Why Reading Matters

It has become one of the cliches of fashionably inverted thought to say that we don’t read books so much as books read us. Or, to strike a slight variation, that in reading books we read ourselves. Or, varying further--and now applying the basic concept to Wendy Lesser’s delightful new collection of essays, “Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering”--returning to books that shaped us in our youth, we discern in the encounter the vivid figments of our emerging selves.

Lesser, author of six previous books, including, most recently, “The Amateur” (a title that gives a clue about her basic self-presentation), is one of the shrewdest and most free-spoken of our literary essayists. Fascinated by the broad permeation zone between books and the interior life, convinced that literature matters as much for what it does to us as for what it unprovably simply is, she is the perfect broker between the claims of page and person. As she herself writes, happy to tilt against the academic sequestration of the “text”: “... to the extent that reading is life

“Nothing Remains the Same” comprises 15 diverse reflections on--encounters with, really--once personally influential works and authors (and one film, Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”). It is a less bounded and more idiosyncratic version of what David Denby did for the key books of his old college syllabus in his “Great Books.”

Lesser ranges from the canonical (Cervantes, Milton, Shakespeare) to the more personally formative (Dodie Smith’s “I Capture the Castle” and Kingsley Amis’ “Lucky Jim”), taking in Henry Adams, George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, Ian McEwan and a good half-dozen others along the way. Her choices are canny, nicely balanced, allowing her to cover a broad spectrum of ideas about the self-in-formation as greeted by a self-(mostly)-formed. We get a gratifyingly high-altitude sense of this writer’s moral, political and sentimental education.

Nowhere is this more compellingly set out than in “A Young Woman’s Mistakes,” the determinedly candid interrogation of her radically changed responses to Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” novels she had once inhaled as the most profound depictions of the female heart, which now (Lesser is brave in coming clean thus) seem seriously flawed in aspects of their presentation. Wading in where most critics would fear to tread, she asserts: “I don’t blame Tolstoy for Anna’s choices, but I do blame George Eliot for Dorothea’s; he stands, somehow, safely distant from his characters, whereas she seems willfully, personally involved with hers.” That “willfully” is especially pointed.

Agree or disagree, however, the reader cannot but feel that something real is at stake here, and both masterpieces are unsettled for a moment from the deep inertia of received opinion.

It is possible that Lesser’s disappointing re-encounters elicit the more interesting responses, if only because they underscore more dramatically the realities of growth and change. Of her return to Amis’ “Lucky Jim,” Lesser writes: “When I was younger, all these experiences of shame had tremendous power for me. They were linked with, and in fact gave rise to, the uncontrollable laughter I still associate with this book. Humiliation punctured by humor: that was the mechanism by which ‘Lucky Jim’ gave me so much pleasure. But the puncture alone survives, so the novel seems to me now like a deflated balloon, something that was once tense with its own pressure but now lies in a soft, wrinkled, inert heap.” How much about self-realization and retrospection--not to mention detumescence--is condensed in those few sentences.

If these essays have any flaw, it is that they sometimes lose that dynamic tension between the work and the reader’s life, becoming, for pages at a stretch, merely very good literary criticism. But the lapses into the dutiful are few and far between. There is, in almost every case, enough personal occasion, enough sense of real reader in real time, to pull the essays--and us--back into that zone of special mattering that Lesser has staked out for herself.