Pale Horse, Pale Rider

A recent commentary on NPR by Alice McDermott has a lot of librarians up in arms. In it she tells the story of assigning Katherine Anne Porter's book Pale Horse, Pale Rider to one of her English classes. She was astounded when one of her students brought in a very old hardbound copy that had been withdrawn from a library. She went on to lament that this signified a devaluation of our literary heritage; her implication being that librarians cannot be trusted to protect what is most important in American letters if they are withdrawing books as important as this.

The problem is that this is just an example of a little knowledge being more dangerous than none at all. Sure, she observed a copy of an important work that had been withdrawn from a library. But is she at all aware of how libraries work? Of the fact that we withdraw hundreds, if not thousands of books every year? And that many of those, withdrawn because the copies are old and faded and dirty, are quickly replaced with fresh new copies, so that new generations of library patrons may enjoy reading them?

You don't work in a library for long without experiencing someone charging in with a volume they've picked up from your sale table, demanding to know why you got rid of it. Very often, the person is correct -- the book in question is one the library should keep in perpetuity. But very often, you are able to point out that the new copy is already ordered, if not already on the shelf.

Of course, no library can keep every book someone considers important. Usually, it's a budgetary matter. Right now, I could reel off the names of a dozen classics we should have, and no doubt there are many more. (Ironically, Webster Groves Public Library does not have a copy of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, though there are several available within the Consortium.) But we can't afford to buy all of these important books at once -- not while keeping up with the demand for current bestsellers. I dream of a time when we can.

This is the kind of thing we think about all the time. We know, we understand, we live for our literary heritage. We understand that books by the authors people beat down our doors for today -- James Patterson, Nora Roberts, David Baldacci -- are ephemeral in the extreme and will be discarded a decade from now. Books by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Tolstoy, Austen -- and yes, Porter -- will always need a place on our shelves.

Orhan Pamuk

I was very happy to see Orhan Pamuk receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. I have only read two of his books, but enjoyed them both immensely. What's more, I feel that by having read them, I understand the history, culture and controversies of Turkish society more than I ever have.
Within Turkey there is much anger that an author who is seen as capitulating to the West was chosen. Pamuk has been arrested for 'insulting Turkishness,' and reviled for writing about the Armenian genocide that most Turks deny ever occurred.
That's one point, but I think that if one reads his works carefully, one does not find condemnation of these aspects of Turkish society, but a careful consideration of them. In Snow, which is set in the small Turkish town of Kars during a snowstorm that cuts off all contact with the outside world, a very westernized young poet comes face to face with radical Islamists, terrorists, and simple faithful people whose positions are all examined in almost excruciating detail. You cannot read the book without gaining a greater understanding of and empathy for these people. That's not to say it makes you sympathize with terrorists -- but neither does it do anything to make you love the west and hate Islam.
The other book I read is My Name is Red, which is a sort of mystery involving competing calligraphers in medieval Istanbul. Just the setting is fascinating, and one imagines Pamuk's research to have been exhaustive. The story is intriguing, lusty, funny -- everything a good story ought to be. But I will say this, I have recommended My Name is Red several times to people, and usually they have put it down and told me they couldn't get into it. I don't know why that would be. Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which is the only book I know to compare it to, was wildly popular, even made into a movie, so I don't know why people don't like My Name is Red.
Has anyone else read Orhan Pamuk's work? Wanna talk about it?

Why So Sad?

At the book discussion group the other day we talked about Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. I liked the book, but people in the group didn't. They generally agreed that Gaitskill was a skilled writer, but that the book offered no hope. The main character (not Veronica, by the way) leads a dissolute and pointless life, allowing herself to be sexually exploited all along the way. I asked group members if they actually liked the book, but hated the characted Gaitskill had created -- which is very different from hating the book. But no, they just didn't like the book.
It was further weakened by employing the literary tactic, which I think is extremely overworked these days, of beginning in the present and telling the whole story in fractured, sometimes hard to follow flashbacks. Even from page one, you knew there was no hope. But like I said, I liked it, and if you want a gritty, realistic look at the 'glamorous' world of modeling in the 1980's, just as we were starting to wake up to the AIDS epidemic, Veronica will give it to you.
But the interesting question that came out of this discussion concerns why so much good writing these days is unremittingly sad. Why is it all about victims, and abuse, and estrangement, and bad luck? It used to be that even the best authors wrote with a lighter touch. So many contemporary authors seem to have forgotten how a dose of humor could lighten any subject, without reducing our perception of its importance.
Or am I wrong? Can you think of authors who write with wit and humor, but still produce stories of true thematic worth?