What to Read and Why

Francine Prose

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780062397867
• eBook ISBN: 9780062397881
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan and Roberto Bolaño.

In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose’s previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story, and even on books by photographers like Diane Arbus.

Prose considers why the works of literary masters such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen have endured, and shares intriguing insights about modern authors whose words stimulate our minds and enlarge our lives, including Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jennifer Egan, and Mohsin Hamid. Prose implores us to read Mavis Gallant for her marvelously rich and compact sentences, and her meticulously rendered characters who reveal our flawed and complex human nature; Edward St. Aubyn for his elegance and sophisticated humor; and Mark Strand for his gift for depicting unlikely transformations. Here, too, are original pieces in which Prose explores the craft of writing: "On Clarity" and "What Makes a Short Story."

Written with her sharp critical analysis, wit, and enthusiasm, What to Read and Why is a celebration of literature that will give readers a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the written word.

1
Ten Things That Art Can Do

One: Art can be beautiful.

That is all it has to do. That is the only thing we require of it. But what do we mean by beauty? Did the cave dwellers think, Hey, that’s really beautiful when someone drew the first bison on the wall? Did anyone think, That’s beautiful when the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic invited the gallery audience to cut her with razor blades—or shoot her?

Critics and philosophers have devoted their entire lives to defining beauty, while artists have pursued it from another part of the brain. Is there a meaning of beauty on which we can agree? Is a Netherlandish portrait beautiful? What about Vermeer’s The Love Letter? Cézanne’s apples? Perhaps it would be possible to know nothing about art, to have never seen a painting, and to look at any one of those works and think, Well, that is really gorgeous.

But what about those early viewers who saw Cézanne’s apples as the smudgy scrawlings of an untalented child? What about Jackson Pollock? It took me years to see the beauty in his paintings. When I say that there is nothing so beautiful as a certain phrase in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, or Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte, or Miles Davis’s “Flamenco Sketches,” or Mary Wells’s version of “You Beat Me to the Punch,” what am I saying, exactly?

Unraveling the word beauty can get us so ensnarled that it’s no wonder that for a time, critics and academics and even some artists agreed that it was probably better not to use it at all. For all I know—I haven’t kept up—this taboo still exists. And, really, who can blame anyone for not wanting to sling around this vague, loaded, indefinable, and antiquated term in the learned journals? Though it does seem a little strange to ban the word from the conversations of people for whom it is a matter of life and death.

The Greeks, at least, had some ideas: order, harmony, structure. But all of that had gotten a radical shaking up even by the time of, let’s say, Hieronymus Bosch. If we think the Apollo Belvedere is beautiful, what do we say about the naked bottom and legs of a man emerging from a strawberry and scurrying around Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights?

Obviously, content is only a fraction of what matters. There’s beauty of conception and beauty of execution, which is, to oversimplify, part of what makes Cézanne’s apples different from the apples we doodle on our notepad or the scribblings of a child. Conception and execution are major factors in the narratives on the page and screen that I tend to remember as beautiful. For example, I find great beauty in the scene in Mavis Gallant’s story “The Ice Wagon Going down the Street,” in which the self-deluded and heartbreakingly sad office worker at the League of Nations in post–World War II Geneva is asked to take home a mousy co-worker who has gotten drunk at a costume party. What happens (nothing happens) may well be the most important event in their lives. Yet one of them thinks that the nothing that happened was about the two of them not having sex, while the other thinks that “nothing happened” meant that she didn’t commit suicide, as she seems to have considered doing.

There is a startling and deeply melancholy scene in the great Hungarian writer Dezso Kosztolanyi’s novel Skylark. An elderly couple’s beloved, burdensome, unmarried thirty-five-year-old daughter has gone away on vacation, freeing them for a week of unaccustomed pleasures and shattering realizations about their domestic life. On her return, they go to greet her at the station. Dressed in an unflattering rain cape and a silly hat, and carrying a scruffy pigeon, her new pet, in a cage, she is even homelier than they remember, just as she is even more intensely the love of their life and their jailer. Suddenly they notice that autumn has arrived. “A desolate boredom settled over everything. The warm days are over.” Why should that seem beautiful?

And why should I be so taken with the moment in Mike Leigh’s film Life Is Sweet when Timothy Spall, as the sublimely geeky Aubrey, opens a restaurant, a bistro called the Regret Rien, fashioned on an Edith Piaf theme. “Très exclusive.” On opening night, no customers come, and Aubrey, who has been drinking wine as he waits for the nonexistent onslaught of diners, trashes the place and winds up passed out on the floor, stripped down to a pair of unnervingly creepy Speedos. Why do I love the marvelous scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather in which Sonny speaks out of turn and the Tattaglia family knows that the Corleones are vulnerable and can be attacked? And why do I think there is beauty in every moment of Michael K. Williams’s portrayal of Omar Little in David Simon’s TV series The Wire?

There is little that could be considered conventionally pretty about watching Gallant’s filing clerk, dressed as a hobo, nearly fall down in a Geneva street, or Kosztolanyi’s woman arrive, with her pigeon, at a rural Hungarian train station, or Leigh’s chef—a man with heartbreakingly hilarious pretensions to coolness and sophistication—charging around his empty bistro, overturning elaborately set tables, or a Mafia don’s meeting with his enemies and his unruly son, or a scar-faced Baltimore hit man sticking up a drug dealer. But how, I wonder, can we not feel the beauty of these scenes?

Each of us has heard—and probably, in a charitable moment, thought—that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but each of us secretly believes that we are the one with the eye for beauty. Why do I see these melancholy scenes, these dark moments, as beautiful? It’s a question to which there is no real answer, except to mention truth, another difficult and complicated thing, and to add that we do feel we know beauty when we see it. We could quote Emily Dickinson’s famous definition of poetry as applying also to beauty:

“If I read a book and it makes me so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.” Or, less gloriously, we have Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s ruling that hard-core pornography is difficult to define, but “I know it when I see it.”

Two: Art can shock us.

I don’t mean shock as in bad news or brutal murder or horrific catastrophe or embarrassing scandal. I don’t mean shock as they did on a reality show that ran some years ago, a series entitled Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, modeled after Top Chef. In one episode, the contestants competed to make “shocking art.” Among the judges was the photographer Andres Serrano, once considered shocking by, among others, the late Senator Jesse Helms, who was shocked that a government arts grant should go to a person who had photographed a crucifix submerged in a vial of urine. (Did Andres Serrano think, Beautiful! when those contact sheets came back?) On the show, Serrano spoke about the difficulty of making art that shocks at this particular political and historical moment. And in fact I wasn’t shocked enough to remember which artist contestant won.

In any case, I mean something less aesthetic and moral and more neurological: the shock that travels along our nerves and leaps across our synapses when we look at a Titian portrait or read a Dickinson poem. We understand it, and we don’t. It’s irreducible; it can’t be summarized or described; we feel something we can’t describe. I often think of that feeling as resembling those moments in dreams when we fall off a cliff and then discover we can fly. Dropping, then soaring. We can no more explain or paraphrase or categorize our response than we can explain why a Chinese scroll can transport us out of a gallery or museum and return us, moments later, jet-lagged, giddy with the aftereffects of travel through time and space. The effect of those tiny art shocks is cumulative and enduring. Enough of them can change our consciousness, perhaps even our metabolism. Dieters, take notice.

I’ve always hoped that someone would fund a research project to measure the changes that occur in our brain waves when we lose ourselves in a book. What if it turned out that these changes have a beneficial effect on our health, not unlike the benefits we have been told can be obtained from exercise and a daily glass of red wine? What if reading were proved to be even healthier than exercise? Imagine the sudden spike in reading everywhere as the health and longevity conscious allowed their gym memberships to lapse and headed to the library and the bookstore?

Three: Can art make you a better person?

Not long ago, I read a Facebook post that suggested that Shakespeare was a sadist for subjecting us to something as gloomy as King Lear. And I thought of how a doctor’s assistant once told me that the only books and films she likes are those that are cheerful and uplifting, because there’s enough doom and gloom in the world without looking for more. She said she hardly ever reads fiction, because it’s so depressing. She prefers books on philosophy. “What kind of philosophy?” I asked. She said, “Well, actually, I like books that tell you how to be a better person.”

Art will not necessarily make you a better person. When I was a child, my favorite aunt was a great fan of Wagner, and though my mother and father teased her for going to see fat women in braids and Viking helmets sing for five hours at a time, she secretly indoctrinated me into her cult of Wagner. I can still picture the cover of her record of Tristan und Isolde. Later, of course, I discovered that Wagner was extremely anti-Semitic and a favorite of the Nazis and so forth, facts that had little bearing on my falling out of love with Wagner as an adult. Recently I learned from a documentary something that everyone else has probably known about forever: the manic intensity of Hitler’s passion for Wagnerian opera, how he felt his whole life had changed after seeing a performance of Rienzi, whose hero, a medieval Roman tribune, leads his people to rise up against their oppressive rulers. Hitler would say of that performance, “It was in that hour that it all began,” and claim that Nazism could not be understood without understanding Wagner.

Hitler had notoriously terrible taste in visual art, a predilection for the cream-puff nudes of kitschy French painters like Bouguereau. There is a famous story about Hitler’s visit to Berlin’s National Gallery in the 1920s. Enraged to discover that Germany did not possess any work by Michelangelo, his favorite artist, Hitler was mildly consoled to find a painting by Caravaggio—Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio—whom Hitler thought was the same person as Michelangelo Buonarroti. Next, he became enchanted by Correggio’s highly erotic depiction of Leda and the Swan, though, when his guide discovered him, transfixed before the painting, Hitler insisted that he was only admiring the subtle play of light and shadow. Finally, and most revealingly, he sought out Rembrandt’s Man with the Golden Helmet, an image that, Hitler claimed, proved Rembrandt was a true Aryan who, despite the many works he’d done in the Jewish Quarter, had no real interest in the Jews after all. Hitler’s henchmen had better taste—refined enough to know what they wanted when they looted the museums and private collections of Europe and carried off countless masterpieces. But Hitler had originally wanted to be an artist, and during his final days in the bunker, he puttered over an architectural model showing his plan for remaking the Austrian city of Linz.

It’s true, or I want to believe it’s true, that there is something humanizing about the intimacy a book creates between the author and the reader, between the reader and the character, something humanizing abo...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• 1: Ten Things That Art Can Do
• 2: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• 3: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
• 4: Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette
• 5: George Eliot, Middlemarch
• 6: George Gissing, New Grub Street
• 7: The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant
• 8: Roberto Bolano, 2666
• 9: Complimentary Toilet Paper: Some Thoughts on Character and Language—Michael Jeffrey Lee, George Saunders, John Cheever, Denis Johnson
• 10: Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels
• 11: Paul Bowles, The Stories of Paul Bowles and The Spider’s House
• 12: Patrick Hamilton, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy; The Slaves of Solitude; Hangover Square: A Story of Darkest Earl’s Court
• 13: Isaac Babel
• 14: Lolita, Just the Dirty Parts: On the Erotic and Pornographic
• 15: Gitta Sereny, Cries Unheard
• 16: Andrea Canobbio, Three Light-Years
• 17: Diane Arbus: Revelations
• 18: Helen Levitt, Crosstown
• 19: Mark Strand, Mr. and Mrs. Baby
• 20: Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle
• 21: Elizabeth Taylor, Complete Short Stories
• 22: Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
• 23: Jane Austen
• 24: Charles Baxter, Believers
• 25: Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
• 26: Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
• 27: Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach
• 28: Rebecca West
• 29: Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
• 30: On Clarity
• 31: Reiner Stach, Is That Kafka? 99 Finds
• 32: What Makes a Short Story?
• 33: In Praise of Stanley Elkin
• Permissions
• About the Author
• Also by Francine Prose
• Copyright
• About the Publisher