Hammock

A snapshot of July, 1979, at our house in southern Illinois:

Dad, at work.

My little brother, I don’t know.

My twin sister, I don’t know.

My mother, possibly in the basement sewing, in the kitchen doing dishes, or out front in her flower garden with the dog.

In short, I don’t know.

Me: barefoot, rolled up in the nylon hammock in the shade outside our back door, reading. Not quite on the ground, not quite flying. Suspended.

I was ten when I discovered our neighbor’s Nancy Drew novels. She had the whole set and offered me and my sister to treat her house like a library. I made my way through the collection, braving the weirdness of her son’s upstairs room which opened off the little room with the books. They had dachshunds, and his room always contained an unmade bed. More than once I saw dog turds in his bed, right on top of the sheets. Also, on the floor, even in the little library.

Nancy Drew led to Encyclopedia Brown. I found The Boxcar Children, then The Littles. By middle school, Agatha Christie was in the mix: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None. Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s creepy books thrilled me; I can still recall the exact spot on the library shelf where I found them, starting with The Changeling, then The Headless Cupid, and The Witches of Worm.

These hours in the hammock are some of my happiest memories. Not vacation. Not sports or friends or nature. Certainly not camp. I’d never heard of camp till I was in my late twenties. The concept appalled me: if your day, or—egads—your whole summer was booked, how in god’s name were you going to get in the reading time?

I don’t think there is language for what happens when we fall deeply inside a book, so deeply that our surroundings recede, people vanish, and time stops. The only other experience that comes close is swimming underwater, and that can only be done in spurts.

Just how does it happen, this transition between the physical experience of lying there holding a book and and the entrance into what the writer John Gardner called a novel’s “vivid and continuous dream”? It still happens for me, though not with every book I read. But when it does, surely mystical is not too strong a word. I fall into a deep trance, like that kid in the hammock: suspended. Not going anywhere, but gone.

By my late teens, I had a developed reading pattern: every “serious,” literary novel, even those required by English class, I’d follow with a “light” one, usually a mystery. In literary circles, much is made of this distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction, and though a part of me finds such distinctions snobbish, I must admit that even as an early reader, I knew the difference. I didn’t mind crossing the line, and I was certainly aware of it. I knew, for instance, that Agatha Christie wasn’t going to scare me as bad as Old Yeller. This understanding continued into my twenties: Sue Grafton’s A is for Alibi did not hold the power of anything by Alice Munro. I was wrecked, in the best possible way, by Wuthering Heights and Howard’s End. Cormac McCarthy shattered my soul, as did Jim Harrison and Antonya Nelson. Writers like Agatha Christie, John Grisham, and P.D. James helped put it back together.

Writer and critic Charles Baxter refers to lighter, genre fiction as “airport reading.” In his essay “The Art of Staging,” he observes that most airport books are techno-political thrillers or romance novels, books that are designed to quiet the imagination rather than stimulate it. They are well-suited for airplanes, he says, because air travelers do not need more anxiety than that produced by air turbulence. Genre characters are by definition built on stereotype, and genre novels have “virtually no interest in using dramatic means to reveal character.”

In short, genre novels don’t make the reader anxious. Literary fiction can produce a lot of anxiety, asking more questions than it answers. What’s at stake in a literary novel is more than just what will happen; it includes the how and why.

I’ve heard people accuse genre fiction, especially mysteries, of being “all plot,” making plot sound nasty, something you’d never admit to liking. But in Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster outlines the difference between story and plot. A story is a “narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence.” Its primary question is, “and then?” A plot, on the other hand, is a “narrative of events with the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief,’ is a plot.” A plot’s primary question, then, is, “why?”

So maybe it’s story rather than plot that’s at the heart of shallow, genre fiction. But, that can’t be right. Can’t a good story produce that same delicious suspension of time and space? Isn’t a good story at the heart of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch? And all of Charles Dickens, a writer she names as an influence?

The issue really heats up when you start blurring genre lines. Not all detective novels are genre fiction, after all. There’s Agatha Christie and Sue Grafton, and then there’s Smiley’s People, by John LeCarre. Or The Freshour Cynlinders,  a historical thriller by Speer Morgan, long time editor of the very literary magazine, The Missouri Review. Jackson Brodie, the detective at the center of four novels by Kate Atkinson, is a conflicted, appealing, complex character I’d follow anywhere. When asked if Case Histories, the first of the Brodie series, could be called “cross-genre,” Atkinson responded with befuddlement: “I’m not sure I even know what that means.” The author, who has written several “literary” novels in addition to the Brodie four, claimed, “there is always a mystery to be solved at the heart of everything I write.”

To return to my theme, just what exactly is it about reading that returns me to the hammock, that suspends? Must it be literary? In my post college years I read Virginia Woolf, an experience that rocked my world. I do love me some lyrical, slow moving prose. But I am also a fan of books in which stuff happens.

Must one be better than the other? I think not, so long as the work is not outright bad. I read a bad one over spring break. I tried it because I heard there was a TV series based on it, which was probably fair warning. Nicole Kidman is in the show, however. I like her. I was curious. I forced myself to finish, but I did so clawing at my own skin. Horrid little sentences. Stereotypes throughout. Even the idea itself was cliché: a fat girl picks up a violent man in a bar, gets pregnant, becomes a single mother in an affluent town where she meets the man again! Murder ensues! I read this cheap little tale asking myself as a writer, can an idea be bad? In life, yes, like the time my sister and her then-boyfriend decided to swim across the Missouri River and nearly drowned. But in fiction, couldn’t a skilled author use nuance, prose, and character to make a novel, a good novel, out of anything?

I hated reading that book. I hated every page of it, so badly that I cannot state the title. For the next little while, as summer gears up, I commit to exploring what it is about a book that suspends. Which ones take me back to the hammock again, and why. I vow to rarely discuss what I hate, and instead focus on what I love, which if you think about it is always the harder road to take, the higher one.

*****