Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading, Maureen Corrigan (365 Books, Day 159)

[rushthatspeaks]

Maureen Corrigan is the book reviewer for the NPR program Fresh Air, and a lit professor and writer of reviews for various publications. This is her memoir about reading and books and the things books have done to her life, good, bad, and indifferent.

In general there are two things that cause me to enjoy a memoir about reading (assuming it is at least moderately competently written). The first is the amount of insight the writer has into the whys and hows of their personal ways of reading, the reasons behind themselves as a reader; I tend to become annoyed with writers who settle on one explanation for their love of books and stick to it (especially if that reason is 'clearly it must have been escapism', Francis Spufford, I am looking at you). The second is the number of new-to-me books that the author makes sound interesting and worthwhile.

Corrigan is completely covered on that second front, because, bless her, she includes an entire separate list of the books recommended in her book, at the back, where you can find it easily, and it is a solid mix of things I have never heard of and things I have loved passionately for years, which bodes very well. I had been getting ready to get a piece of paper and a pen and go back through the entire text to note things down and I very much appreciate not having to do that.

As far as the first thing goes, she does the usual thing of weaving her own life and the books she was reading at the time together and discussing what effects the books had on her choices, and this is competently done, but she also does something I haven't seen in this genre before, which is that a pretty significant chunk of the book is devoted to actual interesting criticism. Apparently this trumps deep personal insights for me in terms of enjoyability. At any rate, she has some lovely close-reading work in here, and some thoughts on various genres that are original and insightful, and she's interested in many of the same things I am-- books about women, about aging, about work and other subjects not generally written about-- only her home genre is the mystery and not the fantastic, and so most of her examples are new to me. And glory be, she's a real feminist critic too, and a well-grounded one, cites Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic straight off and shares the heart-stopping terror over Charlotte Bronte's Villette that I have only previously seen among critics in Joanna Russ (seriously, there are ways in which Villette is the most frightening book I have ever read, period, end of sentence). She appears to have missed reading anything at all in fantasy or science fiction, which is enough to make one want to send her a huge pile of things poste restante, except that due to her radio celebrity people evidently do this to her all the time; but she is explicitly writing about female visions of utopia in twentieth-century American literature and oh there are things that could fit into her arguments.

Also, she read Gaudy Night while teaching at Bryn Mawr, which means she has all the same associations with it that I do, which Does Not Happen With Critics.

Honestly, my primary complaint about this book is that it's a memoir. Because as a memoir it is interesting, it is well-done, but it doesn't have the originality and free play of the criticism; I've seen things very much like it before. She's thought through her reasons for reading rather more thoroughly than many writers have, but still. I suspect this of being more publishable as a memoir than as a freestanding book of lit-crit using elements of memoir in portions of its argument-- I'm not even sure you can just publish generalist critical studies in a non-academic context right now, not when the point is the generalism and not a readily summarizable thesis statement. But I would cheerfully read stacks more of her critical essays, whereas, if I were told she'd written a more conventional autobiography, not so much.

If you read criticism for fun-- and if you don't, why don't you? it's the best way ever to pick up book recommendations, and to figure out which theorists you consider particularly pernicious, so that when people express fervent devotion to them at parties you can back away slowly-- if you read criticism for fun, you will not want to miss this. If you are an aficionado of the reader's memoir, it isn't terrible.

Comments

[zeborah]

I'd be fascinated to hear your thoughts on the terror of Villette. There is certainly a kind of claustrophobia to it, but it's more... deadening than the heart-racing quality I associate with terror.

[rushthatspeaks]

I get the same kind of terror from Villette that Lucy herself does at a couple of times in the story-- the moment at the closing of the first half, where everyone has gone off and she's left at the school, and she slips into panic and delirium of trying to find someone, anyone to talk to and not just thinking but knowing that it is already too late. So much too late that she doesn't notice the possible avenues of help that you-the-reader can see around her. So she passes out, eventually, from sheer misery, and it comes very close to killing her. The book is claustrophobic, yes, and that tightens around her until she breaks, at that halfway point, and then after she's clawed her way up out of it she breaks again and forever at the end.

When I'm reading the book I get not only the empathic terror that one feels as a resonance from a well-done character, but a panic attack on my own account: if my life were doing this, would I ever know it before it was unfixable? Part of Lucy's problem is that she can't see the traps she's caught in as clearly as the reader can, so she keeps on believing in social convention, which is some of what destroys her. I had a desperate fear, when I was younger, that I would do the same thing to myself; it's less of a worry now, but I remember it clearly.

[sixbeforelunch]

I glanced at your tags and didn't see him listed, so I'm curious if you've read Nick Hornby's Believer columns. They were collected into three books, The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, and Shakespeare Wrote for Money. They're not memoirs exactly, but they certainly touch on his life and he explores not only why he reads, but how one book leads to another. They've introduced me to some books I doubt I would have read otherwise, and I always find them entertaining. There's not much criticism going on (very little, in fact) but his reflections on the books are entertaining, at least.

[rushthatspeaks]

I have not read Nick Hornby, though I do on occasion read The Believer, mostly for Greil Marcus's Real Life Rock Top Ten columns, so I may well have read some of Hornby without noticing the byline. I shall look into those collections, and thank you for the recommendation.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

I may need to read this just for the discussion of Villette, a novel that made a huge impression on me. Also because she references Madwoman in the Attic.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It was highly enjoyable for those reasons-- it's a really good discussion of Villette.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Tell me more about Villette? I keep meaning to read it but haven't yet.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

There is no question in my mind that it is a better book than Jane Eyre, and I think many critics actually admit that; but it is incredibly emotionally difficult, and goes so much against most ideas of classical novel form and structure that I think it will never be popular.

The protagonist, Lucy Snowe, is brilliant and sensitive, plain, poor, and disadvantaged. She wants nothing more or less or other than someone to love and talk to who can understand and love her, and the book is a painstaking examination of every single thing about the ways society treats women that will prevent that from ever happening. Jane Eyre is a Gothic and has fairytale elements; Lucy is Jane in a realistic universe. Some of the things that tie her down have gone, nowadays, but way too many are still just How People Think Women Are. It is an ice-cold book, one giant suppressed scream of rage that knows it has to suppress itself in order to be published and read at all, and the way it hides itself under standard things that happen in books is one of the most chilling things about it.

It's one of those books where I fall back on talking about structure and shape and technique because thinking too hard about Lucy and how real she is and how terrible it is for her starts my own anger again and it is not copable.

It may be the greatest feminist novel ever written, and I have never read it without both wanting to tear down everything in the world and start over-- and wanting to throw myself off a bridge. I hate it desperately, and I am so glad it exists. If one reads it when feeling strong and confident and willing to work with anger, it can be a good source of strength, but it is a book I recommend people save for that sort of mood, because reading it when depressed or ill or tired can do terrible things to you. It's worth mustering the strength at some point, though. I never regret having read it.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any Corrigan before. It sounds very much up my alley. Particularly since I finally finished a reread of MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC a few months ago.