MARILYN JOHNSON

A Bewilderment of Books


There's a wonderful scene at the end of Don DeLillo's Underworld where the main character is arranging the books on his shelves. It's the sort of thing he always wished he had time for when his children were young and distracting, but instead of savoring the task he finds he misses the chaos. So what if his shelves were messy all those years?

I'd go find that scene right now and quote DeLillo himself, and incidentally check to see whether it was children or just one child (and what was the narrator's name, anyway?), but I can't find my copy of Underworld. It isn't on the den bookshelf, where a brave little fleet of 60 or 70 novels are filed by author's name. It isn't in any of the stacks or shelves in my office, or in the hall bookshelf where I file some of my favorite books, also alphabetically (though the newer books stacked on top and squeezed around the edges are making the whole structure precarious). It isn't in the heaps and stacks in my bedroom—at least I don't think it is. There are several cabinets where I've stuffed books on tape and CDs, and, since slipping on one of those shiny cases, I've begun sliding audio books under the bed too. My house is a beautiful, stimulating mess. It's pig heaven for book lovers—but try to find a particular book. There are times I've actually given up and gone to the library to check out books I know I own. How pathetic is that?

Information is useless if you can't find it when you need it. I know that. I know that I need a system. I used to organize by genre, with poetry in the bedroom, fiction in the den, nonfiction in the office, and a few themed bookshelves here and there. Books have been migrating, though, and nobody's been grooming the shelves. It's a kindergarten structure, staggering as it tries to absorb a graduate school onslaught. It's time for a complete overhaul, with a fixed, retrievable core of classics, references, and touchstones, and a fluid zone that can accommodate the waves of written and spoken volumes rippling through the doors. I don't want to compile a catalog on cards or the computer, though the idea of spending my afternoons fussing over librarian details with a tray of tea and scones at hand is a pleasant thought. Then I think, nah—more fun just to read a book.

Meanwhile, I'm buried here. I must make some basic decisions about how to sort and shelve a thousand or more books. Should I separate poetry and prose? Then what do I do with the work of my wonderful old teacher, Charles Simic, master of both? The first rule has got to be all of one author's work together, genres be damned. Then should I alphabetize the authors, an obvious strategy, and string them all through the house, A's in the kitchen to Z's in the bedroom? That seems boring, even a little arbitrary. What does Doris Lessing have to do with Elmore Leonard? Alphabetizing, like strict genre borders—it's just not me.

I have to invent an idiosyncratic system, with special shelves for Great Books I Remember Reading On Vacation, Cool Hispanic Writers, and My Morgue—the authors I discovered reading the obituaries. Maybe I'll group everything thematically. Laura Kasischke's novel The Life Before Her Eyes will be next to Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World on the Mind-Boggling Mental Trips shelf. I'll make little jokes and put Philip Roth next to Anatole Broyard. It will be a map of my brain. Of course, I'll never finish. But maybe someday I'll stumble on Underworld.

“We have bookshelves built in the cool room at the back of the house, my mother’s old room, and you know how time slips by when you are doing books, arranging and rearranging, the way time goes by untouched, matching and mixing inventively, and then you stand in the room and look.

“I’ll tell you what I long for, the days of disarray, when I didn’t give a damn….”

Remember the Great War



A 108-year-old Frenchman, Rene Riffaud, died the other day—a veteran, believe it or not, of World War I. How incredible is this? The war ended almost 89 years ago. Even more amazing, Riffaud isn't the last of its veterans to go; three Frenchmen survive him. Last year there were a couple dozen WWI vets living in the U.S.; I think we're down to three as well, ancient history still alive in our nursing homes.

They didn't call it World War I at the time. They called it the Great War. I got a glimpse of it from my grandfather, who wrote a poem about the gold stars that the mothers of the fallen soldiers of the Great War, his war, posted in their windows. What else did I know or even care to know? It sounded like one of the bloodier wars, stinking of mustard gas and trench rot. Worldwide, 37 million casualties. A big flu cleaned up afterward.

Then I read Regeneration.

Regeneration is an intense novel short enough to read in a day and vivid enough to send me out hunting for more stories of World War I, more books by its author, Pat Barker. Barker was a working-class British girl who became a history professor and then started writing smart, boiled-down dramas, saturated with atmosphere and tough dialogue. Regeneration gives off the sharp odor of authenticity, though it's not even set on the battlefield. It's set in an institution for broken-down soldiers in Scotland, where a sensitive psychologist tries to patch together the shell-shocked so they can be shipped back to the front. Among the damaged is one soldier, who's on strike, he says, because the people in charge have no strategy and deceived the troops.

The relevance is a bonus. The psychologist and the soldier are based on the real people, Dr. W.H.R. Rivers and the poet Siegfried Sassoon, also a bonus for those who want to run to the library and learn more. Another great character, Billy Prior, an officer from the working class, is invented. Prior basically jumps anything that moves; he'll have sex with anyone. He meets a girl in a bar, and like everything in this novel, the particular details of the encounter describe both her and her era: she has thick dark hair overlaid with a coppery yellow sheen, and her skin has a yellow tinge, both the result of working in a munitions factory. Prior wants to know why she doesn't have a boyfriend. " 'I did have one,' she said. 'Loos.' "

Those are all the words she needs. "Language ran out on you, in the end, the names were left to say it all. Mons, Loos, Ypres, the Somme. Arras."

There are lots of reasons to admire this story, which continues with The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, layering and deepening with each book. I love all three because they're tough and smart, explicit and literary, and though written in the '90s, they're about a war in which the people in charge had no strategy and deceived their troops. By the time Barker sends one of her characters to the battlefield, the claustrophobia of wartime London, the paranoia and persecution of the era's homosexuals and pacifists, and even the tragic struggles of a tribe of headhunters (subjects of the doctor's previous anthropological field work) have ratcheted up the stakes. This is a tragedy, and its characters bleed off the page.

Why are the soldiers breaking down? Why do the officers twitch and stutter? "This Great Adventure, the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys, consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity." The 108-year-old veteran said it in his obit. A man who was alive last week had been there, and he left behind his account: "The war was a massacre," he said.

Turned Off


I love recorded books. I love being read to, especially while in motion, riding in the cocoon of a car or plane—a pleasant voice reading a good book directly into my ear as the world flashes by. The narrator with the annoying voice doesn't simply reduce my pleasure. He spoils it completely. He ruins the book.

I shop the lists of digital downloads, I cruise the shelves of the local library. When I spy T. Coraghessan Boyle or Dennis Lehane, Joseph Conrad or Edith Wharton, Sideways or In Cold Blood, my heart gives a little leap. Gold! Hours of pleasure! A week of fantastic, musical prose and a story to match. Then I see who's narrating. Scott Brick. I pull back my hand. The CDs settle back on the shelf. Forget it—I'd rather listen to squealing tires.

Scott Brick ruins books. I suppose I should say he ruins books for me, because everybody else seems to love him. I think he's won every audio award ever given. Publisher's Weekly, a magazine that usually nails it, just named him Narrator of the Year. Brick should certainly win a prize for diligence. He has recorded almost 300 books, and not bad books, either—good genre fiction (sci-fi and thrillers), literary novels, classics, and smart, entertaining nonfiction—a whole library I'd otherwise download.

The first time I heard his voice was on a recording of Dragon Hunter by Charles Gallenkamp, about the explorer Roy Chapman Andrews. The story itself was absorbing. Andrews raised millions of dollars and outfitted five spectacular expeditions into the Gobi Desert and central Asia in the 1920s to collect fossil specimens. The book was full of tales of bandits, bribes, and Indiana Jones adventures, like the time the photographer fell into the Flaming Cliffs and discovered nests of fossil eggs. To listen from the other side of these discoveries, jewels in the dinosaur collection at the Museum of Natural History in New York, was wonderful—or would have been wonderful if it weren't for this smug, mugging voice delivering the prose. It was as if the narrator's eyebrows were wriggling, feet shuffling, and hands flapping as he read: a mime that spoke. I remember taking out the tape box and studying it, trying to figure out from the display case what this guy did that was so irritating. Every sentence was wrong, every subtlety bulldozed.

Brick has an unerring instinct for erring in emphasis; he always punches the wrong word. He also does something that sounds bizarre, but go get one of his recordings and tell me if I'm mistaken: he skates through phrases in this fake, hearty, jolly way, singing along without a breath, so a phrase that's nothing fancy, filler or background, an unshowy building block in the sentence, is given this jazzy, winking, speeded-up delivery. AudioFile, another great magazine with a blind spot for Brick, calls his approach "understated," but that's exactly what it isn't. "In all his work," AudioFile continues approvingly, "Brick almost sings in a youthful, manly voice brimming with personality and gusto." There's a line that gives me the willies. And maybe that's my problem: I don't want some youthful, manly voice almost singing me Conrad.

Scott Brick likes good books, and in an interview in PW that appeared with the announcement of his latest award, he even seems modest—which is something when the publishing business declares you emperor. "I don't want to interfere with the author's words," he says and sounds like he means it. Aside from your first English teacher, though, I can't think of a person with more potential to make or break your experience with a book and the power to turn you off altogether. There are so many fantastic narrators out there. That all this work and glory comes to Scott Brick distresses me. I say he has no clothes, and I'm off to find someone else to murmur in my ear.

New American Pilgrim



If a mother or a teacher wrote a book about American history and everything you could learn driving around the country, it would bomb. Packed with goody-goody facts, it could never convey the right tone, never be cool. Did you know this? Did you know that? (said bitterly, mockingly, like a resentful fifth grader). I imagine such a book, The Purpose-Driven Vacation, and start to feel the sweat trickling down my armpits, the mosquitoes of annoyance biting as I trudge up and down a thousand steps to the stupid site of something that happened long ago to dead people.

Sarah Vowell, neither a mother nor a teacher but sounding at times like a mocking fifth grader, has found her calling in rejuvenating the quaint field of heritage tourism. Generation-X scamp, deadpan voice coming out of the funky radio show This American Life, and also incidentally, the disaffected daughter in The Incredibles, and—well, check out her photo—dead ringer for the creepy girls in The Addams Family and Beetlejuice, that Sarah Vowell has written a wise and funny and inspiring book about our history called Assassination Vacation. Her trip to discover where Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were shot, buried, and memorialized is a search for the meaning of America.

Vowell brings her alert, funny, offbeat attention to every relic and ruin, aware that, as she quotes a friend in her previous book, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, "When you declare your genuine passion for something, you are so setting yourself up." She tracks down the sites where a bullet changed the course of history (except in Dallas, which might have overwhelmed the book), and her fierce opinions, trove of knowledge, and droll observations make her a great traveling companion. She digs up quirky history, the fact that Robert Todd Lincoln was nearby for three assassinations "like some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom," or that Charles Guiteau, the man who shot James Garfield, lived for years in the free-love colony of Oneida, New York, but couldn't get laid. Her sharp eye zooms in on the last lines on an obscure plaque at 15th and F Street in D.C., on the site where, among other things, Guiteau purchased the gun he used to shoot Garfield: "Ballot initiative to preserve the building approved by Washington citizens, 1983. Razed, 1984." Then she realizes that as she's been scribbling, several families of tourists have crowded around to videotape whatever it is that she finds so fascinating. "This is a new development in Garfield pilgrimage—other pilgrims," she writes coolly.

This revisiting of our history by a smart young Democrat should interest people of all parties. She keeps finding our common patriotic ground, whether she's admiring phrases like Lincoln's "with malice toward none" or the skills of the volunteer docents who recite history for tourists. There's something fierce about her insistence on our ideals, in spite of our messy reality, something deep that focuses her writing and brings purpose to her playfulness.

Vowell, like most of us, is mainly mutt—part Swedish, Scottish, English, and French, but a slice of Cherokee gives her passion for this country an interesting twist. As she wrote in her 2000 book, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, the Cherokee watched the new American republic take shape and embraced its ideals and institutions. The tribe established its own three-branch government, wrote a constitution, even started a newspaper. "Always a nerdy, overachiever, bookish sort of tribe," Vowell wrote, they "married whites at a fairly fast clip." This didn't prevent them from being betrayed and banished, and a quarter of their people died struggling along the Trail of Tears on the forced march from the east to Oklahoma. A hundred and sixty years later, Vowell and her sister followed the trail by car, blasting a Chuck Berry tape and trying to figure out where they came from.

She doesn't discuss her Cherokee heritage in her latest book, but it's something to marvel about while reading Assassination Vacation. Even when her flip delivery makes her look like she couldn't care less, she actually couldn't care more.

My Clear Plastic Bag



When I turned up at Heathrow to fly back to New York, days after the discovery of a terrorist plot to blow up airplanes with liquid bombs, I was less afraid of being blown up than I was about spending seven and a half hours without a book. No carry-on luggage allowed, according to news reports. Only essentials like passports and documents, prescription medicine, tissues, and glasses in a clear plastic bag—everybody a bag lady. (You could bring baby formula, but only if you drank some in front of a security officer.) I could imagine the gruesome possibilities—explosions, flames, hurtling into the ocean—but I couldn't imagine sitting in steerage for all those hours with nothing to read but an airline magazine, crossword puzzle already inked in.

We waited outside the terminal on a gray wet day in mid-August, mushed up under the awning with families of every stripe—Jamaican, French, Hassidic, Arab, Indian. We had to stay outside until an airline rep walked through the crowd with our flight number on a card. There was a white tent thrown up by the entrance for us, with heaters blasting in its middle and a few folding chairs, stacks of water bottles and a woman serving hot drinks in disposable cups from the back of a car, that whiff of refugee in the air…. What was missing were books. Everyone seems to read in England—you could see people reading bestsellers and classics, Ian Rankin and Sherlock Holmes, on buses and park benches—but nobody had his nose in a book for this gathering. We were all on alert, quick to share rumors, bending eagerly as one of the orange-vested security people passed by with more clear plastic bags and scraps of official words. When they finally let us through the door, to join the first of many queues, searches, and pat-downs, I felt thrilled, chosen.

Security people, some bearing snubby machine guns, were everywhere, and answered questions patiently, but each one contradicted the next; we were told that the individual airlines set their rules and the individual pilots had a say in what was allowed onboard. It seemed the electronic devices that had been banned yesterday were permitted today, and you could bring a book. Jubilation! Once you got through the first layer of security, you could buy other things to carry on, too, as long as they weren't made of liquid or gel. I grabbed the first book I felt in my bulging suitcase, Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles, sent it off to the x-ray machines and the cargo hold, slipped off my shoes, belt, jacket, held out my arms for the pat-down, and headed for the newsstand. Maybe I was greedy to want newspapers, too; when I tried to pay, the clerk asked which airline I was flying, then wouldn't sell them to me. Why bother, they won't let you bring them on, she said. As it turned out, she was wrong, I had a generous pilot, and I could have had those beautiful newspapers, too….

But here's where, in this tale, I almost lose it. I am a sheep, one of many, many sheep bleating through these bleak pens of Heathrow, on our way to green pastures or slaughter, none of us can tell which. I think of the 9/11 hijackers, rehearsing on those early flights, standing out in retrospect because, unlike the other passengers, they didn't read, only stared ahead, marking time. I kept looking up during the flight, at the screen where the little drawing of the airplane moved along the trajectory from London, over Dublin, under Iceland, across the Atlantic, over Newfoundland, down over Boston, until it finally, finally hovered over the little dot marked New York. The book I held was full of information and stories that snagged my attention for a moment, then let go. I had to keep turning back to reread and pick up the connection, and now I can't remember a word.

* These essays were originally written for AARP magazine online.