tired of bland, overly earnest reading guides that discuss the same old books? Read This Next by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittlemark is the answer. A smart, irreverent, honest, and truly hilarious guide to your 500 new favorite books, Read This Next is aimed at those readers and book groups that are looking for great reading suggestions with more variety and spice than the usual book club picks—while offering food for thought and laughter in equal measure.

Part I
LOVE

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O LOVE! HOW MANIPOLO are your stings! How versatile your applications! Love is sweet and bitter, pungent and cloying, brittle and squishy, in and out. In Saudi Arabia, they stone you to death for it. Meanwhile, in France, it is compulsory for third graders.

For anyone who has ever been in love, as well as those who are considering it, this list will be an indispensable guide. Here we bring you some of the most illuminating depictions of the divine madness. These twelve books will clarify (or inspire) the misadventures in your own life. At the very least, they will show you that—however bizarre, wonderful, sordid, or humiliating your experience—you are not alone.

We start with one of the classics of star-crossed love,

Camille, source material for dozens of films, one opera, and the vague romantic overtones of both the camellia and tuberculosis. This hopelessly romantic version of love is then challenged, ridiculed, and kicked around seven ways till Sunday in Flaubert’s classic,

Madame Bovary. If that isn’t enough to make you reconsider romance, Ian McEwan’s

Enduring Love begins with one of those chance encounters that spark so many of our fantasies. This one leads—inevitably?—to insanity and violence. After this first round, it’s time to pause and think about how we found ourselves here—sobbing, up to our elbows in blood—but still somehow filled with hope that next time … Ann Beattie’s

Chilly Scenes of Winter could be that next time, with its gently pining Charles, who nurses an unrequited love without harming its object, or in fact affecting anyone, or ever getting anything done. Yet Beattie keeps us turning pages to find out what he doesn’t do next.

In their day, Nancy Mitford and her celebrated, scandalous sisters were the brightest of bright young things; as a palate cleanser, we give you Nancy’s comic classic,

The Pursuit of Love. Feeling better? Then you’re ready for

The Bloody Chamber, a collection of macabre and sly, saucy versions of the fairy tales that taught us about romance in the first place. From here, adolescent romance, of course, in Scott Spencer’s

Endless Love, a breathless account of first-love-turned-first-stalking. Besides being an engrossing story, it serves as a lesson in what can go wrong with both young love and movie adaptations. Then we move on to young love made lucrative, with Anita Loos’s comic classic of gold digging,

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

We pause to consider love from a more objective perspective, with

Marriage, a History, a fascinating account of how the idea of love slowly contaminated and finally killed the once-thriving institution of marriage. Then, diving back into the past, Mary Renault’s

The Last of the Wine is a marvelous evocation of love in the days of Socrates, when marriage was always between a man and a woman, but love was strictly homosexual. Nobel Prize winner-Doris Lessing often uses science fiction to explore social issues; in

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five she offers a unique investigation into the evolution of love within an arranged marriage. Finally, to leave you on a hopeful note, Penelope Fitzgerald’s

The Blue Flower offers the fusion of love romantic and spiritual in the tale of eighteenth-century poet Novalis’s unearthly passion for a decidedly earthly twelve-year-old.

CAMILLE (1848)
by Alexandre Dumas, fils

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Camille, a.k.a. The Lady of the Camellias, is the (semiauto-biographical) story of a young middle-class man’s affair with Marguerite Gautier, a celebrated Parisian courtesan. It begins with love at first sight, develops into life-altering passion, and ends in tragedy. Dumas wrote it when he was only twenty-three, basing it on his own affair with the celebrated courtesan Marie Duplessis, and combining the winning innocence of youthful love with glimpses of the impossible luxury and decadence of early Belle Epoque France. Camille has a lasting charm that transcends its historical interest as an ancestor of every “my-true-love-dying-in-my-arms-of-a-mysterious-disease-that-somehow-makes-a-person-more-attractive” story of the past 150 years.

Alexandre Dumas fils, (1824–1895)

First things first: “fils” means “son” in French. And in this context, it also means that an author has the misfortune to be the son of a man who is himself a famous author, and who will overshadow his fils throughout Junior’s misbegotten life. Dumas père was the author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and over a hundred other works of fiction, drama, and nonfiction—a spectacularly prolific and beloved writer who was a French institution by the time Baby Dumas was born. Papa was also a womanizer, and Alexandre was only one of at least four illegitimate children he misbegat.

To some degree, Alexandre escaped his father’s shadow with his writing for the stage. In fact, although Camille the book was published first, it only became a bestseller after the play’s runaway success. He went on to become one of the most popular playwrights of his time, with dozens of plays to his name, many featuring tragic heroines like Marguerite Gautier. At the end of his life he became a tireless, humorless crusader against the evils of adultery, prostitution, and the spawning of illegitimate children—although these three things are a neat inventory of his own love life. At his death, he was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre, coincidentally only one hundred meters away from the grave of Marie Duplessis. At the funeral, some breakaway mourners filched flowers from his grave to carry to Marie’s.

The Real Camille

Rose Alphonsine Plessis was born in 1824. Her father was an impoverished, incurable drunk, and her mother left the family when Alphonsine was still small. By the time she was ten, she was begging on the street. By twelve, she was the mistress of an elderly gentleman, to whom she had been introduced (sold) by her own father. When she arrived in Paris a year later, she changed her name to the more genteel Marie Duplessis.

Her first big break was attracting the duc de Guiche, who would remain a friend for life. With his help, she not only learned to read and write, but to ride and to dance. Her natural tact and delicacy impressed everyone, and this soon developed into a refined appreciation for the arts. Her salon in Paris was frequented by the finest minds of the era—all the more remarkable in that Marie was still in her teens. She had also already suffered from the tuberculosis that would kill her.

Her affair with Dumas lasted for about a year. Sadly, there is no evidence that it was of as much importance to Marie as it was to the young writer. She continued to be supported by other admirers, and he was succeeded in her affections by the composer Liszt, who, however, balked at running away with her because he was afraid of catching her disease.

Marie lost her admirers in her final year, but managed to avoid debt by selling her jewels and gambling. She died at the age of twenty-three. Within five years, Dumas would immortalize a version of her that was sweeter and more virginal, but noticeably lacking any intellectual interests. He replaced those with an all-consuming interest in Duval/Dumas himself.

Discuss

1. In the real-life affair between Dumas and Marie Duplessis, Duplessis seems to have dumped him without much thought. How satisfying do you think it was to put words in the mouth of his unfaithful girlfriend and write an “official” version of the affair in which he was the love of her life? Also: how creepy? Could this be a category of stalking?

2. Do you think Dumas makes his Marguerite believable, or is she a male fantasy of a courtesan?

3. In the world of Camille, courtesans routinely “ruin” men by spending their entire inheritances on clothes, home furnishings, and jewels. They also, as in the case of Camille, happily go on to ruin themselves buying the same fripperies. How wrong (or right) do you think this behavior is, in the world of the courtesan? Is this what we would today call being a shopaholic?

4. In most twentieth-century romance novels, the lovers end up together at last, happy and safe. Which is more romantic—a happy ending or one where someone tragically croaks? (As we know, by the end of most twenty-first-century romance novels, both lovers are vampires, making this a moot point.)

5. Do you think Marguerite has to die be...