I Eat My Words

You know how sometimes arrogant and self-satisfied people have this way of pontificating about what you ought to like? Many years ago I had a friend who used to lecture me on what writers I really should have been reading. "I'm surprised you're not even willing to try Pynchon," he'd say. "You come across as an intelligent reader." I do, do I? Also an irritable one. Or "You do realize that you're just shooting yourself in the foot by not trying Borges? I don't know why a woman like you would waste her time on Wilkie Collins. I thought you were smarter than that." Of course this would make me clutch my copy of The Woman in White closer to my chest and desperately try to think of witty ripostes, like, "Oh yeah?"

So to this day I haven't read Pynchon, and I'm sure he's, you know, okay if you like that kind of thing (except for this latest one, am I right?) Before you start sending me reproving screeds, I do adore Don DeLillo, even the unreadable ones like Ratner's Star, so I have my credentials. But I'm just allergic to Pynchon, and actually reading some would only confuse matters, so don't even try to persuade me.

A few years ago I got stuck -- I mean, I was invited to have the pleasure of teaching the beginning-level "Introduction to Fiction" class. (This is the class where one of the students said, "I've never finished a whole book and I'm not going to start now," but that's another story.) All the anthologies use the same authors, and putting together one's own selection is exhausting and absolutely not worth the effort, as I quickly found out. (For one thing, never try to negotiate with Harlan Ellison about using one of his works, as I'm sure you all know, but that's also another story.) And they always include absolutely the wrong story by Charles Baxter. But anyway, conscience decreed that I ought to include one of the anthology selections by Borges, so I steeled my nerves and read "The Aleph."

So I had to eat my words. Everything my annoying friend said about Borges is true. And more. (I refuse to disavow Wilkie Collins, though.) Damn. Borges is brilliant, penetrating, mesmerizing, etc. etc. -- just pile in the rest of the thesaurus. The whole world knew, and I was sitting in my corner sulking. Thank goodness I'm no longer in touch with my annoying friend, though I suspect he has been gloating these many long years ("Some day she's going to read some Borges, and then she'll have to admit I was right all along.") Okay! You won! You were right all along!

This is by way of saying that I also eat my words about Alice Munro.

The novelist Robert Boswell, who's no slouch himself, says that Alice Munro is the greatest living short-story writer in English. But -- you know -- all those precious little literary short stories written by New Yorker writers and their ilk. I should like them. I teach them. I respect them. I get how they work. They're clever. The emotions come right on cue. Occasionally I run across one that really gets me where I live. (Like "Ralph the Duck" by Frederick Busch. That one I make the students read even though it's not in the anthology. Talk about heart-rending, talk about redemption. And it doesn't even have an unhappy ending, unlike 99 percent of the others.)

But Alice Munro always sounded too precious, too literary, too self-conscious, too contrived. Then I made the mistake of actually reading her. They printed part of her latest book, The View from Castle Rock, in one of the British Sunday papers, and I got sucked in. I just hate the taste of crow. She is so *&%$# good. I'm going to repeat myself. She is so %$#*&%!! good. They're not exaggerating when they say how good she is. Simple, plain, detailed, heartbreaking, lovely, and real. It's not contrived at all. It's not even "literary." It's just what the rest of them are imitating.

My pride is in shreds. If this keeps up, I'm going to have to stop making self-righteous pronouncements about things I know nothing about.