a book by its cover

One of the last books I bought, before taking the vow I mean, was The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg: Stories. I read a review of the book in Bookforum, a publication that compels my addiction in alarming ways, and was intrigued. A viable argument could be made, however, that it was my attraction to the book's cover (by Hendrick Dorgathen) that cinched my intent. I'd like to pretend that my tastes in literature have to do with its more elevated aspects like style, content and form, but at some point I have to ask myself: how much of what I read is influenced by book jacket aesthetics? Or conversely, do publishers invest more in the covers of books they privilege over others? However a cover happens, being a sucker for them worked out well this time.

I found my way into the first story in the collection, 'Flotsam', in the most superficial way. The narrator is reeling from a wrecked relationship with a man named Robert, my husband's name, and escaping from their late home in Buffalo, where my sister lives. Of course these connections are tenuous and silly (though reading a first-person narrative wherein the narrator's recent ex shares your husband's name is more jarring than I might have thought, and there is something about having the experience and feel of a setting that exceeds the mere imagining of that place), but they suggest nevertheless a hypothesis concerning reading, or at least a manner of interacting with a text. I've never been comfortable with the idea of identifying with characters or situations in books, but I might say that the kind of writing I like is able to appeal to so many hundreds of discrete facets of myself, that it appeals to and so reveals these facets like light refracted.

I know, reader, what you're thinking: only a narcissist could imagine such an infinite self-containment and possess such an inability to differentiate herself from the other. But I say that I experience the other only upon my own person, most acutely when I am pained, when I lack, and that the other is intrusion and absence. This point was especially significant to me since I was reading the book while my babies were still stuck in the NICU (it had a permanent spot next to the breastpump on a small table in my bedroom, near their empty crib--let me tell you, it isn't easy to balance an 800+ page book and two pump bottles, but the committed adapt). They no longer existed within my own borders, they had become the others, absent from me in all ways. My desire for them surpassed all my other desires, their intrusion into my self became whole.

It's been written that Eisenberg's main characters are aimless and manic-depressive, but I think that what her women express (even the single male narrator in the collection expresses as a woman), in a sort of pedestrian manner, is this outrage of intrusion, the effrontery of lack, the real difficulty of interacting with the other. "How hard it was to figure out how to say anything to anyone!" wails the narrator of 'Flotsam', who consistently misinterprets and misconforms to those closest to her. She has the desire to relate but is mired in the trouble of locating the appropriate boundaries. I can also hear in this exclamation the lament of the author hoping to connect with a reader...

a proposition

I have a problem.
Or shall I begin more obliquely, with an echo:
I am a sick woman, a wicked woman. If I had in my pocket our last desperate dollars and happened upon a used bookstore, I'd slouch helplessly through the door. In such a store the first thing that hits you is the smell: old ink and yellowed paper (air, light and lignin), and something musty that's difficult to place...the detritus of past ownership, perhaps, a heady smell. There's also a particular auditory effect at work, a muffling, that envelopes the visitor. Then, and maybe most significantly, comes the excision; one becomes alone, fixed in the present. One loses companionship, history, expectation. In the aisles I'd begin to feel the first pricks of guilt as I slid first one then another book from its space and flicked furtively through the pages, waiting for the bite. You might imagine that the septic feeling of guilt would urge me to abandon my course. On the contrary, even my guilt has a certain pleasing flavor to me.

Once the bite came, quick and catching, I'd stow the book beneath an arm and make my way to the register. Inwardly seething with pride over the quality of my taste, the singular, indisputable rightness of my selection, I'd make my purchase, declining a bag out of a vain desire to showcase, subtly but plainly, the caliber of my choice and the charm of my bookish character. Back on the street my guilt would return in the baffled outrage I could predict on the face of my husband, the disappointment, and my insides would cringe in anticipation of the coming confrontation. As I walked, hunched over my most recent acquisition, my palms would begin to sweat, then my brow, followed by chills, tremors...Would the ferocity of this panic turn me around? Urge me to return the book? Of course not. Is is wickedness that compels me? How describe need? how explain pleasure?

Then, April 9th, I lay half insensate on a cruciform table in surgery: a cut, two emphatic cries, and I am made a mother, milk and salt. Perhaps it has to do with their lengthy hospital tenure (being premature), or maybe the trauma of those long wakeful weeks before I even had the chance to hold my daughter (who suffered the difficulties of patent ductus arteriosus), maybe it is my lack of engagement in my job, or maybe it would have come out of me anyway right alongside the afterbirth, but it turns out I have an implacable need to care for them myself, at least for now. To do this, financially, sacrifices must be made. In other words, all that is inessential in terms of housing, sustenance and utility must be pared away. While I could make all sorts of clever arguments about why books are essential, the truth is that I would rather be with my twins than work to support my habit...I think. So, with this tenuous assertion in hand, begins the year of no books bought.

Premise: I will read all the books currently sitting unread on my shelves, and I will engage with heretofore neglected texts by writing about them. All the new books I encounter will be either borrowed or received as gifts, no exceptions.

Predictions: Weakness. There may be failures, lapses, embarrassments. Perseverance will prevail.