Readings
At the risk of writing ancient history, let me deposit a final note about The New Yorker Festival. ("the New Yorker Festival"? that's not what it was called; "the The New Yorker Festival"? please...) How it all began, to be exact.
It began with a Friday-night dinner at the Brooklyn Diner USA. Here's what New York is really like: last year, before Jonathan Lethem and Edward P Jones gave readings, I took Ms NOLA and her Bryn Mawr pal Riri Thibodeaux (not her real name) out to dinner first. A year went by, and then I took Ms NOLA and Riri out again, before a reading. It was as if we'd run into each other countless times. Dinner was a lot of fun, but I don't remember why. I was already "up" - at an altitude that I would retain for several days.
We got good aisle seats at the Directors' Foundation, an institution on the same block as Carnegie Hall. I stood up for a long time, waiting for the seats at the end of the row, up against the wall, to be filled. There was some confusion about that. Then we were all in our seats and the house darkened. A young lady named Cressida Leyshon came out to introduce Zadie Smith. Looking quite chic in a head wrap, Ms Smith went to the podium and proceeded to read the passage from On Beauty in which the Belsey family goes to Boston Common to hear Mozart's Requiem. I had just started the book a day or so before, but I'd already read this, so I enjoyed it all the more. Ms Smith demonstrated a versatility with accents that kept performing-arts options open.
Mr Franzen, after he was introduced, read three extended passages from "My Bird Problem," an essay that appeared in The New Yorker in August. With masterful control, Mr Franzen weaves three strands of thought into a passionate embrace of environmental responsibility. I had been impressed by the work in print, but Mr Franzen's reaading made of it something rather more powerful. The focus seemed sharper - there was of course a very great deal less about actual birds - but there was also the writer's stand-up delivery. Jonathan Franzen could spend the rest of his life speaking at university literary festivals and make a fortune. He writes like a tenor, but he speaks as a baritone, and the tension between his flights of fancy and the suspicious impatience that he must have inherited (or learned) from his father naturally resolves itself in laughter.
During the Q&A, both Ms NOLA and I asked questions. My own was inspired by Jane Smiley's theory, advanced in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, that novels have acted as engines of social development in Western history. I asked the writers if either of them wrote with such an idea in mind. I believe that I used the term "last best hope of Western Civilization," and of course neither Ms Smith nor Mr Franzen would acknowledge any such grandiose intentions. But they didn't dispute Ms Smiley's thesis, either.
A few days later, I attended another reading, this one followed by a signing, at the Greenwich Village mystery bookshop, Partners & Crimes. The idea was to get a look at Ruth Rendell, alias Barbara Vine, and to hear her voice in person. As I suspected, she looks like someone who would never be caught dead near the center of any of her stories. A trim petite, wearing a black suit and a nice perm, Ms Rendell (or "the baroness," as she's known chez nous; I just wish I knew of what - PD James is "Baroness James of Holland Park," surely the drollest title in England) has a bright smile and that air of slight but shameless befuddlement that the English play so adroitly in public. Because she could not manage to speak into the microphone - or perhaps because she had shut it off - the shop's ventilation had to be shut down until her Q&A was over. Her reading, from the opening of Thirteen Steps Down ("13" in the Crown edition published here) went nicely enough, and was soon done, and the questions were brisk, too. (Q When you wrote Chimney-Sweeper's Boy, were you thinking of Patrick O'Brian? A No!) So the ordeal of standing still at the front of the shop, far from the podium, was not more than I could bear.
Now, which books to have signed? As was the case with Jane Smiley, I saw what I ought to have brought the moment I stepped into line, when there was nothing to be done. I knew that I'd have to buy a copy of the new book. Well, I wouldn't have to, but it would be pretty rude. But I needn't have asked her to sign it. I could have brought my English edition, asked Ms Rendell to sign that, and given the American edition away. So I was dumb there. I also brought The House of Stairs and King Solomon's Carpet, Barbara Vines both - Ms Rendell explained the adoption of that pseudonym, and how it was never intended to be "deceptive" - and both works that I have read twice. But as I inched closer, I could see that the writer was flagging. She had quipped something about being tired, but up close she positively reminded me of my mother in the advanced stages of chemotherapy. Well, she didn't look that bad. But still. I felt ghoulish with my three books. Once again, a book-collecting mistake. I ought to have asked her to sign the two Vines, period. I'd so much rather have a signed House of Stairs than a signed American edition of the latest Rendell. I did get King Solomon signed, too.
For a generous appreciation of Ms Rendell by another eminent British crime-writer, Val McDermid, click here. And by the way, it turns out to be "Baroness Rendell of Babergh."
