Sunday, nine days ago, I was invited to Books & Books to be a mini-book club “facilitator” and lead a discussion on any topic I wanted. (Those of you who have been reading this blog may wonder if I live at Books & Books. The answer is no, I do not live at Books & Books, but if you go there and you overhear someone accosting one of the patient booksellers with questions like — “Where are my books?” and “How are they selling?” — that would be me.)
The set-up was brilliant. If I counted correctly, there were six tables. Each customer was assigned a table to begin. Every fifteen minutes or so, the bell would ring and the customer moved to another table, as prescribed by the game plan. Each table had its “facilitator” and a different discussion.
The topic I chose was close to my heart now that I am writing a novel. My topic was, What is a novel? And to begin the discussion, I compared Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach with Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country. You may already know that some people criticized the Booker judges for choosing McEwan’s book for the short list. One of the criticisms was that at under 40,000 words it was not a novel. Previously, I posted about this and noted that Kawabata’s Snow Country is also under 40,000 words long, but no one has ever questioned its status as a great novel.
Two women participants said that they had liked McEwan’s book because it accurately depicted for them the stress of the honeymoon night in a time before the “sexual revolution” and the Pill. These women had been married in the late 1950s or early 1960s. One man and one woman, both looked to be in their thirties, confessed to me that they had hated the book. This lead me to wonder if McEwan’s book further divided people along generational lines. People old enough to remember a time when one was expected to have sex only after marriage saw a reflection of themselves. While younger people thought, Why all the fuss? So much build up for so little return.
Getting back to our question of what was a novel, one woman hit the mark when she said that a novel gave you a sense of fulfillment that a short story never does. I think of novels like symphonies, which do something for me that suites and concertos cannot do. When I finish listening to a symphony, I need quiet. When I finish reading a novel, I cannot pick up another book for awhile. I have to give it time, maybe no more than one day, but time nonetheless to cool off, time when I do not read. No short story has ever done that to me.
It is fun to talk about books. Sitting for two hours on a quiet Sunday morning, discussing two books, and the topics they inspired was a great experience. But the real story about that Sunday morning was the fact that over 80 people attended the event in a city renowned for eating late and staying up later on Saturday nights.
The next time I hear someone say that people don’t read any more, I will remember this twister mixer and all the people who turned out for no other reason than to talk about books.
Photo: Gonzalo Barr
