Mark D. Roberts
There’s plenty of talk these days about whether adults should be spending so much time – as they are – on young adult (or “YA”) novels, or if they need to be reading more weighty books. Over at The New Yorker, Christopher Beha explores what the nineteenth-century author Henry James has to do with all of this:
When I mentioned this plan to friends, their responses fell roughly into two camps. “How impressive,” some said. “Better you than me,” others said. They seemed to take for granted that such a project was an exercise in self-discipline or self-improvement, not something that one did just for fun. But that was exactly why I was doing it. Occasionally, reading James stopped being fun and, when it did, I stopped reading him, sometimes for months at a time. Eventually, I came back, because so few other writers offer the particular pleasures that James does. It’s true that some of the later books are imposing—nineteenth-century realist comedies have given way to twentieth-century modernist monuments. But, precisely because I’d been reading my way through this evolution, I was prepared for the change. I had come to know intimately James’s way of looking at the world, and how it had pushed him toward implication and indirection, so I was in a better position to appreciate (and enjoy) the result.
Of course, the friends who suggested that reading James was an act of self-discipline were just making polite conversation. But I’ve been thinking about those remarks recently, because there has been so much talk of late about what and why we read.
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