An American Antidote

Okay, well, I gave up.

I struggled onward for a while through Shehan Karunatilaka's Chinaman, and then laid it down in defeat. Life is too short to keep slogging when reading is  . . . a slog.

I was hoping this novel would grow on me. Partly because I know I have a Western-centered view of what constitutes good literature. Partly because I set out to read the DSC Prize winners with the specific goal of broadening my literary horizons. Partly because I said I would read it, by golly, and felt duty-bound to finish. 

Ultimately, though, those reasons were not enough. I gave it 240 pages and that was all I could manage. I have spoken before about my distaste for the picaresque. The main character, W.G. Karunasena, a retired sportswriter, becomes obsessed with tracking down a mysterious cricket player. He's antagonistic toward his wife and his son, he's usually drunk, and his quest forces him to encounter a host of exotic characters and situations: underworld types, a coach with six fingers, mysterious car rides while blindfolded, you get the idea. Lots and lots of cricket information is included, sometimes illustrated with unilluminating black-and-white photographs. 

For a certain reader this might be a romp. But it wasn't a romp for me.  

Instead, I retreated to the relative safety of A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlan to Amherst, by my friend Thomas Hallock, to be challenged in a different way. This journey of creative nonfiction blends personal experiences of daily life and travel with wife and son with more scholarly explorations of the classics of American literature such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and vignettes of the teaching experience. If you can imagine going on a road trip vacation with your favorite college professor, and then hanging around over a beer afterwards, to talk about it and look at the pictures, you'll get the flavor of this book.

Along the way there are a few picaresque adventures, including pretending to be interested in purchasing a piece of very expensive waterfront property in order to try to track down the location of Igbo Landing, a significant site for African Americans since an incident there in 1803. (Hallock really only said they were "interested" in the property, which was true -- but when you say "interested" to a realtor, the word is freighted with meaning, indeed.) To the extent that's picaresque, I'm all in.   

 

Hallock has a way with words and an honest, appraising viewpoint, whether it's the sights out the car window or the events inside the car and the classroom. He blends the literary lessons seamlessly, although he drops the occasional word that sends me to the dictionary for specifics ("belletrism" and "leitmotif," as examples*) and confirms my suspicion that I could never delve deeply enough into any one subject to be a professor myself. Or at least not a good one. 

This book is a little bit like being in college again, digging into literary works, sifting to find what works for us, embracing (or fending off!) the professor's suggested perspectives and considerations, dragging nuggets from the pages into our own lives, and viewing it all from a modern stance while learning the context of the past. Hallock is the professor we wish we'd had, or wish we'd appreciated more when we did have them.    

*Belletrism (noun): the study or composition of essays, particularly on literary and artistic criticism, that are written and read primarily for their aesthetic effect. 

*Leitmotif (noun): a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation. 

Excerpt:

Truth be told, no one knows what to think. There is no string to guide readers through the labyrinth. When my father underlined the passages in "Self-Reliance," was he copying the professor? (A decidedly un-Emersonian act but plausible.) Or did the effusions of self-love spark a flame in his entitled young breast? The scholarship offers no clear answers. 

Note: This book counts for both the Color Coded Reading Challenge and the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.