Why do we read?

      I have a confession to make. When I first began reading Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, I was enchanted. There is nothing so wonderful as seeing that someone else takes delight in the same things that you do. (A bit narcissistic,I'll grant you, but true.) I think C.S. Lewis put it best when he said, "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'" Not to cross that fine line between sentimentality and pure sap, but the first few chapters did indeed make me feel like I'd found a friend.

      But what do you make of a friend that recommends a book to you with all of her heart, and then proceeds to spoil the ending? Not just once, but time and again? It reminds me of the time that, having just seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at the theater, my older (nerdier) brother called me and, without mincing words, informed my cheery voicemail that "Snape kills Dumbledore."

      No harm was done, of course. Since I'd already read the books, I deemed his wry wit hilariously funny. But let's face it--I haven't read all of the books on Ms. Prose's "Books To Be Read Immediately" list. Nor had I read all of the books that she cited throughout her discourse on Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Narration, etc. Let's take, for instance, Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina. Sometime last year, I got an itch for Russian literature and managed to read 397 pages of this monster of a masterpiece. But, as fate would have it, I am easily distracted and found that I needed a break from Tolstoy's style. While 95% of the world may have known poor Anna's fate, I did not. Thanks to Francine Prose, I am no longer a part of that ignorant 5%. Thanks a lot.

      The plot of Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O-- suffered a similar fate. While I understand that she revealed the startling nature and (let's be honest) pure genius of the plot for strictly pedagogical reasons, I object nonetheless. That would be like a teacher telling her class, prior to studying the novel, that Richard Parker of Life of Pi is actually a...oh, I just can't bring myself to be that cruel.

     All that being said, I think that Prose's dubious pedagogical style raises an important question. Why do we read? It is probably safe to say that as children, we read books that interested us. Books that possessed a certain mystery and excited the senses. As we grow older, we are encouraged to read the Classics. Ah, the Classics. I don't mean to suggest that they are not valuable, or even that they aren't entertaining. But as a whole, we know what to expect from them in terms of plot. By the time you are old enough to read and appreciate the great works of literature, someone somewhere along the line has probably spoiled the ending. Sitting in Modernism during the spring semester of my senior year, I was seized by the irrepressible desire to find the nearest Barnes & Noble and purchase a cheap, probably hastily written genre novel solely on the basis that its plot had not been revealed to me. No, Jim Butcher's Storm Front isn't exactly a front-runner for the future literary canon. But it is fresh, life-affirming and without pretensions.

     So. Do we read because, as Bill Watterson might suggest, it builds character? For a lesson in writing good fiction? For pleasure? In all likelihood, the motivation behind burying one's nose in books on a regular basis is a mixture of all three. Still, that doesn't mean that Francine Prose is off the hook.

    

God or the Devil: Which occupies the details?

     I'll admit that Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer is a challenging piece for me to comment on. In some weird amalgamation of objectivity and subjectivity, Prose crafts arguments that strike me as somewhat impenetrable. Despite the fact that she often backtracks and tells us (or her prior students) to disregard whatever rule she has just established, she is never wrong. In her discussion of Anton Chekhov's short stories, she often feels that she has led her students astray by making some broad generalization about storytelling, only to see Mr. Chekhov has done just the opposite with magnificent results. But was her advice really wrong?

     I'd venture to say no. First of all, I for one am no Anton Chekhov. The fact that he has gotten away with flagrant disobedience of the accepted rules of storytelling does not automatically guarantee that I will be half as successful in my own attempts. If I'm not mistaken, we discussed this idea in the second week of class with regard to grammar. Dickens crafted a splendid run-on stream of sentence fragments in the introduction of A Tale of Two Cities. Your typical composition teacher might advise against such an act because A) you are not Charles Dickens, and B) you might not be able to achieve clarity with such an artistic measure. That is not to say that one is right or wrong in the artistic (not grammatical) sense, but rather that one clearly works better for you.

     It is because of this extreme subjectivity that I generally find it easier to focus on one paragraph, one claim, or one offhand remark. In this case, a quotation on p. 196 caught my attention and refused to let it go. After recounting the anecdote about the "true-life stories" writing workshop, Prose ends the segment by quoting her friend as saying, "Trust me on this...God really is in the details." She goes on to suggest that "if God is in the details, we all must on some deep level believe that the truth is in there, too."

      The colloquial phrase "God is in the details" struck me as odd, though it took me a day or two to figure out why. Think what you will, but I have always heard a different version of the saying: "The Devil is in the details." Believing that I had simply misheard the expression, I looked it up online. According to Wikipedia, (all hail) the original phrase supposedly goes like this: "God is in the detail." Though I don't have a second source on this, I also read that this version is attributed to Flaubert: "The good God is in the detail."

     Ironically, the difference between these variations really is in the detail. Still, I think that it is a perfect demonstration of Prose's point. The original phrase, "God is in the detail," refers to a single detail, or perhaps the complexity inherent in a single object. (I.E.: The detail in that ancient Roman archway is truly magnificent.) Prose tells us that "[B]ad liars pile on the facts and figures, the corroborating evidence, the improbable digressions ending in blind alleys, while good...liars know that it's the single priceless detail that jumps out of the story..." God (and/or truth) then resides in that single tell-tale gesture, comment or revelation. He doesn't feel the need to convince us--it is up to us to notice that detail and take it to heart. My own version of the same colloquialism, "The Devil in the details," is equally apt. Since we are naturally less likely to believe him, the Devil (theoretically) would have to pull out the big guns in order to gain our trust.

      Following this logic, writers that rely on that single crucial detail are aware of the truth inherent in their work. They would love for you to believe it and to come along for the ride, but they won't (as Prose suggests) stoop to salesmanship.