John Freeman - How to Read a Novelist

JOHN FREEMAN has been the editor of Granta magazine since 2009. His first book, Shrinking the World, was published the same year. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and Zyzzyva, his reviews in newspapers around the world. He lives in New York and London.

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Copyright John Freeman, 2012

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First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2012

Cover design & illustrations and text illustrations by WH Chong

Page design by Imogen Stubbs & WH Chong

Typeset by J&M Typesetting

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Freeman, John.

Title: How to read a novelist / John Freeman.

ISBN: 9781921922688 (pbk.)

ISBN: 9781921961106 (ebook)

Subjects: Authors--Interviews.

Novelists--Interviews.

Dewey Number: 808.3

This book is for my father, who asked the hard questions.

MY FIRST apartment in New York was in a Brooklyn brownstone owned by a magazine editor and her silent, bookish husband. I spent a lot of time before a long, dusty bookshelf that ran parallel to the staircase in their home. To get a volume from the F section, you had to climb halfway up the stairs and lean out over the banister. One day, the silent, bookish husband caught me craning over the ten-foot drop, Flauberts Sentimental Education in my hands. He became talkative. He told of disappearing into Proust over a teenage summer on Fire Island. How Tolstoy was a passionate college-age fling. A late reader, I envied his library and these lazy, literary summers. I asked him what I should read. First he pulled down a volume of short stories by John Cheever, then he gave me Rabbit, Run, by John Updike.

The Cheever I put down without finishing: the stories felt whiny and overdetermined, their broadcast mysteries hardly mysterious. But Updike was another thing. I blasted through Rabbit, Run in a few days, ferrying it into the city in a muggy trance. In college, I had fallen for Jack Kerouacthe story of Sal Paradise and his love of the American road. Here was that books exquisite oppositethe story of a man who made himself a prison of small-town domestic life, a man whose big countercultural act was not to light out for the open highway, but to get in a car, drive across town and sleep with his mistress.

I felt an instant connection with Updikes fiction. I lived in eastern Pennsylvania for six years as a child, and the regions circumambient embrace felt like a third parent to me growing up. Now that I was an adult, I could see how such a life might have become stifling. In Updikes prose, it was gorgeously so.

One book led to another and, before long, my Updike appreciation had turned to mania. I slowly amassed an almost complete set of first editions of his booksmore than fifty in alland my girlfriend, bemused and never smitten by Updike, often accompanied me to bookstores to get them signed. When I decided I, too, wanted to be a writer, I did what Updike had done forty years before me. I quit New York and moved with my mate into a white clapboard house in New England. She took a job in technology research, and I began to write. Only I didnt. Instead, I spent my time reading Updike, increasingly aware that at my age he had published a volume of light verse and a short novel, but also more and more conscious of his works magnificent sadnessof the families broken up and destroyed, the repetitive failure of fleshly desire to relieve his characters creeping claustrophobia. At night, I would occasionally look at the shelves in our bedroom and worry they might collapse from the black weight of their content, smother us in our sleep.

During the daytime, though, the air would clear and my growing shelves of Updike titles became, again, a beacon. His industry and mindfulness of every detail of the visible worldso prevalent in even the soggiest of his novelswere the topics of my Masters thesis. If Updike himself functioned as my model for how to behave as a writer, his characterswhose lives mine increasingly resembledwere the anti-models of how to behave as a person. Perhaps through the repetition of reading I might avoid the relationship immolation his characters provoked, again and again and again.

Or so I thought. I took a job abridging Tarzan of the Apes for a childrens publisher. It occurred to me that what I had been doing with Updike was similar to this grim bit of hackery: tracing my life over that of another writers. My personal life suffered equally from my attempts at mimicry. At the end of the workday, as the New England chill settled below the rafters, my girlfriend and I would snip at each other with increasing frequency and rancour. I was unhappy because I wasnt writing; she was unhappy for reasons I didnt quite understand. Even though we were only in our mid-twenties, a sense of opportunities lost began to hover.

After a year living among couples twice our age, my girlfriend and I had had enough. We moved back to New York. Away from the predetermined doom of our Updikeian stage-set of a life, we felt our sense of possibility recharge. I decided to propose, which meant I needed a ring. For the last time, I turned to Updike. I had gone through periodic purges of my shelves, attacking my bibliophilia like a cancer that required radical surgery. But it always grew back, often thicker and more pernicious. This time, however, I performed the most radical incisionmy entire Updike collection. It took three cab rides, but in a few hours Id managed to transport all three shelves to a New York dealer.

Travelling down Park Avenue in a cab a week later, a little red leather box nestled in my lap, I felt purged and absolved. All the heartache and the wisdom and weakness Id absorbed through those books had been boiled down to something eternal, and pure: a wedding ring. No longer would the spines of those books stare out in judgement and gloom. I was free to become the husband I wanted to be, the writer I was meant to bewhatever that meant. I had swallowed Updike whole and spat out the bones.

I was surprised by how quickly things fell apart. A year after we were married, my wife moved out. When times were bad with her, I had fantasised about living alone, like a young Updike, writing in my garret. Now I had the place all to myself and I filled it with cigarette butts. As I looked out the window and smoked, I often thought about all the Updike books I had read in the past ten years and how witnessing his fictional marital breakdowns seemed to have done me so little good. Studying his books had made me a better writer and critic, but I had repeated his characters mistakes in life.

My wife and I divorced in the autumn. She had moved to California, and the laws of Mainewhere we had marriedrequired one of us to be present during the final divorce proceedings. I drove up from New York alone, and spent the night with my soon-to-be ex-in-laws in their house on the beach, eating the most uncelebratory lobster dinner. The next morning I drove to the court with my mother-in-law, who waited outside the empty chambers while I cut the thin legal string that still connected me to her daughter.