I’ve been reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed. Not because Oprah told me to. I heard about the book before people started hearing about it from Oprah and sent away for a review copy a couple months ago. Just took a while for it to work its way to the top of my To Read list.
Wild is Strayed’s account of a physically grueling, spiritually cleansing 1,100 mile hike she took up the Pacific Crest Trail from the bottom of California to the top of Oregon in 1995. Strayed covers a lot of ground covering the ground she covered at the time, (Funny, Lance.), writing about more than just the scenery and the birds and the beasts, four-legged and two-legged, she met along the way. Among other things, she writes about the books she read when she stopped for the night. She carried two books the whole way. One was an old favorite by Adrienne Rich that she re-read when she had nothing else or she was in the mood. The other was something disposable. I don’t mean disposable in the sense the book, which was actually a succession of books, was trash. I mean that she disposed of them as she went, burning the pages she’d read the night before in the that night’s campfire, thus lightening her load and making room in her pack for the book she’d be picking up at her next re-supply point.
Those books included As I Lay Dying, Lolita, Dubliners, a collection of essays by various authors, a couple of guide books to the trail, a field manual for hikers, A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble, Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M Coetzee, The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout, and The Novel by James Michener, her late mother’s favorite writer.
Getting over her grief at her mother’s death from cancer is one of the reasons Strayed set off on her hike.
Michener’s book made its way into her pack serendipitously, and she decided to read it not in honor of her mother but as a sort of apology to her.
Finding The Novel on a bookshelf in the house of a couple she’d met who offered her lunch and a shower reminded her that once upon a time, back in college, full of herself as an aspiring writer, she’d confidently assured her mother that Michener’s books were disposable…as in trash.
“You know that isn’t a real book,” I’d said disdainfully to my mother when someone had given her Michener’s Texas as Christmas gift…
“Real?” My mother looked at me, quizzical and amused.
“I mean serious. Like actual literature worth your time,” I replied.
Strayed was parroting one of her professors:
An entertainer for the masses, [he’d] scoffed after inquiring what books I’d read. Michener, he advised me, was not the kind of writer I should bother with if I truly wanted to be a writer myself. I felt like a fool. All those years as a teen, I’d thought myself sophisticated when I’d been absorbed in Poland and The Drifters, Space and Sayonara. In my first month at college, I quickly learned that I knew nothing about who was important and who was not.
I know that guy. Or I knew academic types like him. I have no brief for Michener. Tales of the South Pacific, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Sayonara, and Drifters are worth reading. His big books, his epics, after Hawaii, are hit or miss. I only liked Space. Actually, it’s the only one I finished. But that’s not the point. When I was a young college professor, which would have been about the time Strayed was a student, I was careful not to sound like her professor, which is to say like some of my colleagues. My students probably never read Michener, but they had read Stephen King and loved his books and they were happy to tell me about it. I think that in the many years since King has proven to be not disposable but back then he was regularly dismissed the way Strayed professor dismissed Michener and the way she then dismissed him to her mother. But the reason I’m bringing this up is that it relates to my post last week on the ongoing debate on the relative worth of genre writing versus “serious” literature, Why I don’t like science fiction even when I do and vice versa.
Michener isn’t a genre writer, although you could make the case he invented his own genre and within that he was the best at it. The question, though, isn’t whether genre writing is any good. It’s whether any particular writer, no matter what genre they’re working in, is a good writer.
And this also relates to last night’s post on Nora Ephron.
There are writers who should matter to us, even if we don’t particularly care for their stuff, because they matter to people who matter to us.
We should be able to see the worth in a book that someone we love and admire saw in it and appreciate it for their sake.
That doesn’t mean we have to change our opinion. It just means we need to keep an open mind and be careful of their feelings.
Stayed felt bad because she wasn’t careful of her mother’s feelings about Michener. She felt worse because she remembered the good grace with which her mother met her sneering at her favorite writer.
“You know that isn’t a real book,” I’d said disdainfully to my mother when someone had given her Michener’s Texas as Christmas gift…
“Real?” My mother looked at me, quizzical and amused.
“I mean serious. Like actual literature worth your time,” I replied.
“Well, my time has never been worth all that much, you might like to know, since I’ve never made more than minimum wage and more often than not, I’ve slaved away for free.” She laughed lightly and swatted my arm with her hand, slipping effortlessly away from my judgment, the way she always did.
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I wonder if Strayed wishes kindles had been around when she set off up the trail. Probably not. They’re not that light, every step on a hike like that offers a hundred ways to break one, and how would you recharge it? But, if you’re not hiking the PCT, you might be glad to know Wild is available for kindle, as well as hardcover.
Lance, I'll be curious to know what you think of Wild. I started reading it because I really like Strayed's "Dear Sugar" advice column, even when--maybe especially when--I think she's rambling and her advice is either batsh*t crazy or just a license for self-absorption and "self-actualization" at the expense of those you love. But I just couldn't get over my longstanding allergy to memoir to enjoy Wild. The more I read, the more I wanted to hear her ex-husband's version of their marriage or her stepfather's version of her behavior.
Posted by: Walter Biggins | Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 03:30 PM