As I said last month, when you move, you move things around as you unpack them. I found a whole lot of books I hadn’t seen or read in several years. Setting up new bookshelves gave me a good opportunity to put old books in new places. For example, I took the whole row of Discworld novels off the back of a dresser and lined them up on the top shelf of a bookcase. They fill the whole shelf, so when I buy the next one, I’ll have to tuck it in on top of its predecessors. I also had a three-shelf bookcase filled with paperbacks, two deep. I gave some of these away—it’s amazing what I wanted to save fifteen or twenty years ago that I have zero desire to reread today—and reversed the front and back. When I was reading these paperbacks in the '80s and '90s, I lived near a used bookstore (remember those stores that sold and traded used books?) and went through most of their inventory of mysteries written by female authors. A few years later, I came upon another used bookstore where I found novels upon which movies were based, including Girl With a Pearl Earring, The English Patient, and Atonement. Those were keepers. And after that I found stores that stocked historical novels, including the out-of-print Hera Series. More keepers. You can see why I have so many books.
Up to that time, I was (I admit it) a snob. I disdained fiction. I read only good, solid nonfiction, mostly history. Why, I grumbled, should I read mere stories? What would they have that would teach me anything worthwhile? Why read something made-up when you can read real history? I think I was listening to only classical music, too. Major snobbery.
I got over it. First I read my way through the mass market paperback mysteries. Then I started finding good books among the trade paperbacks. Hardcover books, too. What did I learn? That a well-researched novel can be as true to life as a nonfiction book on the same topic … and probably more fun to read.
Right now, I’m nearly through another long-hidden novel. It was published in 1982 and is 1176 pages long. When I pulled it out of a box last month, I said, “Gee, how long has it been since I’ve read this?” The book is …And Ladies of the Club, written by Helen Hooven Santmyer, who was 88 years old when it was published. The book jacket says it took her fifty years to write it. The book opens in 1868, when two of the protagonists, Anne and Sally, graduate from the Female Academy of Waynesburg, Ohio (Xenia, where Mrs. Santmyer lived, in disguise), and are invited to participate in the founding of a Women’s Club, the purpose of which is to elevate the intellectual life of women in the town. Anne and Sally marry Civil War veterans. Anne’s husband, John, is a young doctor with post-traumatic stress and nightmares about the war (some things never change), and Sally’s husband, Ludwig, is a German immigrant (his father participated in one of the revolutions of 1848) who becomes a leading industrialist and Republican politician in Ohio. What am I learning as I read? What life was like for middle-class Victorian women. Their main goal in life was marriage and the production of many children. They thus spent a lot of their lives pregnant, but the word was never spoken and as soon as they started to show, they stayed at home. If a woman wanted a career as, say, a teacher, she could not marry, and if she did marry, she could no longer teach. (This custom actually lasted until the 1950s.) Manners and customs were circumspect. As I read, I think of my two grandmothers, both of whom were born in the 1890s and better understand how they were raised. I grew up near St. Louis—white, working class, Republican, Calvinist. Except for the location, Ferguson was a lot like Waynesboro. I also get a better look at my family by looking at the families in this novel. And I see how far I and my friends and our daughters and nieces have come in a century and a half.
Yes, we can learn a lot from novels. And this is something I often tell the authors whose novels I edit. Some of them are writing novels but don’t read fiction. Maybe they’ve read some of the how-to-write-a-novel books, but can you really learn how a plot works or how characters grow and change unless you see it happening in a well-written novel? Reading about rising action-climax-falling action-denoument is one thing, but actually making it happen in the plot you’re writing takes hard work. You can read about how to write and punctuate dialogue, but you probably won’t really get it until you start doing it. Almost none of the prospective novelists I’ve worked with, for example, know that each speaker gets his or her own paragraph, that the punctuation goes inside the quotes, and that it’s best to stay away from fancy dialogue tags.
Even books that aren’t particularly well written (in my opinion, Dan Brown’s books fall in this category) or are poorly proofread (alas, Mrs. Santmyer’s book needed better proofing) can be fun to read. And educational in interesting ways. I’m sure a lot of Brown’s readers learned about Mary Magdalen for the first time (unless, of course, they had already read Holy Blood/Holy Grail). I’m learning more than I ever wanted to know about 19th-century politics from …And Ladies of the Club.
I’ve got all my novels on different shelves now, most of them in different places. They’re waiting on my shelves to be taken down and read again. I’ll love some of them all over again, I’ll think some of them are interesting but not worth keeping for another decade, and I’ll say, “Why on earth did I keep this book?” and give some to Goodwill. Circulation, whether it’s our blood or our breath or our books, is good for us. Let’s all keep reading good novels. (And if you want to write one, get in touch with me and let me be your editor.)