Diary: Michael Robbins, Days of Unserious Reading (or, Just Sit Right Back)

From the “Jack Reacher” website; Calico cover; “The Lord Chancellor Copies from Memory” (1852–53), Bleak House illustration by Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”); The Book of the Most Precious Substance cover

After finishing In Search of Lost Time last year I took a break from serious reading. For about five months I read almost nothing but thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, spy novels. Genre fiction, in the repulsive parlance. But—I object to myself—can’t such literature be “serious”? Of course. I just mean that some books, you stay up all night turning the pages because you just have to know what happens next. That doesn’t happen with Proust. But I immediately run into trouble, because a hundred years ago I read Bleak House in about two days. I had to know what happened next. And John le Carré was surely serious, even in the silly season. I never claimed to have a fully worked-out theory of the novel.

I actually ended up reading more books during this span, which I described to friends as “not being able to read anything,” than I would have if I’d been sticking to my usual reading habits. That’s because it takes two nights at most to finish a Jack Reacher novel, and I usually restrict my junk reading to a couple of hours before bedtime. Unleashed, able to read ridiculous novels about ex-military vigilantes at all hours of the day, I went through them like hotcakes, to reach no further for a metaphor than your average Jack Reacher novel.

I finished fifty or so unserious books, and I started and abandoned as many more for various reasons—mostly bad prose. I come in to this stuff with middling expectations—le Carrés don’t grow on trees. But there is a question of a certain competence. Lee Child is no one’s idea of a stylist, but he knows his limitations. His workmanlike writing doesn’t distract from the lizard-brain pleasures of his plots. On the other hand, consider this, from Lucy Clarke’s The Hike:
Instinctively, she angled her face toward the microphone. With her mouth almost touching it, her lips parted, her eyes opened. “Hey.” One word, smoky, low, deep.
The room fell silent.
And into that silence she began to sing.
Oh, Jesus! That voice.
Dusky, deep. The resonance ripping through the lodge, sending shivers down Helena’s neck.
She was a rock star.

There are, of course, a lot of terrific stylists in the game. Half a dozen off the top of my head: Ruth Ware, Megan Abbott, Tana French, Kim Stanley Robinson, Elizabeth Knox, Thomas Perry. And there are many more who will never write a good sentence in their lives (I’ll name just one here, too successful to notice me: Dean Koontz). Most of my fifty solid reads bore blurbs attesting that they were astonishing, unputdownable, etc. I did manage to put all of them down—not to brag, but I have successfully put down every book I’ve ever picked up. But four of the books I picked up during this spell were put down, reluctantly, only when my eyes had begun to resist my command to stay open.

The first was Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You, basically The Secret History meets Serial. Makkai also describes singing:
I hadn’t understood till then how sound travels differently at night, but I’d sit on the Old Chapel steps with my clipboard, and when you arranged the singers in a ring, their voices were rounder: lofty and silver. Like singing in the shower, if the shower were limitless.

This isn’t Yeats or anything but it lifts a little off the page. The novel shares a lineage with Alexander Payne’s recent film The Holdovers: all those fictional snow-fraught New England boarding schools of the seventies and eighties. A podcaster returns to her alma mater to teach a workshop and ends up solving a campus murder from her school days. Makkai nails the vibe of today’s young phone-people, who say things like “That’s one of my theories. I have eight theories” and “She sounded super not into that” and “I don’t want to be another white girl giggling about murder.” And she knows that everyone my age is still in love with Kurt Cobain or Courtney Love. Or both.

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi—the only of my fifty books that I actually bought. You know the Borges story “The Library of Babel”? In Piranesi “the House”—as the titular protagonist, one of its two inhabitants, calls it—is kind of like that except it’s all endless ancient marble halls full of statuary, with ocean tides sweeping through the lower levels. There are birds. Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I enjoyed but didn’t love. Piranesi is shorter and richer. I don’t want to spoil the secret of the House, but one of the statues, of a faun with his finger pressed to his lips, gave me an early inkling of its nature. “I dreamt of him once,” Piranesi writes in his journal; “he was standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child.”

Calico, Lee Goldberg’s delightful time-travel detective western, is the funnest novel I’ve read since Peter Cline’s delightful time-travel detective western, Paradox Bound. The army is conducting teleportation experiments in the desert that open up a rift in time, and, whoops, a jackass in a Mercedes gets stuck in a nineteenth-century mining camp, and a nineteenth-century miner who wipes his ass with corncobs gets flattened by an RV while running in terror from gas-station dinosaur statues. The Mercedes guy is Owen, who becomes a cook in the camp, and he soon espies Wendy, another involuntary visitor from modern times, as he guesses from her perfect teeth. To signal her, he plays the Gilligan’s Island theme on the piano, which understandably freaks her out. Her eyes go wide as she clocks his Nikes, passed off to curious miners as the latest in French fashion. “No phones, no lights, no motor cars, not a single luxury,” as the song has it. One phone, actually: Owen has preserved his iPhone 10, which he charges with a solar battery, to watch videos of his past future life. Wendy doesn’t recognize the device—turns out she’s from 1992. At least they’ve both seen Back to the Future.

And finally, Sara Gran’s The Book of the Most Precious Substance—a truly bonkers bibliophilic sex magic novel. There’s a rare occult book that tells you how to get whatever you want—for a price. The eponymous most precious substance is, well, female ejaculate. A double quest ensues: for the book and for, well, female ejaculate. If you really need to hear any more than that, there are also submissive horse-people living naked in barn stalls “at a dominatrix witch’s house.” I’d call the novel a mashup of Dan Brown and Clive Barker if that didn’t make it sound dumb and poorly written. It’s neither.

I remember sprawling on my bedroom floor, five years old, reading my first novel: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. The scene where a panther stalks Pa through the trees scared the ever-lovin’ bejesus out of me. Something began in those pages that I look for in every book I read. I find it in Dostoevsky’s Demons, Lawrence’s Women in Love, but not, whatever else I find there, in Ulysses or Swann’s Way; in Calvino and Faulkner, Balzac and Welty, Mary Gaitskill and Marilynne Robinson, in Charles Portis and Richard Hughes, but not in Woolf or Tolstoy or Pynchon. I find it among statues in an endless marble hall, on a quest for sex magic, in the strains of the Gilligan’s Island theme song, playing in 1882. Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale.

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Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music.

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