I was that guy who, like everyone else, never wanted a Kindle. In fact, I swore I would never get one. I liked how books felt, I liked how the pages smelled, and I loved holding a well worn and loved copy of some pretentious book in a quirky coffee shop. A few months later, and I’m hooked. My Kindle is my best and only friend. Sure, there are certain books I’ll want or keep around, but overall I became exactly what Amazon expected:  their bitch.

I have no problems being cocky enough to say that I love my taste in books. So I naturally love to show off what I’m reading. The issue with a Kindle, the only thing I can brag about is owning it and the books that might be on it.

On the T one day, a girl is reading the book Columbine by Dave Cullen. Great book. It’d be fascinating to talk about, in spite of how creepy it is to start a conversation with “Hey, you’re reading Columbine also?  Have they killed anyone yet?”

From my perspective there’s a cute girl reading Columbine. From her perspective there’s a short guy reading… something on his Kindle. Twilight?  The Awakening?  She’d never know (it wasn’t Twilight, for the record. That was high school. Or The Awakening. That’s just a terrible book). There’s no ticker on the back of the Kindle that shows what you’re reading. Soon no one will ever know what other people are reading, and my potential soul mate will marry someone else.

People like me want to share what they‘re reading. It’s cool to read. It means you somehow make spare time to read a book for fun. It means that while on the T, you prioritize a novel over Words with Friends.

…Though I’m currently reading a novel-length epic Harry Potter Fan Fic on my Kindle, so maybe it’s not so bad that stays hidden.

If I was still reading Twilight, I’d love to have no one know. “What are you reading?” someone asks you. “East of Eden,” I’d promptly reply and switch the book (just in case they would see the words ‘Edward,’ ‘yearning,’ or other Mormon themes instead of Steinbeckian America).

For bookworms like myself, we have entered a new age of literature. In an era where everyone knows what 80s synth I’m listening to on Spotify, its strange that no one will ever know what I’m reading. On one hand, this is devastating. Remember winter of 2009 when everyone had a bright green or orange book sticking out of their purses and you knew just how many people jumped on the Steig Larsson train of violence and snow?  Or how if you’d be drunk today if you took a shot for every Game of Thrones book you see on the T?

Seeing what everyone else is reading is comforting. If you recognize a fairly unknown book, you get that warm smile, knowing that someone else is about to go on the same journey that you and few others embarked on. If you see the next big fad being read all around you, you know you’re in the next movement. Nowadays, everyone just has a Kindle, and they’re reading… something.  But just like how page numbers aren’t really a thing anymore thanks to our eBook friends, maybe the public knowledge of what others are reading will just dissipate over time. It’s not just the technological aspects of reading that’s fundamentally different, but enigma is the new trend.

(text by: Alex Trivilino)

Tom Perrotta’s 2004 novel, Little Children, has one of my favorite first lines: “The young mothers were telling each other how tired they were.” Immediately, Perrotta, a Jersey-born, Massachusetts-based writer, establishes his book’s world and its townspeople, their low-shouldered lameness. The banality of the sentence’s content, and the flatness of its form, prepares the reader for a story about exhaustion and hunger. The sentence also announces Perrotta’s deep and abiding interest in ordinariness. The minimalistic writing style that marked his early work, and the plain-speak dialogue and descriptions that he’s developed throughout his career are reflective of Perrotta’s peculiarly specific writerly ambitions.

Little Children’s opening line is an effective introduction to Perrotta’s novel, but not because of its syntactical daring or high-brow cross-referencing. Its meaning isn’t radically altered by what follows. It doesn’t surprise the reader; it grounds him. Perrotta specializes in threading his stories with the kind of writing reading heads nod to, jolted page-by-page from the shock of recognition. It doesn’t condescend to the reader, but nor does it demand from him an extraordinary amount of work. For the most part, Perrotta earns his head-nodding reader’s trust with his storytelling abilities. Little Children, for example, is a highly-readable tragi-comic exposé of “normal” human behavior and the darkly funny ways in which people endure humdrum American existence.

Speaking with the Guardian in 2009, Perrotta made a remark that suggested a close relationship between who he writes about and who he writes for:

“I like to write simply and clearly. I never wanted to write for the guys I met in college; I wanted to write for the guys I grew up with who weren’t literary sophisticates.”

While this might reflect well on Perrotta-the-person, generous in his consideration of his audience, it seems like a compromise on the part of Perrotta-the-writer, a graduate of Yale who has often enjoyed commercial success that, in turn, has called his literariness into question. The worlds of High and Low don’t trust one another. When an artist combines elements from both spheres, or traditions, the result can be schizophrenically exciting, immediately gratifying in the way of Low Art, with the long-lasting impact, and complexity of High Art. Perrotta’s most recent work, however, suffers from his self-conscious restraint and cautiousness.

The prose on display in his new novel, The Leftovers, seems ill equipped to interestingly handle the lofty and uninspired themes that his book tackles: grief, hope, community. The Leftovers imagines how a New England town (Mapleton) would attempt to make sense of a Rapture-like catastrophe, the disappearance of many but not all members of the human race, which happens at random. The overtly supernatural, a new element of Perrotta’s work, exists alongside the suburban realism he’s made his name on. As a result of ungainly genre-mashing, his simpleton diction, and the story’s wobbly pacing, there’s a sort of stakes-lessness that ruins both the fun and the darkness of The Leftovers.

The many residents of Mapleton lead unenlightened, stale, colorless lives. Humor, which has always served as Perrotta’s characters standard defense mechanism, is present in The Leftovers, but it’s scaled back. When it is employed, it offers little levity. At his best, Perrotta has a strong command of the kind of humor, used most often during scenes of dialogue, that reveals, aphoristically, a character’s truest self. His previous novels feature characters whose worldviews come through clearly in their sense of humor, their ranges and tones. This quality is largely absent from The Leftovers. More significantly, his writing style lacks a sense of forward-motion, or the kick-in-the-gut rush of a sentence that sings. Verveless, Perrotta’s prose rarely ever lights up, and is only occasionally charged with the kind of quotidian detail that good art magnifies.

Appropriate, then, that Stephen King, a writer often bastardized for his non-literary sensibilities, wrote the laudatory review of The Leftovers that ran on the cover of The New York Times Book Review recently. King’s most blurbably direct, all-or-nothing assertion: “Perrotta has delivered a troubling disquisition on how ordinary people react to extraordinary and inexplicable events, the power of family to hurt and to heal, and the unobtrusive ease with which faith can slide into fanaticism.” An important distinction, I believe, should be made between disquisitions and exposés. Disquisitions may not necessarily bear the quality of revelation. All Perrotta reveals in The Leftovers is a sad willingness to forgo the challenge of writing The New Suburban Story, or The New Post-Apocalyptic Story, hell, even The New Tom Perrotta Story. Especially discouraging is how The Leftovers’s omniscient P.O.V.-shifting structure is the same as that of his previous novel, the similarly tiresome The Abstinence Teacher.

Criticism should do what Perrotta’s most favorable critics suggest his novels accomplish: a peeling back of the layers at the surface-level. A novel, and the response it gets, should be a work of excavation. Many, like King’s, read like bad flap copy, the work of an unpaid intern. Perrotta’s business-savvy decision to dip his feet in the world of genre writing was covered eloquently at The Millions. Few reviewers, however, have interrogated Perrotta’s sentences, those perfectly safe, unshapely constructions that, like his characters in Little Children and The Leftovers, stumble toward their oblivion. Lifeless. His book, and its empty-headed critical reception, then, can be seen as a reflection of the rapturous disappearance of genre fiction ingenuity, veteran writer risk-taking, and critical attention spans. Sentences and readers alike suffer.

Something lost, nothing gained.  

(text by: John Francisconi)

Any piece of scientific or religious writing is also a work of mystery. Marilynne Robinson’s 2009 novel Home is no exception. Home isn’t a ghost story like Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” but her characters, the pious, Presbyterian Boughtons, are haunted by their immutable pasts. Home, like Robinson’s other works, which include a nonfiction book about “parascience,” is concerned with kindness, respect, and piety, but it doesn’t ignore the barriers we daily construct that hinder moral progress. In short, it doesn’t ignore the fact that home, how to make, inhabit, and heal it, is a mystery that may well be solution-less.

I started in on Robinson’s lauded novel after reading Rick Moody’s polarizing “memoir with digressions,” The Black Veil. (TBV boasts a blurb from off-the-grid postmodernist Thomas Pynchon, but also inspired Dale Peck’s unrelenting, which begins with the bold thesis “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation. Moody’s writing is highly associative, bouncing back and forth between issues of politics, mental health, and the dually crumbling and regenerative self. Its title refers to the book’s central conceit: Moody spends much of The Black Veil traveling New England, researching his lineage, looking for any genealogical link between himself and “Handkerchief Moody,” the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s highly-anthologized short-story “The Minister’s Black Veil.” In doing so, Moody uncovers his Puritanical and Calvinist roots. Stylistically, Robinson’s novel shares little with Moody’s work of self-examination. There is, however, a clause late in his memoir, placed inconspicuously mid-paragraph, in which Moody asserts that “language obfuscates as much as it reveals.” Robinson’s work exemplifies this radical truth. Like Hawthorne’s short-story, Home deals with concealment, i.e. mystery. Using metaphoric language, mastered after years of close readings of Transcendentalist texts by Emerson and Thoreau, Robinson draws attention to the hidden, dust-lined drawers of the soul, its nooks and its crannies, chinks at the edges. Moral sincerity takes pride of place over practical sincerity. Scenes of dialogue are handled deftly, each characters’ words riding a current of meaning not always clear to the conversationalists. 

Home, the place, the idea, is perhaps the greatest mystery shared by all readers. One of Kurt Vonnegut’s final books is titled “Man Without a Country,” but, more powerfully, he admitted in interviews to feeling like a man without a home. Home, for him, was Indianapolis, 1931, his ninth of eighty-four years. Home wasn’t simply a place, but a time. It didn’t – it couldn’t – exist without the grace-giving presence of his mother, father, siblings, friends, teachers. Robinson’s novel articulates well this phenomenon of figurative homelessness. This is a commendable accomplishment, considering her novel rarely leaves the Boughton homestead. Though Robinson’s prose is clean, and her characters deeply considerate, there’s an element of discomfort at play in Home. Aside from the Biblical allusions, the niceties of domesticity and religious curiosity or observance, Home, like The Black Veil, is a story about people struggling to be good fathers, sons, sisters, brothers, people.  

Home and The Black Veil are recommended reading for Emerson students, especially as syllabi are printed and books ordered. Whether you feel as though you’re leaving or returning home this September, Robinson and Moody have wisdom to share.  

(text by: John Francisconi)