An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [40]
It made me feel good, all right, about the Human Condition and about the women (mostly), too. I hadn't read the book, of course, but as far as I could tell, neither had anyone else, and besides, that wasn't what it was there for: the book was there to give the women (mostly) a reason to confess to the feelings they'd already had before reading the book, which as far as I could tell they hadn't actually read. The confessions made everyone feel better, I could tell, because the café was now filled with their bright, non-book-related chatter. The book had made them happy! This was a revelation to me because I remembered how unhappy reading books had made me back when I read them ― they were full of things I didn't entirely understand and never would, and they made my head hurt. Books had made my parents unhappy, too, even though they professed to love them. My mother, for instance, taught The Scarlet Letter every year, and every year after she read and taught it, she looked miserable and depressed and angry about Hester Prynne and her A and her Dimmesdale, as though she would like to take the book and beat herself over the head with it and then go out and find the Human Condition and beat it over the head, too. The look on my mother's face had told me that she was certain that the Human Condition would have been grateful for the beating. Put me out of my misery, would have been the Human Condition's sentiment, according to my mother.
But that happened only if you read the book, or if you read certain kinds of books. The women (mostly) had put aside the book and were now talking about ordinary, worldly things-money, clothes, food ― and they seemed happier now that they'd confessed and unburdened themselves. It wasn't just that they were happier, either: they seemed lighter, and if it weren't for gravity I was sure they'd have been floating up somewhere near the ceiling with their cups of coffee. Their voices were optimistic and clear and not at all afraid or weepy anymore; they were the kind of voices that made you forget that there was pain and longing and fear and dishonesty in the world, and for the moment I forgot all those things existed for me, too.
There was only one more matter I needed to clarify. I walked up to the woman who'd said, "Bring on the dirt," pointed at her copy of Listen, and asked her, "Is this book true?"
"It's a memoir," she said.
"OK," I said, not really sure whether that meant yes, it was true, or no, it wasn't. The bond analysts had been working on their memoirs in prison, but I hadn't been sure whether they were true or not, and for that matter the bond analysts never seemed too clear on the distinction, either, and had spent many hours engaged in debates over the relationship between creative license and the literal truth. I knew better than to press the issue further, because when I'd done so with the bond analysts, when I asked them whether they were telling the whole truth in their memoirs or not, they laughed at me as though the question was just another addition to the house of my bumbling. So instead I asked the woman if she liked the memoir.
"Oh yes," she said.
"Why?"
"It's so useful," she said without hesitation.
"That's all I needed to hear," I told her, because now I knew the answer to the judge's question: books were useful, they could produce a direct effect ― of course they could. Why else would people read them if they could not? But if that were the case, then why did my mother get rid of her books? Was it that some books were useful and some were not and weren't doing anyone any good and so why not get rid of them? Clearly my mother had read the wrong books. But I would not make that same