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ShareAs New Year’s resolutions go, mine is a tiny one. There are no big Geeta-changing ideas on my list this year. I’m not going to stop eating pasta or stop peppering my adult kids with phone calls about their safety as if they were toddlers at the edge of a lake. My one small resolution for 2009 is really meaningless for everyone but me, and perhaps those who write books.
I resolve to worship at the temple of the author’s art. I’m going to stop reading the endings of novels before it’s time to read them.
It will be a difficult habit to break, for it involves the essence of how we read. But I’m willing to give up one pleasure to gain a different one.
It took a long time to come to this.
Throughout childhood and young adulthood my reading style was catholic. I read everything from “Mother Goose” to “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” to Chaucer’s tales in the order the author had prescribed for me. I committed no venial sins. Page by page, I went, dutifully. No amount of suspense or romance swayed me to cheat and flip to the last pages for a quick peek at the ending.
Certainly at times I rushed, wanting to discover whether the heroine dies or is committed to living unhappily after. (Her happiness was never something I worried about.) But generally, I remained true to the art, relishing the speech of characters, lingering over the beauty of sentences, pacing my excitement, remaining engaged with the work until the author told me: Stop, you can go away now.
I read so intensely and unhurriedly that minutiae from those reading days stay with me today. At 12 or 13 there was a brief love affair with war novels, among them Nicholas Monsarrat’s “The Cruel Sea.” In one scene in the novel, survivors from a sinking ship float around in the ocean. Through the night the wounded begin to die. Describing the end of one sailor, Monsarrat wrote he “died badly.” I re-read that part over and over again before moving on. I wondered how one dies well. The concept of dying badly or well remains with me today. The scene is still fresh. I have an image of the author as a Sistine Chapel-like God, noting in an account book how each person is dying. (I’m aiming to die well when it’s my turn.)
Were I to read that novel today, I’d probably flip ahead to find out whether the good guys lived, and then happily go back to my finger-held spot to finish the novel.
Something happened when I became a middle-age reader. More precisely, something happened when I began casting a critical eye at the novel, taking it apart, seeing how the pieces fit together, how an author had sketched his characters, plotted his scenes, strung his words, conjured up settings. This is when I became a bad girl, a hyper reader, reading endings before they were meant to be read.
“Well, I don’t want to be reading for plot, rushing to find out what happens,” I explained lamely one afternoon as I interviewed John Updike. Our discussion had veered into the ending of his new novel, “Terrorist,” and I’d confessed I’d peeked at it while still midway through the book.
The expression on his face - part surprise, part disappointment - made me feel guilty. I told him it was really better that I had. Because then I slowed down in my reading. Then I did not miss things. Then I could linger over what mattered, the things I enjoyed, the things I needed to explore: the language, the deft characterizations, stuff like that. Updike is always polite. But I knew what he was thinking.
In the time since, thoughts about how we read have occupied me periodically. Books and film are about the only art medium where one can ignore the wishes of the artist and re-make his art in our own way. You cannot really listen to music that way. Who listens to the first part of a song, then skips to the end, then comes back to the middle and starts listening in sequence again? And a painting is all there, to be viewed in small sections if you wish, yes, but in the end to be seen whole, in total, as the artist intended.
Which is why I began to think about changing my ways. A work of art deserves respect. A reader makes a silent compact with the author to respect the integrity of the writer’s art. Do we not break faith, then, if we take away the integrity of the story, the gasp of discovery or the sigh of resolution that the author has so carefully set up?
