Reading Novels in My Fifties
I’m weird about the novels I like.
I read differently now that I’m in my fifties.
I’m in a phase.
I’ve reached this phase after decades of reading.
When I was in my twenties and thirties, I liked experimental novels. I liked humor and the supernatural and typographical playfulness. I liked modernism and postmodernism.
I liked James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Francois Rabelais, Robert Coover, Grace Paley, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortazar, Jean Toomer, Amy Hempel, Lee K. Abbott, Rick Bass, Mark Richard, Larry Brown, David Markson, Curtis White, Carole Maso, Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Padgett Powell, and many others.
That was then.
Okay, yes, I’m still a sucker for a fun experimental novel, especially one that takes liberties with the look of the page, with the shock of contrasts, with irreverent humor and playful typesetting, and with putting mythical beings in the middle of a contemporary novel, just for the fun of it.
I like down-to-earth prose that takes big swings at culture and authority, but always with a self-deprecating sense of humor and the neverending mission to sustain compassion for one’s fellow human beings.
You know, that kind of novel, whatever genre that is. I don’t know what shelf they keep these books on, but I’m sure they’re in the bookstore somewhere, maybe near the works of Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders, Amanda Filipacchi, or Guy Davenport.
Now? Today? At my age? What do I like?
I’ve come to realize that I like the novels I read as a young kid when I’d pick out books at the library to while away the rainy Michigan weekends.
I don’t mean I gravitate necessarily, as a fiftysomething, to the same subject matter: the animals of Dr. Dolittle, the wizards of Oz, the pirates of Treasure Island, the hobbits of Middle-earth, the detectives of Agatha Christie, and the astronauts of Robert Heinlein.
I mean I appreciate, now, the way those stories were told and developed. That is, I like novels with scenes, novels in which the adventure is happening as you read it, novels that put me in the same room with the hero as that character is making their decisions and living their life.
It’s the difference between something like:
“We remembered, years later, what our parents said about the incident, as it was reported then, and we understood, much too late, that our parents could not have wanted to know more, mostly to protect us from what they were afraid was true”
—which is very postmoderny and self-conscious and reflective—and something like:
“He was afraid the old stairs wouldn’t support their combined weight, but with his mother depending on him to be the brave one, he took her hand, and up the old stairs they went.”
The first one is just talk. We’re waiting for the story to begin. What’s at stake? I have no idea.
In the second, the story has begun. Someone is acting despite their fear, taking a step toward the resolution of a mystery, and bracing to meet the dangers of the journey. The old stairs might crack and give way under the weight of mother and son, but there’s something upstairs that’s worth the risk.
I made up those two examples as I was typing—they are not quotes from any book—so I hope they’re clear enough to convey the gist of the differences in the two styles.
When I was younger, in my twenties and thirties, I was drawn to the first type, to writing by an author who was sensitive, tentative, and self-conscious. Maybe I was drawn to that kind of writing because it paralleled the way I felt.
I was trapped in my head, intellectually knotted up about my life and my writerly ambitions. I was earnest in my attempts to create meaning in my fiction, so earnest that sometimes I wrote fiction like I was writing an essay, the kind I’d learned to write as a student when, in class, we’d read a novel just to decode its symbolism, define its themes, and critique the heck out of it.
Today, I’m drawn to the second type because I love the power of fiction to make stuff happen.
I love being able to experience, vicariously, someone else’s life, as dramatized in fiction. I want to hold new worlds in my imagination, and I want people to move.
I don’t get hung up anymore on the precision of long sentences surgically exposing complex ideas under the layers of memory and authority and language. Instead, I like scenes that, one after the other, page after page, chapter after chapter, add up to an adventure in someone’s life.
The complexity of my preferred type of fiction comes from that person’s adventure, as dramatized in an immediate kind of way, the way life is lived—wind in the hair, boots in the mud—and not from the writer overthinking the exposition in a detached, forensic kind of narrative approach, the way life is examined after it’s happened—elbows on a table, stockinged feet on the carpet.
So, as a reader in my fifties, I like active characters making tough decisions. I like dramatic scenes. I like a fully developed story, a story that, by the end, really takes you somewhere.
As others in their fifties can likely relate, I have lived a life of tough decisions, of making compromises when facing dilemmas, and of paying the costs of having made those tough decisions.
Dilemmas came at me. Choices had to be made. You only live once. You can’t go back and live a different life. Consequences accumulate. You can’t talk your way through the crossroads of your life. You have to choose a direction . . . and keep going.
So maybe that’s why, at my age, I don’t like fiction burdened by chitchat and philosophical musings and the recountings of memories of yesteryear. I don’t like page after page of dialogue that goes nowhere and characters who don’t change.
In my twenties, I liked to read about characters thinking and talking and critiquing, because that’s the stage of life I was in: the stage in which you question everything and wonder about everything and haven’t yet made any final, lasting decisions.
In my fifties, I like characters who face dilemmas and debate the options but then act and face the consequences, because that’s what I’ve done. That’s where I am. I’ve come to understand that, in my fifties, I like stories in my fiction, not talk.
It’s like the difference between someone cornering you at a party and telling you what they think is a fascinating story . . . and someone taking you skiing in the Rockies and—wow, okay, here I am, skiing in the Rockies!
I prefer vicarious experience over ponderous exposition.
Also, I get plenty of good talk from nonfiction.
I get my true stories from memoirs. I’ve read Susan Orlean’s Joyride, Sally Mann’s Art Work, and Seymour Hersh’s Reporter: wonderful!
I get my history from history books. I’ve read David McCullough’s History Matters, Jill Lepore’s This America, and Robert Caro’s Working: wonderful!
I get my perspective on the world from investigative journalism. I’ve read Casey Michel’s Foreign Agents, Steven Brill’s The Death of Truth, and Phil Klay’s Uncertain Ground: wonderful!
I get my science from science books. I’ve read Hans Rosling, Daniel Kahneman, Carl Sagan, Brian Greene, Sarah Scoles, Jeanette Winterson, Nicole Kobie, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Graeber, and Ray Kurzweil: wonderful!
From a novel, I want DRAMA.
That means characters making hard decisions, acting on them, and dealing with the consequences. The characters have grand experiences. They fail. They keep going. They resolve their adventures in meaningful ways. They gain wisdom, even if they pay a terrible price for that wisdom.
And I’ll take humor and compassion, playfulness and honesty, of course and always.
But if an author wants to wow me with conversation, they have to work extra hard to have something to say or to be entertaining. Remember I’m over fifty. I’ve been around. I’ve not heard it all, but I’ve heard a lot.
Sometimes, yes, chatty novelists compel me, especially if they make me smile.
But it’s tough, so much tougher than writing a dramatic scene. If a novelist isn’t writing dramatic scenes but is instead cranking out pages of exposition and reverie and conversation—engaged in a forensics of the soul, as I just now decided to call it—then that novelist is actually making it harder on themselves to keep me reading.
By avoiding dramatic scenes and relying on thoughtful prose, novelists have set themselves a real challenge, because when I see giant paragraphs of exposition, I skim. I turn pages. I skip chapters.
I’ve read thousands of novels over the course of my life. I’ve read Cervantes and Thomas Hardy, Dickens and Rabelais, George Eliot and Jane Austen, Toni Morrison and David Foster Wallace. I have many worlds built up in my imagination.
So I don’t need, in a dramatic novel, handholding and background and reminders of what happened in the chapters that I just read. And I don’t need all that research. Goodness. Take that stuff and sneak it into the drama when appropriate, that is, when it matters to the characters.
So it’s summer in Detroit, 1955. It’s autumn in Rome, 180 AD. It’s winter in Paris, 1939. It’s spring in Las Vegas, 2173. Cool. I’m there. I’m with you. I’m ready to get on with the story. So let’s go.
Reading expands your imagination.
It has absolutely expanded mine. I have read thousands of books, fiction and nonfiction, and I am absolutely a much more developed personality than I would have been had I not been a reader all my life.
I understand that novels are written for all kinds of people in all kinds of stages, from young to old, from the innocent to the veteran: fair-weather readers, bad-weather readers, bestseller readers, critical readers, light readers, readers who haven’t touched a book since high school, and so on.
But I’m me. So, whatever stage of life I’m in, I get to think about what I like to read. And so do you.
That’s another feature of my weird phase, the stage I’m in today, that of a lifelong reader in my fifties. I’ve grown.
I’ve grown as a person because I’ve been an avid reader. I have a personality that is full of quirks and rough edges and shiny things in dark moody caves. I have tastes. I have preferences. And those have changed over time as I have changed over time. Reading over so many decades has changed me, and I’ve enjoyed it. I wouldn’t change it, even as it has changed me.
I read to change my mind.
I read to change my mind because if I have to spend the rest of my life with myself, I don’t want to hang out with the same person the whole time.
So I keep reading. I have stacks of novels: novels I’ve bought, novels given to me, and novels from the library.
I’m always open to being surprised. I give new novelists a chance, always. I don’t prejudge a novel. I read it first. I give every book a chance. I want it to be good.
Maybe this novel will change my mind about the novels I like. Maybe I’ll have to eat my words. Maybe I will have to expand my personality.
Wonderful!
I gaze at the cover—so many fantastic covers nowadays—and I open the novel to the first page. I take a breath. I summon a hopeful heart.
And I read.
__________
