Issue 4 | May 2008
The first order of business for readers is, I think, to find a book that captures their imaginations. I hesitate to use the word “entertain” because its fashion has been so overused with television’s 250+ channeldom juggernaut taking over far too many people’s minds (movies are useful and create quite dramatic characters; broadcast television is by any estimable value system just shit). Yet if “to entertain” is the main objective you have in a book, I’ll roll with that, too. As Woody Allen said in “Manhattan” regarding the opening paragraph of his novel, “Let’s be serious. I want to sell some books!”
I’m sure, too, that Vladimir Nabokov sought to entertain his readers, though perhaps not exactly as they saw his larger aims: to poke his finger in the eye of just about every category of people and institution. Flannery O’Connor entertained people with harrowing stories of the dark side of humanity. Hemingway chose to highlight the male roughness (and how men bonded). Scott Fitzgerald sang the beauty of the Jazz Age and the emptiness of living rich. In fact, I propose that all writers want to shake the tree of established thought, wherever such binding thought exists, to show readers, and through them then society, where we are at a particular moment in time.
This month brings a cautionary note to a book I was particularly excited in reading, only to find the tree of established thought quite sturdy against Lore Segal’s hand. Shakespeare’s Kitchen had entertained thousands as serialized pieces in The New Yorker magazine. Alas, I can’t find the source of such fount in the book form. However, for those who liked such accessible “language” books as Eats, Shoots & Leaves or What in the Word?, there is Inventing English by Seth Lerer, a fine academic look at the history of our language and where it has taken us—and where, perhaps, it is headed.
