AS summer nears I begin to
search my bookshelves for companions. Much like other people return again and
again to the same small towns or sandy beaches, I return to the same novelists
and with ever greater frequency to the same novels.
My summer friends are
expansive and equal to any beach-to-bar evening among the living. The old
reliables — Henry James, Edith Wharton, Anthony Trollope — have been with me
for a decade or more. Five summers ago they welcomed George Eliot and always
they make room for relative newcomers at the table. This past summer, in
between rereadings of “The Ambassadors” and “The Age of Innocence,” Kazuo
Ishiguro’s novel “The Unconsoled” stepped in.
Reading has made my least
favorite season not only one I can now tolerate but one I have begun to look
forward to. By actively hating summer for years, I unintentionally built my own
protective structure from the elements of sun, sand and fun. Every summer, a
very dear friend has her birthday party on the beach. Her e-mail message to me always
says “I know you won’t come but...” before giving me the location and date.
Another close friend has
given up trying to lure me into climbing a mountain in 100-degree heat. I think
she is insane for doing this and she thinks I’m “all about coffee and museums.”
How I’ve ended up with such well-adjusted friends is obvious — the others like
me are inside their houses or under shady trees or finding the coolest, darkest
place for three months to read books and shield their faces.
I grew up in a house of
readers but I was actually not one of them.
My father, a professor of
Romance languages, sat about the house with small precious volumes from
overseas. They were bound in leather and had ribbons sewn into their bindings
that our jealous bassets would reach out to paw.
My mother read poetry and
mysteries. Anne Sexton and Agatha Christie were stacked on her bedside table.
And my sister read Ray
Bradbury and the Bible and in high school went on a C. S. Lewis binge. She sat
on a spring-shot sofa in her bedroom that had once been downstairs in the
living room, and pored over textbooks for the coming school year.
In our house the difference
between summer and all the other seasons was simple. In their bedrooms or my
father’s office, the three readers wore shorts instead of slacks. They drank
iced tea instead of hot tea. Sleeves were rolled up and if I interrupted,
tempers were short.
An undiagnosed case of
dyslexia defined me as the non-reader of the family. Stupid was how I felt. In
summer I built Barbie a highway out of cardboard and construction paper and ran
her over and over again with my Hot Wheels and Matchboxes in a home-grown
version of “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.” I made a secretive, sweaty universe
of the space beneath my ancient rope bed, only to find the dust ruffles, my
stage curtains, parted by the snout of an equally bored and lonely basset.
Now, in a way that seemed
impossible when I was a child, I read maniacally. And I read everything my
family did: poetry, mysteries, ancient leather books with ribbons swinging —
with two cats, not bassets, pawing them — and old textbooks from the 1800s.
If the phone rings between
June and September, I am often jolted out of my make-believe world. I am with
Henry James’s Isabel Archer or the ever more poignant Strether, returning over
and over again to the cruel fates they can do nothing to change. I’m with Celia
and Dorothea, trying on their mother’s jewels and feeling, each time I return
to Eliot’s amazing “Middlemarch,” more and more pity for Mr. Casaubon, whom I
initially took to be nothing but a mean and bitter prig.
In between the bounty of
these larger tomes, when I have an evening to myself because my more social
spouse has gone to a party or dinner with friends, I have summer flings — J. L.
Carr, Susan Minot, Françoise Sagan, Elfriede Jelinek — and discover previously
unknown gems like Julian Greene’s novel “The Other Sleep” or Jane Gardam’s
delightfully titled “Old Filth.”
This is summer: it is a
time to read and for me at least, despite what many may think, reading is play.
It is comfort, company, a way to buffer oneself from the pain and isolation of
the everyday. It is the peace I find by visiting my closest friends. I have
given up thinking I’m deranged for discovering them between the covers of a book.
Was it really any odder
when I hid under my bed or talked aloud to myself or to my basset hounds about
people who didn’t exist? Any more bizarre to hang brunette Barbie from the
doorknob in an imagined passion play involving Ken and my stuffed Scottie dog?
I think not.
I’ve reached an age where I
can admit to and even take a strange sort of joy in what some might see as my
limits. I had an allergic reaction to Johnson’s Baby Oil the first time I
smeared it on my skin and went out into the back yard at 13. The feeling of
sand on oil, like the feeling of newspaper when I crumble it in my hand, or the
smell of brass on my fingers after using a stairwell or turning a doorknob,
unsettles me. My husband sarcastically calls me “his delicate flower,” but I am
also the one who attends to an animal’s corpse found under an overpass or
empties the occasional sick person’s bedpan.
To me, it is simple. There
is our world — the world of mundane annoyances, of heat and grit, and of
hideous realities, and there is that other world I visit each summer. My real
world. The world of fiction.
Alice Sebold is the author
of “The Lovely Bones” and the forthcoming novel “The Almost Noon.”