Too Much Reading?

I’m starting to think I read too much—or, perhaps, read too much “serious” fiction. It’s starting to depress me, for much of it shows what inadequate creatures we are. To say the least.

I just today finished a 1988 novel by Anne Tyler (Breathing Lessons) that doesn’t really have in it a single admirable character. The focus is on Maggie, a mother and grandmother; she works as an aide at a nursing home—and loves it. (I guess that’s good!)

But she doesn’t get along with her husband, her son, her daughter-in-law (who has left her son with their infant daughter), and so many others in her life. She just can’t keep her mouth shut—cannot keep from interfering in other people’s lives, etc. Virtually every conversation quickly disintegrates into an argument—usually a bitter one. Doors slam. People go away for years.

Sigh. I’m worn out with grief.

And I wonder as I read Tyler (and others of the principal writers of our day): Are we really as screwed up as we appear to be?

We probably are. Most marriages end in divorce; most families experience fractures of one kind or another; most parents lose touch with their children as they advance (decline?) into adolescence.

When I was teaching at a boarding school, I had weekly “dorm duty.” Supervision. In the days before cell phones. And I would regularly hear boarders engaged in bitter conversations with their parents on the old phones in the hallway, saying things I could not imagine having said to my own parents—not that I didn’t think such things. It’s just, if I had spoken them, I wouldn’t be alive to type these sentences right now.

Of course, “serious” literature often deals with the Dark Side. Hamlet’s family didn’t get along too well—nor did King Lear’s—nor did Othello’s—nor did many of the families in ancient literature.

So you have to dive into comedies to get some relief, recognizing, as you do so, that these stories are dealing with families that aren’t “real.”

A few years ago, teaching at a private school, I decided the juniors should have, as their “summer reading,” Tracy Letts’ recent Pulitzer winner, the play August: Osage County. And as we read it, I realized how well it connected with so many other works we would be reading that year: Hamlet, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, etc. They were all, to one extent or another, about families. Their struggles. Their failures—sometimes their fatal failures. And so we focused that year on families in literature.

So ... solution to my darkness today? Maybe I should go buy a Bugs Bunny comic.

But what if Elmer Fudd actually shoots Bugs this time?