I knew there was a problem when I couldn't read.
It was not a matter of recognizing letters,making them words,and stringing them into sentences. That I could do just fine. But a certain book,"The Boat,"a collection of short stories by Nam Le,threw me into a funk so unfortunate that I,like Will Barrett in "The Second Coming,"might as well have fallen into a sand trap off the 15th green and not understood why.
Or maybe it was more like Binx Bolling,the protagonist of Percy's justly famous "The Moviegoer,"a man who can only find emotional connection in films or wandering around New Orleans. That's what's happened to me–I seem to have lost the ability to emote save for a few precious things,like movies,or certain books,or my family. So now I'm living in a Walker Percy novel.
There was something about "The Boat"that threw me into immediate despair after reading just a couple of pages,a deep,existential funk Sarte or Kierkegaard would have been proud to have emoted. It was not Le's lyricism or penetrating insight into the human condition that made me shed tears of nihilism inside my soul. To be prosaic about it,the fact Le is talented,young,and actually writing fiction dropped me into a spiral of self-loathing from which sex or drugs or any of the pleasures of the flesh could not be the most addictive of lifelines.
Fortunately,instead I started reading "Revolutionary Road,"a novel painfully beautiful on its surface and so corrosive that the pages seem to shed acid. Of course,this immediately lifted my spirits and made me want to write once again. Its author,Richard Yates,writes sentences so immaculate that they could double as English gardens,yet the protagonists,Frank and April Wheeler,are in such an awful state of existence they really could be…in a Walker Percy novel,if they were Catholic,Southern,unable to love or even express emotions.
And you thought your life sucked
So to recap:about three pages into a book by a successful writer turns me into a semi-suicidal mess while a novel by a successful writer turns me back into a writer.
The difference,besides tone,subject matter,and ethnic background of the writers is that Nam Le is alive,while Richard Yates shuffled off this mortal coil about,oh,30 years ago.
Yes,it's come to whether or not a writer is alive if I'm jealous of him or her. Also,reading writers who are among the living (and,to be fair,only under 40 years old),makes me a nauseated mess of nerve endings ready for a quick hibernation to the psych ward.
Know what I mean?
That’s What You Said