My Life with Bob Read online

  Dan, the manager, was one of the former, a short, sweaty man in his midthirties with sparse tendrils of black hair clinging hopefully to his pate, and a mind brimming with knowledge acquired the hard way. He greeted my enthusiasm and ignorance with tolerant dismissiveness. He had informed opinions.

  But I was determined to learn. I would know exactly what to read and what I would read next. My Book of Books would reflect this clear path forward. Here, at B. Dalton, I could keep my pulse on the passions of the nation; I just had to pay attention. I quickly noticed, for example, that whenever a book broke out in a big way, someone from management ordered rising swirls of that title that spiraled up majestically from the floor. Only senior employees knew how to build and maintain these symmetrical assemblages. Regular sales clerks like me were not allowed to touch them.

  Massive cardboard displays—known in the trade as “dumps”—loomed over the aisles, where they signaled the defining cultural events of the day. Over here, pillars of Bonfire of the Vanities. Over there, an imposing tower of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which everyone in the we’re-sophisticated suburbs just had to have. I would caress this slender volume longingly, imagining that if I owned it, my true place in the universe would make itself known. I envied the people who could just stroll in and purchase a few hardcovers off the important towers with the swipe of a credit card.

  Somewhere along the main aisle stood a commanding dump of Dianetics. These must be important, I mused, leafing through a copy during an idle moment.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Dan barked.

  “Just curious,” I said guardedly. “What is this?”

  “You don’t want to know,” he muttered with a quick wave of his hand. I put down the L. Ron Hubbard in a state of unquenched curiosity, too nervous to get caught going near it again. There were so many mysteries that eluded my beginner’s grasp of the world of letters.

  “What’s this?” I inquired, holding up one of Joseph Campbell’s books on mythology. Who was Joseph Campbell and why was he so important?

  “What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a swirl of Clan of the Cave Bear with the mermaid from Splash inexplicably crawling across its cover. How did this book get to be a movie and what did that mean? So many books indicated something significant yet inscrutable. Authors seemed to have reputations I couldn’t quite deconstruct. Stuart Woods dominated an entire shelf—a monolith of contemporary letters? Ann Rule, master of criminal justice?

  Then, the threat of crime itself came to B. Dalton. In 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, my colleagues and I were swept up into what felt like a mission of global import. The only time I’d given thought to Iran prior to this was during the hostage crisis, when someone graffitied “Fuck the Ayatollah” on a building near Main Street School, where it remained for the rest of my grade-school education. Every time I looked at it, I thought, “The world is full of mysterious danger.”

  But this current danger was exciting. I became nearly delirious in my desire to sell The Satanic Verses, spellbound by photographs of Rushdie’s daunting eyebrows and pungent gaze. The tapping of cash register buttons was swiftly upgraded into a campaign to save literature from the forces of darkness. I blazed with excitement.

  Each day my coworkers and I reported for duty to get the latest instructions, direct from corporate headquarters. Copies of Rushdie’s book were to be kept near the cash registers. No, behind the cash registers. No, now in the back of the store, the stockroom, where only management could tread. Employees who did not feel safe selling the book were allowed to be taken off the schedule, no repercussions. People were bombing bookstores!

  Suburban customers who couldn’t for their lives tell the difference between Iran and Iraq (I counted myself among them) flocked in droves to our store, whether out of curiosity, for political purposes, or simply to feel part of something. They skulked up to the cash register, saying—in the hushed tones of a John le Carré character—they wanted to buy The Book. “If somebody asks whether we stock it or not, think carefully before you reply,” we were told. “Answer on a case-by-case basis.”

  “What’s the book about?” I asked Dan.

  “Nobody knows,” he replied.

  In any case, it was a hardcover. Nonmanagerial employees received a 5 percent discount on merchandise, the barest acknowledgment of our contributions. The closest B. Dalton came to giving workers a free book was during inventory. On these evenings, the store stayed open late and in the cloak of darkness stripped those mass-market paperbacks deemed unsellable and shipped them off to be pulped. Under Dan’s supervision, we tore their covers off, lobbing the denuded copies into a dumpster.

  The whole thing was upsetting. Books were sacred objects, something I wouldn’t dream of throwing away. Well trained by the library, I considered the idea of defacing a book, even with thoughtful marginalia, a punishable offense. I couldn’t believe an item of such import could just be torn apart, its carefully designed cover ripped ruthlessly from its guts, and jettisoned to a place where no one would read it.

  We weren’t supposed to take these rejects, though Dan uncharacteristically gave me a pass. The trouble was, shorn of their casings, whatever allure these books may have once held—and there was little; they were, after all, trashed for a reason—was lost in their newly abused state. I felt sullied in the process, as ripped off as the books themselves.

  My B. Dalton career, in the end, only whetted my appetite. What were all those books about, why were people buying them, and when could I?

  Meanwhile, upstate where he and my stepmother escaped the confines of their middle-income housing complex, my father had developed a library-sale habit, scooping up reams of former bestsellers for pennies. These books, though used, somehow felt found rather than lost. He gathered old James Micheners, well-worn histories of the Catskills, any book about the Spanish Civil War, photographic collections of military hardware, and what felt like more than enough copies of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. He had a weakness, which I contracted through osmosis, for books that had enjoyed a moment of wild popularity decades earlier and then managed to fade into obscurity. (My brother Roger inherited this same tendency, assembling a Library of the Absurd in his living room, which included such treasures as the complete oeuvre of Phyllis Schlafly.)

  I combed my dad’s newly stocked shelves and there, nestled between Ulster County histories and books about the Lincoln Brigade, I came across a used mass-market paperback of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a book that struck me as an especially sophisticated choice for a high schooler. It was not a classic in the English-class sense of the word nor was it a children’s book. It was just a book grown-ups read. I wanted to partake in that, not for edification but for fun.

  Catch-22 was a book about war and geopolitics—about which I knew precisely nothing. But more than its unfamiliar subject matter, its distinctive associative style, its circular structure, its repetitive and escalating iterations were completely unlike the straightforward narratives I’d trained on. Perhaps even more important, Catch-22 was the first book that made me laugh out loud (apart from giggling over picture books). Hungry Joe, who dreamt every night he had a cat sleeping on his face and finally woke to find he had a cat sleeping on his face, made me spit out my food.

  When I wasn’t upstate, I worked weekends in the city. I’d read on the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station, stop briefly at one of “my” Barnes & Nobles, on the corner of Thirty-Fourth and Seventh, then take the subway uptown to Madison Avenue. There I worked at a small French clothing store, selling one-size-fits-all viscose dresses in loud patterns, mostly to keep up my language skills. I chatted with my French colleagues during the largely empty hours and, an incorrigible mimic, wound up speaking English in a haughty French accent whenever a customer walked in, a habit that endeared me to exactly no one.

  I worked so hard at all of these jobs, not because I loved them but
because they were a means to an end, one that had nothing to do with the jobs themselves or adding value to my college application. What I wanted was resources and freedom, the means to buy books and to know which books to buy.

  The core of Catch-22 is, of course, its titular phrase, one used to describe an unsolvable logical dilemma that keeps people in their place, typically a lowly one. This idea entered the popular vernacular and took hold with such ubiquity that it’s hard to understand how we ever got by without it. My personal catch-22 was the unquenchable yearning to own books—to own books and to suck out the marrow of them and then to feel sated rather than hungrier still. I couldn’t have been more deluded.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Norton Anthology of English Literature

  Required Reading

  Denounce the canon all you want; it’s hard to shake the conviction that certain books are meant to be read. Books you may have to struggle to finish. Books that everyone else seems to have read and anyone who dares consider himself a reader, or at the very least “well read,” will also have read, whether they enjoy the experience or not. It’s why everyone gets defensive when you bring up the subject of James Joyce’s Ulysses. People still feel that to be a real reader, you have to … someday. (For the record: I haven’t.)

  As a child, I assumed one of these books was the encyclopedia. In its entirety. It was just a matter of hunkering down, and I actually thought I could do it. If only we’d owned the World Book. Instead we were cursed with a yellowed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, passed down from some forgotten relative, its infrequent and uninspired black-and-white line drawings a pale comparison to the enviable full-color splendor of the World Book. Time and again I would set myself to read one of its mouse-brown volumes, almost hairy with age, and find my mind traipsing off elsewhere within paragraphs.

  The canon also included, in my youthful estimation, any book with “classic” on its cover, a word imbued with near-magical powers, no matter how abridged and watered down the rendition. (A series of “chunky” classic books, adorable in their four-by-three-inch format, with pen-and-ink illustrations and sold on a stationery-store spinning rack, led me to believe I had polished off The Three Musketeers and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.) The canon included anything by a Great Writer, someone famous enough to be an occasional character in a movie or TV show or another book. It included anything associated with Western civilization, the only civilization I’d learned about from school.

  Part of this imperative stemmed from insecurity. If you’re going to be a bookish child, you had damn well better be good at it, and I feared the prospect of being sniffed out for my lapses. Someone always has to be the person who has never read Trollope, but it damn sure wasn’t going to be me. When a book wasn’t assigned at school, I assigned it to myself.

  In my Book of Books, I appended an asterisk to those Famous Books I’d personally selected: Madame Bovary, The 42nd Parallel, The American Political Tradition. Unlike my earlier teenage childhood diaries, which made me squirm when I looked through them, Bob’s entries, I determined, would make me proud.

  Even as a preschooler, I instinctively believed that certain picture books were better than others; they had silver and gold embossed medals on their covers or had managed to survive alongside boldly colored stories despite black-and-white engraved illustrations. I could sniff out books that were clearly unworthy like a bedbug dog. Bad books were cheap and poorly produced; they had garish illustrations or dumbed-down text; they were about visits to the dentist or stupid-looking bears trying to get along. Who thought this was okay for young people? If you’re trying to lift a child up, the last thing you should do is talk down to her. I took this underestimation personally.

  This is how you get primed from an early age to worship at the canon’s imposing altar. In high school, I enrolled in AP English, where we read only Great Books: Faulkner and Joyce and Conrad and Fitzgerald. Our teacher was a believer in modernism and close textual reading. I was not. Where were all the proper nouns? I struggled to keep my eyes on the page and not on my teacher’s nose, which, with its spiky mesh of hair protruding from each nostril, drew me in like a beacon. At any moment, he might demand we locate a specific phrase from Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, and even insist that we understand it. I could ill afford to get lost in the tangle. He was especially fond of quizzing us on the first three pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I lived in fear of not knowing something about the moocow.

  It never once occurred to me to skip my assigned reading, no matter how unappealing. I even went one maddening step further: I read it early. I read everything as soon as it was assigned, did all my homework, wrote my essay, and handed it in. This drove friends and roommates crazy, but what they didn’t understand was that I was driven by fear, and also, perversely, by a form of laziness and impatience. I really wanted to just get it over with now and move on to the next item. There were lots of books needing to be read.

  I remember the precise moment in grade school when I bailed on procrastination, which up until then had been my standard modus operandi, as it is for most daydreamy children. I was pushing a pencil through the grayish-pink carpet of my bedroom, avoiding one task or another, when I had an epiphany: If something needed to get done, I could put it off and worry about it and then do the actual task. Or I could just do it right away and then go back to pushing pencils through the carpet. I chose the latter, because it meant that in the aggregate you had less to do. Also, you had less chance of getting in trouble for not getting something done. Cowed by authority, I went about life convinced that, at any moment, someone would give me a good, hard look that said, “You there. Yes, you. Did you really do what you were supposed to do?” I was not going to get caught.

  Conquering The Norton Anthology of English Literature felt fundamental to this plan. The most required of all requirements, the Norton Anthology is the bedrock of every college English literature survey, and the foundational text for any English major. By college graduation, anyone who considered himself remotely literary was supposed to have a well-worn duct-taped copy on his shelf.

  “The Norton Anthology was based on the idea that it actually matters to plunge into a comic masterpiece written in the 1300s or to weep at a tragedy performed in the 1700s,” Stephen Greenblatt, one of its editors, has explained. “It is vitally important to remind people that the humanities carry the experience, the life-forms of those who came before us, into the present and into the future. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.”

  I wasn’t the only person to bow before the Norton’s demands. “It turns out many students—without the compulsion of their teachers—feel that they really shouldn’t go through their undergraduate years without reading the great imaginative works of the past,” Greenblatt said. This describes precisely how I felt in the fall of 1989, my first semester in college, a budding English major. If I was worth anything as a reader, I was going to read that Norton—if not quite cover to cover, then at least enough to constitute a thorough sampling of the essentials, no matter how mind-numbing.

  So eager was I that I preenrolled in the English Department’s yearlong survey of English literature, where the Norton ruled supreme. I would soon know “the basics,” once and for all. At the Brown bookstore I splurged on a brand-new copy, a brick of a book containing 2,616 paper-thin pages, which I intended to make bountiful use of so that every sign of wear signified an acquired bit of knowledge. My Norton, the first volume of the book’s fifth edition, included Shakespeare and Swift and Johnson. It also contained Middle English lyrics like “Fowls in the Frith” and “My Lief Is Faren in Londe,” along with the interminable “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” part of the so-called Alliterative Revival, written in unfathomable Old English verse. (“The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes,” etc.)

  And it contained Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a nefarious bit of doggerel disguised beneath a deceptively e
nchanting title. Is there any more dispiriting way to enter the canon than The Faerie Queene? I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Years later, I took comfort in the unimpeachable literary critic Terry Castle’s own recollection: “I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser’s poem and just looking at it—the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I’ve scribbled in the margins—can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness … so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots.”

  But I didn’t know Castle’s work at the time. When I looked around my English class, the other students appeared to be fully absorbed. It didn’t occur to me in my greenness that they might all just be exceptionally persuasive fakers. I took it as an indictment of my ill-preparedness.

  The Faerie Queene also made one suspected failure official: I would never understand poetry. It was one of my many deficiencies as a reader, but it was perhaps the most damning. Poetry was practically a litmus test for literary credibility. Real book lovers loved poetry, yet for me it remained opaque. When I encountered poetry in a collection, I couldn’t help flipping the pages until the paragraphs reverted to the reassuring tempo of prose.

  I’d started off, as most children do, with poetic promise. I adored nonsense verse, full of as much respect for Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein as the next second grader. In third grade, thinking I was possibly gifted when it came to verse, I wrote my first poem, a contemplative ode to the tree, which received a certain amount of praise from the teacher. It was at precisely this point that my ability to create and appreciate poetry stalled. I did have an idea for a follow-up effort, one about a road with two paths, which I shared with my mother. “I think that’s taken,” she said.