Happy reentries into fictional worlds

July 22, 2007|Daniel Akst

Reading Life: Books for the Ages
By Sven Birkerts
Graywolf , 256 pp., paperback, $16

Grand claims for literature -- and for reading -- go way back. Shelley called poets the world's unacknowledged legislators. Borges imagined paradise as a library. And the critic Sven Birkerts, in his new collection of essays, declares that "reading, the mind's traffic in signs and signifiers, is the most dynamic, changeful, and possibly transformational act we can imagine."

These grandiose claims for literary activities should always be greeted with suspicion, especially when they come bristling with such lit-crit mumbo-jumbo as "signs and signifiers." A writer who thinks reading is more dynamic or transformational than sex is not one I am dying to read, particularly when he shows up with a collection of literary criticism, a genre that is to literature what cholesterol is to arteries. As one of our best - known and most sensible literary critics, however, Birkerts is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and it's a relief to report that his "Reading Life: Books for the Ages" eventually repays our indulgence by means of its good taste, good temper, and lovely prose.

The animating idea of this collection is for the author, a lecturer at Harvard, to revisit some of the fiction that has meant the most to him over the years, responding to it anew from the perspective of middle age. One of the ways Birkerts earns our forbearance is by choosing not just excellent but also interesting works with which to renew his (and our) acquaintance, including "The Catcher in the Rye," "Pan," "Women in Love," "Madame Bovary," "Humboldt's Gift," "Lolita," "The Moviegoer," "The Good Soldier," "The Ambassadors," "To the Lighthouse," and "The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose." Nor are the safest bets on this list as safe as they seem, for the practical reason that it's not easy to say something new or interesting about a classic.

Unfortunately, Birkerts prevails further on our forbearance with his elegant but predictable opening essay, entitled "The Reading Life." Just as it's boring to hear about other people's kids, it's not terribly interesting to hear about someone else's love of books, all the raptures and swooning and years spent working in bookstores notwithstanding. Will anyone be shocked to learn that the author was a bookish, alienated youth, or that he liked the Hardy Boys when he was a kid? Similar news flashes include word that reading books changes people and the remarkable discovery that when you re read a book years later, it seems different, probably because you're different: "I was often surprised, going back, to find the work had grown fresh again, full of unexpected turns and nuances."