Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Engages in the Guilty Pleasure of a Bad Book

When my little sister started her menses, she was humiliated that, on the way home from a trip to the drugstore, I was reading her tampon box.  She complained to Mom that I was embarrassing her, and Mom clarified that I was just reading print on page - it's what I do - and that it wouldn't have mattered if it was a tampon box, a cereal box, or the paper that was going to line the cat box, I was going to read it.  Not to humiliate her, but because I was then, am now and probably always will be an indiscriminate reader.  This book is, theoretically, about helping people read discriminately.

What reader hasn't fantasized about opening up a book store?  What could be better than to sit in store all day reading - interrupted only by people coming in to talk about books?  And what better place to do this than in some out of the way vacation spot?  Well, be careful what you wish for.  A.J. Fikry opens ups just such a spot in his wife's hometown.  But he is an outsider.  Not just because this is a small town and he looks foreign, but because he is a reader - someone whose nose is always stuck in a book, and he cares more about books than people - and he has particular tastes in books.  And he is in mourning - and he is mean when he is mourning.

The book deepens, in so far as it does, as Fikry begins to recommend books to people based on who those people are and what kind of book they would like.  I have had the experience, first for myself, of telling a bookstore employee what I was looking for (a wonderful fellow at the Little Professor Bookstore - one of the early chains - turned me onto Roger Zelazny, still my favorite fantasy author), and then for the reluctant son (recently a local bookstore helper in the young adult section was able to help latch his interest in sports books onto a futuristic series involving sports yet to be invented).  This service requires the ability to match our own sensibilities with those of another - to imagine not what our reaction to a book would be - but what their's would be.  It is a wonderful sort of match making - I think you would like this book.  And, when it works, there's almost something mystical about it.  We have gotten both the book and the other person.

Melanie Klein, a psychoanalytic theorist who was keenly attuned to the raw underbelly of human existence, claimed that there is nothing we can do that is more hostile than to give someone a gift.  And recommending that another read a book can certainly be a hostile gift.  They will, if they accept the gift, invest their time, the most precious commodity that they have, in something that you have foisted off on them.  Recently I recommended a book to the reluctant wife.  She likes to read, but she is discriminating.  I recommended Beautiful Ruins, a book that includes a weird mash up of fictional characters and Liz Taylor and Richard Burton - actors that she admires.  It also has a romantic/off beat feel to it and it feels allegorical.  It is incredibly well written.  Like Fikry, it is a quick read.  All these elements lead me to think she would like it, even though many of the books that she likes do not fit this formula.  I was right.  She enjoyed it.  I felt relief that I hadn't burdened her - but also some joy - pride maybe? - that I had picked right.

Booksellers have, it is clear from Fikry, from my own experience, and from an article read long ago, played an important role in helping us get to know what books to read.  And they are a disappearing breed.  A good reviewer can also help us determine what to read or see.  When I lived in New York a million years ago, Janet Maslin's reviews of films allowed me to know whether I would like the film.  Sometimes she would not like it, but could explain the virtues in such a way that I knew it would work for me - other times she would like it, but I knew from her tone that it would not be such a good fit.  This requires the reader to get to know the reviewer.

Fikry gets to know his customers - eventually - at least one or two of them - and he is able to put to work his talent for organizing, for categorizing, for putting a hierarchy to the books that he has read - books that he has read in part based on the recommendations of the publishing house reps who get to know what he is looking - oh, one of the reps becomes an important character in the story - but most importantly he uses his talent to leave a legacy - a poignant legacy as it turns out - to his daughter - a daughter who arrives on his doorstep in what is an intriguing and self consciously described plot twist - a daughter who reawakens his interest in others - and his descriptions of the short stories he recommends to her - pithy and tantalizing rather than descriptive - form the introduction to each chapter.  Fikry is able to marry two loves - short stories and his daughter - through the medium of written descriptions.

Reading the book, then, occurs quickly.  It is like eating candy.  It feels good in the moment, but the characters are two dimensional.  I feel somehow guilty about enjoying this book so much.  I have important reading to be doing.  I am not spending time with the reluctant wife but have my nose stuck, again, in a book, and I'm not going to be a better person for having read it.  But it draws me along.  I resonate with the bookseller.  I want to know what the twists will be.  I'm not surprised by the character who is not who he (or she) appears to be in a deep way, but am, rather amused and a little bemused that I have, indeed, been taken in a beat longer than I need to have been.  I should have seen that coming.  And the central mystery is not all that mysterious and the sadness at the ending is somehow not all that sad - I really haven't gotten to know this character on a deep and emotional level.

What I have done is indulge in a fantasy - a light daydream.  It has been pleasant.  And it has made me think about a few things - like why I blog.  Not just to get page views - which have suddenly soared in the wake of my using a different format that allows readers to sample what I have to offer - but also to leave a legacy - something that my own children may be interested in perusing some day.  Perhaps helping others know that psychoanalysis is not something cold and foreign and distant (though it certainly can be), but also something that is warm, immediate, available and very very human.  That I might serve as a match maker between people I don't know and ideas that, despite my reluctant embrace of them, I love.  There is something of Fikry in me - which is consistent with a central theme of the book.  And I could learn to be discriminating - maybe I am practicing that by writing and preserving my reactions to books, movies and life rather than simply letting it wash by...

Fikry's interest in the rep scuttles her interest in her fiancee.  Why?  He points out that the rep and the fiancee don't have the same interests.  His thesis is that love is essentially narcissistic - we love others who share our interests.  We love others who are like ourselves.  But we also love those who are different - he turns the police chief onto books - and the police chief, in turn, turns others who previously had no interest in reading onto books.  We love not just those who are like ourselves, but we share aspects of ourselves that are unlike others - and they come to embrace something that they otherwise would not have known.  And we want to go there.  We want to explore.  We want to expand.  This book is enjoyable because it is circumscribed.  It tells a small story about a small place and a small band of people.  They are introduced in and the plot is developed in a predictable and very pleasant way.  The author pretends (and she has the luxury of being able to do that because these are, after all, characters) that these people can be understood, can be circumscribed, that there is no mystery here.  And yet, of course, in all things human, there is.  Because the book doesn't address that internally I, as reader, am cast out by it to see what in my life it reflects.  I find the organic, the unknowable, in the margins, not in the center - where the author coyly and artificially tells us there is nothing much to see.  A discriminating reader like Fikry would have little use for this book.  I, a less discriminating one, find it a guilty pleasure - a little like watching a favorite sitcom.  Ironically, given Fikry's cry that we read so that we know we are not alone, I am with the author and presumably other readers, but the space we are inhibiting is, like the sitcom space, comfortable but limited.

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Post script:  Recently the New York Times magazine  published a piece noting that the number of independent book stores is on the rise again - they were in serious trouble after the big box bookstores and then the online bookstores and books emerged.  This is good news for readers everywhere.  Indeed, the thesis of the article is that while the industries that got art out to us have taken a hit or been reconfigured, this may actually have been in a way that allows us to have more direct contact with artists - and maybe even for more artists to flourish.  See a review that touches on this phenomenon in another medium - music - here.

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