How to Rewire Your Brain

If you love reading, it can be scary sometimes to realize how little of what you read stays with you. When I read a book for a book group discussion, I need to do it within a week or so of the discussion to make sure it's fresh in my mind. Books I've read in recent years, even recent months, are often just a title and a few hazy impressions. It was set in Minneapolis... the hero loved baseball... his girlfriend turned out to be the killer. Well, that's a book I've read several times (The Cavanaugh Quest by Thomas Gifford--see my list of indispensable mysteries), so it fared better than most. And as for books I read in school--which is where, let's admit it, I read most of the classics I'll ever read--they are mere shells in memory.

So... if we don't remember them very well... why even read them? Well, of course pleasure is a fair enough reason. Reading a book can be its own reward, just like listening to music or drinking a glass of wine or watching an episode of Cheers. No law says everything has to be self-improving.

But if you want to go that route, I do have a theory. We may not retain a lot of the specifics long-term. But in the process of reading, a book takes us places, shows us things, makes us see the world through its own special lens. It changes us in the same way a friendship or a trip to a new place changes us. We come to understand something about a place, about how people work, about a way of thinking or our place in the world. We may not, in the end, recall the details or appreciate what's been added to our mental repertoire. Just the same, our brain's been rewired in a very literal sense. And in a few special cases, that rewiring can be profound, a serious change in our world view.

Enough introduction--here are a few books that seriously rewired me:

The Plague by Albert Camus--For a frank and realistic portrayal of disease, death, and heartbreak, this is a surprisingly uplifting book. But then the author, who fought in the French Resistance during World War II, clearly knows what he is talking about when it comes to confronting suffering and evil.

Middlemarch by George Eliot--This one has a long fuse. It took me a couple of hundred pages to get into this tale of 19th-century English provincial life, but once there, I was thoroughly hooked. Eliot's dry wit puts Jane Austen to shame, and the generosity of her world view is such that even the wickedest of her characters is oddly sympathetic.

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves--The renowned poet and translator's account of his experiences as a junior officer on the Western Front in World War I. The horror and heartbreak of that particular war, and of war in general, are brought home with piercing intensity by his thoughtful, understated prose.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner--Frankly, I find a lot of Faulkner unreadable. But this one is brilliant, the account of a Southern family's decline and fall, told in a fragmented, disjointed, poetic style that perfectly conveys the sad chaos of their world.

Jesus's Son by Denis Johnson--A collection of linked stories that follows the hideous misadventures of a young heroin addict. His world will make you shudder, but Johnson's rendering of it is bizarrely beautiful and deeply affecting.

I Is Not Me

Almost every time we have a fiction writer doing a reading here at Books Inc., a good bit of the Q&A section revolves around that old reliable question-- "Is [insert protagonist name] you?"
Some writers say "Of course," others say, "Nuh-uh, no way, and I'm kind of insulted that you asked," but for the most part the answer is "Yes and no." Some part of the character usually comes from the author's own experience, but hopefully this part is embellished and improved by creative invention. That is, after all, what fiction is supposed to be about.

Not that so many people have asked me questions about my fiction, but that one has come up, and my answer is the middle-of-the-road position. I've usually written about things that a) I cared about and b) I had some knowledge of... and both of those criteria tend to point me toward my own experience. But (sorry) my own experience needs a little reworking to be worth reading about. Sometimes it needs a wholesale reinvention.

Of course, this leaves me open on two fronts. If my fictional character expresses a little of my dark side, and say, cheats on a girlfriend or robs a liquor store, people seem all too ready to believe I'm capable of those things. If on the other hand, the fictional character wins a thousand dollars at the racetrack or climbs a Sierra Nevada fourteener, the fiction is suspect, because, after all, I probably haven't really done those things.

But it doesn't matter. Maybe I've done all those things. Maybe I haven't done any of them. What matters is that somehow, somewhere, sometime, I had a feeling that I'm trying to evoke in the reader. And if it takes a little hyperbole to achieve that, if it takes a fictional grizzly bear to recreate the effect of a real-life raccoon, then so be it. The only sin is if it's bad hyperbole.

Things suck... (cont'd)

Things suck but it's OK.

Not sure why I chose to express this important theme in this inelegant way. It would sound better to talk about the indifference of the universe and the basic human need for transcendence... but this is a blog, after all. Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more familiar this postulate felt. I realized, eventually, that it's one I've used in my own fiction. Not the short stories so much, where the concerns are mostly with trust and connection, but in the longer stuff, where cosmically bad things happen and people are left to deal with it.

Of course there are other approaches to the problem. Some of my favorite books--The Plague by Camus is an example--are those where things do dramatically suck, but there is a sense of hope and transcendence. But it does seem that most serious fiction, at least most serious fiction on my bookshelf, embraces a darker view: Things Suck and It's Not OK. Just as a small sample, check out A Farewell to Arms or Tender is the Night or The Good Soldier. On the other hand, lighter fiction tends to pose problems and then casually solve them: Things Are OK. Or perhaps, Things Suck But Only Temporarily. And finally--I can't think of an example for this but surely it must exist?--there is the contrarian approach: Things Are OK But It Sucks.

Why, in the end, keep on wrestling with this problem? Why use up so much paper (or server space) on something that can never truly be resolved? I don't know. Because it's who we are, because the question will never go away, and because it's always fresh--there are a million ways for things to suck, and (perhaps) a million ways for it to be OK.

Things Suck, But It's OK

A few days ago, a friend asked me to take a look at her blog and tell her if I thought there was a book in it. Well, of course there's a book in everything if you're good enough. And she is. See for yourself. She's already written one book, and the blog is an enormous mine of fresh material.

The question, I think, was really this: What kind of book is in there? What's the unifying thread, what would the structure look like, which entries would fit and which entries just wouldn't? Now, she writes about so many different things--tap dancing, moon landings, the Grateful Dead, power outages, photo shoots, yoga, Spaghetti-O's--that at first glance you might despair of finding a through-line. But the more I read, the more I felt a unity of approach to all these different subjects.

Things suck, but it's OK.

Which is a gross oversimplification, and doesn't do justice to the varied and beautiful ways she elaborates the theme. But for us reductionists, that's the essence of it. Disasters large and small befall us--the power goes out, romances self-destruct, bad and even humiliating things happen to our cars, people we care about get sick and we can't help them. And all this makes us feel just the way it should--awful. But inevitably, if we have the insight or the courage or just the stubbornness to seek it out, there's a moment of peace or beauty or enlightenment that makes it possible to carry on.

Things suck, but it's OK.

More to follow...

Beyond Beneath--Prolog

Death, and violent death especially, has a certain dark glamour for me. I admit that. I’ve lived in its shadow most of my life, and no doubt partly by choice. In the end, though, it’s just death--frightening, sordid, usually messy, fundamentally not very interesting. Anyone can die violently, by accident or otherwise, and in my experience far too many people do.

But disappearance--now there’s an art form, a brand of misfortune I can’t help being fascinated by. A good disappearance has a metaphysical dimension, some hint that a door has opened on wider, normally unapproachable issues. Absent a factual explanation, we’re free to stray into other realms--the conspiratorial, the fantastic, the spiritual. What questions, we have to wonder, should we even be asking?

Usually, of course, that’s all we do. We wonder. If a disappearance is a doorway, it’s one we’re likely to sidle past, glance into, loiter near, but not to go through. The particular doorway offered up by the disappearance of Wade Goddard and Lulu Scott stood open for over a decade, and I hesitated in front of it for all that time. I thought, maybe, that what I knew didn’t matter, or that I’d done all I could with it. Then, on a warm evening in the first spring of the new century, I read a letter in the pages of a literary journal called Lost Coast Review, and it pulled me through that doorway.

It was pure coincidence that I read the letter. I can’t even recall how I came by the magazine. I was in a hospital at the time, recovering from my third climbing accident in two years, a thirty-foot leader fall on Thunderbolt Peak in the Eastern Sierra. This time I’d broken two ribs, punctured a lung, and further mangled the bad disks in my back. When I’m mending, a special calm comes over me, a reflective peace that I’m convinced is only in part the result of hospital drugs. I read a lot, wading indiscriminately through whatever comes to hand, and I think about the course of my life in a way that I'd usually avoid.

Being a serious climber--at least the way I’d done it--means long periods of living like a coyote, subsisting at the fringes. You give up every luxury and most comforts, you work hard and train harder. Whenever you’ve scraped together a little cash, you cut your anchors loose and take an endless drive or a redeye flight to some grubby mountain outpost. Once there, you put yourself through more suffering than you thought you could take, chasing an abstract and absurdly dangerous goal.

Those are the hardships, self-inflicted and thus not grounds for complaint. The rewards are indelible memories; feelings and impressions that make the whole spectrum of ordinary existence seem pale. You carry them with you as long as you live, little votive lights that never go out.

That was what I’d cared about most for a long time. But I was thinking, as I lay there with the rough cream-colored pages of Lost Coast Review still in my fingers, about the obvious fact that I was going to have to give up hard climbing. My body simply wasn’t going to tolerate it anymore. I’d been fighting that inevitable conclusion for years, because I’d had nothing to replace climbing with. Living broke was easy enough. Living without a sense of purpose was another thing entirely.

Maybe it was just desperation, but now it suddenly seemed to me that the answer to my problem involved this letter, a woman I’d heard about but never met, and a story that a Norwegian climber had told me one night at 12,000 feet on Mt. Rainier. It seemed to me that I might be able to solve the riddle of Wade and Lulu’s disappearance, and that if I did, I might solve some riddles of my own.