Reader’s Block

By David Markson (Dalkey Archive, 1996; reissue, 2007)

David Markson’s 1996 novel Reader’s Block concerns a writer called Reader who plots a novel about a character called Protagonist and, by the by, sketches this novel, the one that the lower-case reader—you, me—reads. It’s less confusing than it sounds, and more emotionally gripping than tangled issues of authorship tend be. It also takes up precious little space on the page. The book consists mostly of snippets concerning artists and writers—facts about them, quotes by them. These fragments tilt toward the truly depressing. That Reader ponders this flotsam, rather than writing his novel, constitutes his block. The first snippet: “Church bells were already ringing, to announce the Armistice in November 1918, when word reached Wilfred Owen’s family that he had been killed in battle one week before.” War, early death, sorrow following hard upon happiness: there are 185 pages of this to go. Markson’s narrators, like Beckett’s, often teeter on the brink of going absolutely bananas, and his approach is two parts Eliot: as plangent, tonally, as Prufrock—the monologue of another aging, lonely man—and possessed of the appropriative strength of The Waste Land. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” neatly summarizes the book, as the book’s back jacket duly notes. “Has Reader sometimes felt he has spent his entire life as if preparing for doctoral orals?” the narrator asks himself near the book’s end, after citing some 150 pages of literary and artistic arcana.

It’s enough to make anyone miserable, and yet sifting all this misery is not without its consolations. Categorize chaos, and perhaps you can keep the sadness that comes of it at bay. As coping mechanisms go, this would seem a decidedly male approach. What do men want? Not to go crazy is a good start, but sometimes, to stave off insanity, you have to do things that seem nuts. Often, the result is less than nothing. In rare, wondrous cases, the result is something like Reader’s Block.

Paul Clemens is the author of Made in Detroit.

A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe

By Geoffrey Hartman (Fordham University Press, 2007)

“I feel embarrassed,” writes the great literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman in this short, epigrammatic intellectual autobiography, “when, occasionally, younger colleagues, usually Jewish, address me as ‘my teacher.’ I realize this is fond and purely honorific, a secular version of ‘Rabbi.’ But it makes me aware of the fact that I have never thought of anyone in so personal a way as a role model.” This charming and defiantly smart book helps the reader to see that no one ever could have been Hartman's role model. His is so quirky an intelligence — and so roundly informed by his own, sad past as a teenaged refugee — that his only teacher in fact was Wordsworth. Separated from his family during the war, lacking for friends, Hartman wandered the countryside with the Prelude for a companion. All that he has done since, all the difficult, brilliant essays and books, began in that war-haunted boy’s solitude with his slim volume of poetry. You can read this book for explanations of critical theory — though they are still too abstruse to make much sense to the neophyte — or you can read this book for the droppings of academic gossip (Paul de Man, Auerbach, Harold Bloom). But ultimately this book is worth reading above all for its depiction of the kind of mind that has gone out of fashion: the omnivorous European reader, fluent in many languages, autodidactic, with enough whimsy left to suggest that at Yale May Day be celebrated as Midrash Day. (“The idea had a longevity of two years,” Hartman writes, with a touch of gallows humor.) If we never really know the man — wife and family and pastimes hardly feature in this book — we know the mind, and we do get lovely reminiscences of the child, “father of the man,” as Wordsworth himself told us.

Editor Mark Oppenheimer writes for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of Thirteen and a Day, and lives in the Westville neighborhood.

Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl

By Mary Mycio (Joseph Henry Press, 2005)

Triggered or not by An Inconvenient Truth and its fallout, the meme is in the air of contemplating what the planet would look like if everyone vanished, which is really just a polite way of asking whether the planet might not be better off if we weren't on it. There is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, the Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend, the special Life After People on the History Channel. Somehow we have trouble staying away from the image of New York City alternately underwater or covered with flowers.

In the acknowledgments to The World Without Us, Weisman tells us that his book was inspired by an article he wrote for Discover about the Zone of Alienation, the 30-kilometer circle of land around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which was suddenly (almost) depopulated in a matter of days after the reactor's catastrophic meltdown in 1986 and never resettled. Wormwood Forest is the book he could have written, as Mycio takes us on a long and eerie tour of the deserted towns and cities, overgrown fields, government posts, and squatters' farms inside the zone, where the irradiated remnants of Soviet-era civilization are crumbling into ruins as the flora and fauna reoccupy the territory we kicked them out of centuries ago. The strange news is that nonhuman life inside the Zone of Alienation--as in the DMZ between North and South Korea — is absolutely thriving, in a way that some U.S. national parks would envy, and despite the serious levels of radiation that will persist there, as far as we are concerned, almost forever. The details of this simple conceit are more than enough to fill a book, and while Mycio may not be as lyrical a writer as Weisman is, her book equals Wesiman's in power for its solid, no-nonsense reporting and, more to the point, its grounding in truth. The World Without Us speculates that the world could recover from us; Wormwood Forest shows us that it most certainly can.

Editor Brian Francis Slattery is a banjo player and the author of Spaceman Blues.