Books for Living

  Partly it was the gerbil’s disloyalty. He had betrayed me! Partly it was shame. Why was no one else surprised that this had happened? And partly it was the indifference of the adult world to my pain and suffering. I had been mauled, and no one seemed to care.

  There seemed to be only one solution: I had to leave home, leave my gerbil, and leave the misery behind me. I went to the closet, climbed up on a chair, found my suitcase, threw some clothes into it, zippered it shut, and headed out the door, dragging it behind me. Where I was going, I would figure out later. But it was time to go.

  At that time, we lived in a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Out I went, into the hot summer evening. Then, at about fifty yards, I paused. There was the house, my house. There was laughter from inside. The adults were still drinking. No one had even realized I had gone. I had thought I would leave my misery behind, but I was still miserable. And where was I going? All my life was in that house, even if its other inhabitants didn’t always understand exactly how I was feeling.

  My parents later claimed that they saw me leave and kept an eye on me out the window, figuring that it was better for me to come back by myself than to be coaxed back. They were always a little fuzzy on the details after that, but clearly I came home. Soon, it was one of those funny family stories—the time that Will got bit by his gerbil, packed his case, and ran away. Oh, and the gerbil lived—as long as gerbils generally live. I fed him; cleaned his cage; gave him water. But we never really bonded. I’m not sure gerbils ever really bond with humans.

  Fortunately, this misadventure didn’t diminish my love for Stuart Little one bit. Stuart was a mouse, after all—a mouse who could sail a boat and drive a roadster—not a gerbil. And a fictional character. And even if not, I could hardly hold the entire rodent group responsible for the viciousness of one gerbil. So I had learned nothing about Stuart from my unfortunate experience. But I did have occasion later to think more about our respective decisions to leave home. When Stuart left, he was on a quest. When I left, I was running away. And when you are running away from something, it often ends up coming with you, especially if the thing you are running away from is your own behavior.

  Stuart Little was E. B. White’s first book for children. Prior to writing it, he was working for The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine and was one of the most admired essayists in America. (He would later cowrite with William Strunk Jr. what is widely regarded as the best style guide for writers: The Elements of Style. He would also later write two more classic books for children: Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan.)

  In a letter to Anne Carroll Moore, the then current and first children’s librarian ever at the New York Public Library, White wrote in February 1939 that he had been at work for years on a book for children—but only when he was ill. He confessed that he had great fear about writing for children, as “one can so easily slip into a cheap sort of whimsy or cuteness. I don’t trust myself in this treacherous field unless I am running a degree of fever.”

  Two weeks later, in a letter accompanying an early draft he sent to his editor, he wrote, “It would seem to be for children, but I’m not fussy who reads it.”

  He would finally finish Stuart Little in 1943, and it would be published in 1945. But, as recounted in Letters of E. B. White, Moore, who had encouraged White, was terribly disappointed in the book when she read an advance copy of it—so much so that she told the book’s editor that it “mustn’t be published” and wrote to Katharine White, E.B.’s wife, urging her to convince her husband to stop the publication.

  But she didn’t and he didn’t and the book would go on to sell more than four million copies in English alone.

  About the inconclusive ending, E. B. White would later write to a teacher that it had “plagued” him, “not because I think there is anything wrong with it but because children seem to insist on having life neatly packaged. The final chapters were written many years after the early chapters and I think this did affect the narrative to some extent. I was sick and was under the impression that I had only a short time to live, and so I may have brought the story to a more abrupt close than I would have under different circumstances.”

  But White explained further: “My reason (if indeed I had any) for leaving Stuart in the midst of his quest was to indicate that questing is more important than finding, and a journey is more important than the mere arrival at a destination. This is too large an idea for young children to grasp, but I threw it to them anyway. They’ll catch up with it eventually. Margalo, I suppose, represents what we all search for, all our days, and never quite find.”

  White resisted all entreaties to write a sequel to Stuart Little. The hero’s quest had to remain open-ended. I never craved a watertight ending, because I didn’t much care whether Stuart found Margalo or not. What fascinated me wasn’t Stuart’s odyssey, but how he behaved while he was on it. The book ends with Stuart climbing into his car and heading north. White writes, “The sun was just coming up over the hills on his right. As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.”

  This nonending is one of the most beautiful endings in all of literature.

  —

  Inspired by Stuart’s quest, I’ve come up with some rules to live by. Most books don’t lend themselves to this kind of treatment. But for me, Stuart Little does. Here they are:

  Try not to run away but to go in search.

  Try to remain polite when possible, as Stuart always does, and to accept what can’t be changed—even though you might mourn what you’re losing, the way Stuart did when he was on the garbage scow headed out to sea.

  Try to dress smartly. (I usually fail miserably on that account: A friend once told me that I “wear my clothes well.” English was his second language; he later clarified he’d meant that I wear them until they are worn out.)

  Try to be as brave as Stuart, and as resourceful as he was when he piloted the model boat to victory.

  But more than anything: Try to be as cheerful and optimistic as you can be in the face of whatever comes next.

  The Girl on the Train

  Trusting

  I HAVE 2,391 “friends” on Facebook. People who don’t enjoy social networking snort derisively at the idea of anyone maintaining a connection to 2,391 people; they think it’s absurd that I would want to share snippets of my life with all these folk and would be interested to read about their likes and dislikes and their daily lives. With 2,391 Facebook friends, I couldn’t be less far from the madding crowd; I invite it into my life every time I check my smartphone or turn on my computer. But I enjoy it—I get recommendations for recipes; I see pictures of homes and vacations and children; I give and get suggestions on what items to buy and where to eat; I marvel at the cuteness of the animal world as revealed in countless adorable posts. If it weren’t for my Facebook friends, I never would have discovered the little Chinese girl who coos at animals in a hypnotic tone and, with voice and hand, can put into a sleeplike trance not just puppies and kittens but also chickens, rabbits, frogs, and lizards. It’s also through Facebook that I’ve learned about books that are now among my favorites and found links to articles that have changed and deepened my understanding of the world.

  Obviously, most of the people sharing their clips and lives with me are not my friends in the traditional sense of the word. These are friendly acquaintances, and friends of friends. If they were really my friends, I could trust them all. Because that’s my definition of a friend: someone I can trust.

  Knowing whom to trust is not a new problem. But as more people gain access to our lives and attention through social networking, it’s a problem that we need to ponder with increasing frequency. Those friendly acquaintances who want me to recommend them for a job or rent me an apartment for a night—can I rely on them to not embezzle from their new employer or to refrain from giving me bedbugs? Are their recommendations genuine, or a
re they flogging their wares for profit?

  Trust is all about instinct. If you had all the facts, you wouldn’t need trust. Trust is what is required in the absence of proof. But I believe you can strengthen your instincts by testing them; every time you prove yourself right or wrong, they grow stronger. I’ve discovered that a great way to test my instincts with regard to trustworthiness or lack thereof is by reading mystery novels and thrillers—like the 2015 novel The Girl on the Train by the British novelist Paula Hawkins.

  Before I read The Girl on the Train, I already knew quite a lot about this novel. I knew that it was a thriller about a girl named Rachel who took “the same commuter train every morning and night.” I knew that the train, every day, would stop at a signal that allowed her to view the same couple having breakfast on their deck and that she looked forward to this. And that she began to feel that she’d started to know them. I knew that she had names for them and had invented a scenario in which theirs was the perfect life.

  I also knew that one day she would see something that would shock her. It would be for only a scant minute. Suddenly, everything would change. I knew that Rachel would go to the police. And I knew that soon she would be “deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved.” What I didn’t know was whether by going to the police she’d done “more harm than good.”

  The reason I knew all of this is simple. That’s what the publisher wanted me to know—this information is from the book flap on the American edition of the hardcover. Unless I had willfully decided not to read the flap, there’s no way I could have not known this.

  But I had heard about this novel even before I read the flap: it’s rare to read any book without knowing something of it beforehand, whether from a friend, a review, a bookseller, or a comment online. And most people don’t want to read a book unless they know a little something about it, even if only where it’s set.

  Once you begin reading The Girl on the Train, it soon becomes apparent that Rachel may be what people call an unreliable narrator. That is, she may or may not be telling the reader the truth. There’s a great tradition of books featuring unreliable narrators: The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, published in 1915, is the most influential; it’s a brilliantly cynical novel about marriage and infidelity. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a startling suspense novel from 2012, is another book that features an unreliable narrator, and also includes a deeply cynical view of marriage, with a considerably bloodier plot than The Good Soldier’s.

  But if you’ve read The Girl on the Train, you know at the end whether Rachel has been honest or lying. If you haven’t read it, I’m not going to tell you. You’re going to have to read the book and try to figure it out as you go along. Rachel is jealous, often irrational, and obsessed with her ex; she is deeply flawed and deeply human, sympathetic and infuriating. You want to trust her, but she keeps giving you reasons not to. Just when you think you know what’s going on, you realize maybe you don’t.

  That’s why Rachel, like most unreliable narrators, is not really an unreliable narrator at all; she’s a possibly unreliable narrator.

  The fun of reading a book with a possibly unreliable narrator, as opposed to reading a book with a certainly unreliable narrator, is that you don’t know for sure whether you are being told, in whole or in part, the truth. If you know for a fact that the narrator is unreliable, then that’s not really an unreliable narrator at all; it’s simply a dishonest one.

  Rachel is one of three narrators in The Girl on the Train; what makes her particularly intriguing as the main character in a thriller is that she admits to lying in order to get people to take her story seriously (“If I admitted the truth, the trust would be gone”) and that she is possibly lying even to herself. It’s as though she’s Sherlock Holmes and, maybe, the criminal Moriarty all in one. She drinks a lot of booze, and she frequently blacks out, and so she’s not exactly sure what she has and hasn’t witnessed or done.

  At one point, she contemplates hypnosis. But she rejects that when her therapist tells her that memories “retrieved” (she tells us he puts air quotes around that word) through hypnosis can’t always be trusted. She tells us, “I can’t risk it. I couldn’t bear to have other images in my head, yet more memories that I can’t trust, memories that merge and morph and shift, fooling me into believing what is not, telling me to look one way when really I should be looking another way.”

  Perhaps her massive lack of clarity is among the reasons I (along with so many other readers) relate to Rachel. Most of us are sometimes uncertain about what we’ve done. In a world where we are bombarded with messages and constantly looking at screens, or a world in which we ourselves sometimes drink to excess, reality can blur, and sometimes we blur it. Did I read that? Did I send that text? Was that something I saw, read, or dreamed? Often we don’t know. And that’s frightening enough. What’s even more frightening, though, is when we are sure of something that we saw, did, or read—and then find out that we couldn’t have or didn’t.

  “I’m certain it was raining; we ate barbecue; and Jim told that funny story,” I might say to my husband.

  “Well, I’m certain that it was sunny; we ate burgers; and it was Mary who told that funny story,” he might reply.

  In a perfect world, we would both be wrong: the day would have been hazy; we would have eaten fried chicken; and Edgar would have told the tale. That would spare both of us the annoyance of hearing “I told you so” when the truth is revealed. More often, however, only one of us is remembering things inaccurately.

  Finding out that you were wrong when you were sure you were right is like that moment in cartoons when a character runs off a cliff and freezes in midair for a few seconds before plummeting. There is a brief instant when you still hold on to the hope that you were right before conceding total wrongness—and it’s only then that the ground falls out from under you.

  If we can’t always trust ourselves, then how can we ever trust anyone else?

  The answer provided by thrillers is that, even when you are surrounded by strangers, eventually you may need to trust someone. And it’s sometimes the last person you thought you could trust. In order to misdirect us, clever thriller writers give characters prejudices and biases that readers share. Ultimately, characters save themselves by breaking free of these. Maybe the government official isn’t out to help you. Maybe the petty criminal on the corner is the only person who can save your life.

  And so it goes with Facebook and all the people who enter our lives in person and on the Internet. Whom they know, what they do for a living, and how they look tell us very little about them. What they say about themselves tells us very little, too. Are they reliable or unreliable? Sometimes they don’t even know themselves.

  Novels like The Girl on the Train give us the tools we need to try to figure out whom we can trust, and whom to keep at electronic arm’s length, helping us focus more on how our “friends” behave than on how they appear or what they say.

  And here’s one more thing I’ve learned from mysteries and thrillers: the only people you should never, ever trust are the people who say, “Trust me.”

  The Odyssey

  Embracing Mediocrity

  IN THE EARLY 1970S in the Boston area it wasn’t unusual to start studying Latin in seventh grade. Almost all the schools, public and private, taught it. I suspect this had something to do with Boston’s large and influential Irish Catholic population (even after the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965, Mass in Boston was still occasionally celebrated in Latin). Studying Latin was particularly not unusual at my school because we had the kind of Latin teacher who was so popular that he could have been teaching Uighur and his class still would have been filled to bursting with kids who wanted not just to take the class but to be able to say they had taken it, to trade stories with those who had sat in those seats before. So, at age twelve, I started Latin.

  Literature is full of books about great teachers: The Prime of Mis
s Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and Goodbye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton, to name just two. Mr. Gill, my seventh-grade Latin teacher, was the kind of inspired, charismatic teacher who deserves a book of his own.

  “Ah, dawn breaks over Marblehead,” Mr. Gill would say when you got an answer right. We thought this expression was a riot; Marblehead was a nearby Massachusetts town. We didn’t just want to learn from Mr. Gill—we wanted to be him and would greet one another as he greeted us: “Hi, hi, how are you?” pronounced in his broad Boston accent as “Hi, hi, how ah yuh?” The answer was always: “Gud, gud, ya-self?”

  Mr. Gill believed that students learn best when multiple senses are engaged, so he had us sing the Latin declensions in unison to allow us to hear them fully voiced; he also required each of us to create our own set of Latin-English flashcards so we could touch the words we were learning. Smell and taste were the senses he left out.

  Each week after collecting our homemade flashcards, he would fling them back at us Frisbee-style, with uncanny aim. It was a point of pride not to fumble your set when it was tossed at you and also incentive to stay awake lest your cards go flying by while you were dozing.

  We learned French to go to France (one day, we hoped). We learned history because, we were told, if we didn’t we were destined to repeat it. We learned math so we could learn more math (at least that’s how it was explained to us: if we didn’t take geometry, we couldn’t take trig, and if we didn’t take trig, then we couldn’t take calculus—no wonder I stopped as soon as I could, to my eternal regret). But Latin—Latin was going to teach us things. Exactly what? Well, that we had to wait to find out.

  First came Caesar. From him I learned that Gaul was divided in three parts. And I learned a lot of military maneuvers and wondrous facts about the Roman Empire and neighboring nations. (According to Caesar, the barbarian men of early Britain dyed themselves a fierce shade of blue and shaved their entire bodies except for the hair on top of their head and their mustaches; they were also polygamous.) We spent a lot of time reading Caesar. It was very enjoyable. But Mr. Gill spoke with such reverence about what the classics had to teach us that I kept waiting for a piece of knowledge that would knock me off my chair. I was hoping that the thing I would learn would be something intense, that after a certain point I would become like a Mason, someone who had secrets and shares them with others who had been through the same rigorous initiation. And after I learned that thing, I hoped and trusted, my life would never be the same.