In praise of old fictions
You already belong to your time
When I reach for novels these days, I reach for old ones.
Give me stories before smartphones! Stories before the internet tanked critical discourse! Stories before photography and the combustion engine!
I’m so often disappointed by contemporary novels. Even the ones celebrated as “critically acclaimed literary fiction” usually strike me as shallow, thin, unambitious, self-focused, unmoored. I lose my patience quickly. I find very little of substance.
In her thirty recommendations for good writing habits, Lydia Davis, forever a guiding light, says:
“Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.”
Don’t be locked in to the present. We’re already here. It’s such a mind-opening gift to read the dead.
Books are a marvelous technology for this very thing: We can count on their durability across time, their unchangeability. They won’t disappear or resolve into a 404 at some unknown date. They’re sitting on a shelf, waiting for us, a voice from the past ready to speak to us in the present.
Alan Jacobs wrote a whole beautiful book about the urgent need to read old books.
In Breaking Bread with the Dead, he says:
“Reading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is to make the other not identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor. I happen to think that this kind of training is useful in helping me learn to deal with my actual on-the-ground neighbors, though that claim is not central to my argument here, and in any case there’s nothing inevitable about this transfer: I know people who are exquisitely sensitive readers of texts who are also habitually rude to the people who serve them at restaurants. But surely to encounter texts from the past is a relatively nonthreatening, and yet potentially enormously rewarding, way to practice encountering difference.”
Reading the dead offers us a valuable training ground.
To receive someone who is not at all like us, who belongs to a separate culture, who shares none of our references, is an act of openness and welcome that will (hopefully) make us more open and welcoming in the present. It’s such a low-stakes and yet boundary-shifting way to practice encountering difference.
Jacobs also quotes essayist Brian Morton, who makes an important distinction:
“It isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.”
We—and I of course include myself in this censure—have such a poor ability to do this kind of time-traveling.
We stumble when we attempt to read the dead. We forever want to read them by today’s standards and judgments, whether big or small. We find it hard to understand anyone who is not exactly like us, who does not share our current code of ethics and cultural niceties, and so we stick to the present day. New paperbacks go down easy. But Clarice Lispector, Marguerite Yourcenar, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Simone Schwarz-Bart? They require too much from us! They are strange and hard and… different.
It’s precisely that difference that I long for in a novel. I crave unfamiliarity more and more. A.S. Byatt’s 1985 Still Life, which I finished this weekend, was an absolute revelation. It was very much of its time—heady, dense, demanding, with observations and gestures that we’d now call passé—and yet it was perfect. Still Life opened my mind in a way that a 2025 novel increasingly does not.
I’ll keep Lydia Davis’s counsel close at hand this summer. I do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. I’d like a little more nourishment than that.
To someone with my sensibilities, summer is always a little bit horrible. Hence:
Little joys to make it through the summer
The fireworks stand on Pantops, run by some college boys, which included a description of a big-boy sparkler (called THE MIGHTY SWORD) using the word WHILST to describe its pyrotechnics: Huge sprays of fire emerge whilst you hold it in the air. I cannot fully name the delight that this has brought me.
Being married to a man offers a perpetual recognition of how different we are, how little we understand each other on a bodily level, how we are often speaking two different native tongues. Every day is exciting and wreathed in mystery. What will he say next?? Find yourself a husband who will make you wonder this.
The discovery that someone you once regarded as a polite Christian wife and mother is actually deeply funny and joyously obscene, in a way that most polite Christian wives and mothers are not.
The younger son calling out to the older son, whilst they scooter in the basement: “I’m fast because of my body shape and my butt shape!”
Trimming the trees in the front yard—the looming, weeping Japanese maple and the grandfatherly dogwood—offering a little more visual space, more verdant breathing room.
Reading novels at a fast clip on the weekends, because the younger two still take hard two-hour naps in the afternoon.
Watermelon, when the flesh is firm and so cold it almost hurts your teeth.
Blackberry crop coming in strong in the backyard, sending the boys out to pick them each morning while the mosquitoes feast on their skinny little legs.
Learning new words, still, at my advanced age: nugatory, costive, efflorescence, deliquescence, peripeteia!
The neighbor boys coming back from Indonesia for the summer, and our boys rushing out the back door without a word to us to jump on a trampoline and stick garden hoses down their pants or whatever it is that boys do in July.
The baby girl fast becoming a toddler, with opinions and demands and a strong desires to help clean up and put on my shoes.
How to liquidate a people
“The first step in liquidating a people… is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.”
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Currently reading
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, Clarice Lispector
Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Revenge of the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell