I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through a complicated life of books that try to teach me how to die. I take it as an article of faith that the novels I’ve loved will live inside me forever.
Pat Conroy
I don't buy everything I read,
I haven't even read everything I've bought
Barenaked Ladies
Before choosing this book more or less randomly, I had never read any Pat Conroy -- I've never even seen the movie adaptation of The Prince of Tides because of my unshakeable dislike for Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte. With nothing more than an interest in learning what books a famous novelist has found important -- and by extension, what books I might find important -- I had modest expectations and I wasn't disappointed. I listened to an audiobook of My Reading Life, which was competently read by Pat Conroy himself in a deadpan drawl, and that likely enhanced my enjoyment. (In a brief interview after the book itself ends, Conroy states that, not only does he think that audiobook narrators are the greatest actors working today, but that wherever possible, a person should listen to an audiobook read by its author, for only he truly understands its emotional forces. And as his wife has hooked Conroy on listening to audiobooks from his local library, I am not embarrassed to have enjoyed his book for free as well.)
Overall, I found My Reading Life to be a bit uneven. It was more autobiographical than I expected, but that was a good thing -- I would not have understood the Conroy I met here without a quote like: "My mother's voice and my father's fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art." Where this book worked best for me was when Conroy discussed specific books and how they shaped him, like: Look Homeward Angel and Deliverance. I also liked the chapters on people who had an impact on his reading life, like: his mother (the long-suffering Scarlett O'Hara wannabe); a high school English teacher (the saintly Gene Norris); and a librarian (the racist tippler Eileen Hunter). Some chapters, however, didn't seem to have much to do with reading and left me a little bored, like: a look at his life in Paris or his experience attending his first Writer's Conference (describing meeting Alice Walker, Conroy says, “She was as friendly as a cow turd on an altar step.") And there was a longish chapter defending War and Peace as the greatest novel ever written that, however well intentioned, had nothing personal about it at all, and as a result, I found it didactic and dull. (Parenthetically, I was already thinking this would be the year I finally read War and Peace -- I haven't dipped my toe into the Russians beyond Anna Karenina and that was so long ago that her story is muddled in my brain with Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley's Lover -- I just need to wait for the snows to melt; I will not venture into the frozen Russian wastelands while my front yard yet resembles them.)
This book could also have been called "My Writing Life" as Conroy shares a lot of his own processes and that was also mostly interesting, if a little scattered -- there are many self-effacing bits about the teachers and critics who told Conroy he would never be a great writer (and especially if he continued to oververbiate -- yes, I made that word up -- a la Thomas Wolfe, a habit he intermittently demonstrates throughout this book) but he can also be defensive of his art:
I am often called a “storyteller” by flippant and unadmiring critics. I revel in the title… The writers who scoff at the idea of primacy of stories either are idiots or cannot write them. Many of their novels could be used in emergency situations where barbiturates are at a premium and there has been a run on Unisom at the pharmacies. The most powerful words in English are “Tell me a story,” words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.In the end, since my intention was to learn about some books through the filter of one who really knows books (and at 200 pages read per day since he was an adolescent, Conroy makes the claim that he is the most well-read person of his generation), I did accomplish what I set out to do and the reading list I'm leaving with is:
• Gone With the Wind
• Look Homeward Angel
• War and Peace
• Deliverance
• A Dance to the Music of Time
• The Great Santini
And, in the end, that's a worthwhile result.
A comment that didn't have a place in my review:
At one point Conroy said: "Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language." My mother, who is just slightly younger than the author, would have something to say about that -- she and her fellow Roman Catholic classmates were known to sneak peeks at the books on the Index, the list of books specifically forbidden to them because they were Catholics. As I'm name-dropping books like Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley's Lover, I likely would have been imperiling my mortal soul right alongside them.
