The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [29]
“Did you read it when it first came out, or have you read it recently?”
“Read it? I’ve never read the thing.”
“Let me get this straight,” said the woman. “Here, in a university, you’re denigrating a book you haven’t actually read?”
Steve mumbled something about papers in need of marking and quickly bolted.
. . . Blink!
Steve emerged from his brief academic reverie and was once again in his living room. Oh God, I asked this Falconcrest fellow his opinion. Now I have to actually listen to it. Okay, Steve, brace yourself. Open your ears . . .
Kyle was saying, “I guess I’d have to say that I have trouble believing in the future, and I think the past is largely an embarrassment. In general, I don’t trust people. There’s very little to believe in, and all I’ve ever been able to believe in are a few cherished books by a few people who I suspect feel life is as fleeting and ghastly and cruel as I do. I think Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers documents this sensibility as it occurred in a variety of long-vanished, almost mythically privileged cliques. I admire Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, and pretty much everything by Kurt Vonnegut testifies to the wretchedness of life, with an occasional sunbeam sent along to brighten things up.”
Who are these writers he’s speaking about? Steve’s mind again drifted off, and he tried to remember who was sitting beside whom at the previous day’s intramural Dewey Decimal System workshop. Something as simple as the wrong seating plan could undo decades of political work, and since the introduction of stacking chairs in the eighties—after much bitter and angry debate—meetings had never been the same.
Falconcrest prattled on.
“I guess I like work that examines unexpected crisis points in modernism. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio examines the collision between rural and industrial life in the early twentieth century. Bret Ellis’s Less Than Zero chronicles the implosion of secular middle-class values in pre-digital California. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a brilliant assault on consumer culture, while everything J.G. Ballard has written can’t but make us rethink the path our world is taking—particularly Running Wild, a book that makes me wonder if the only hope for our world is to spawn children who have mutated so far beyond our present selves that anything we have to offer them as a survival tool is pointless and quaint.”
Steve was mentally day-planning the upcoming week: a dozen meetings, perhaps write a letter pleading for an advance from his publisher for a book he’d been on the cusp of starting for—how long was it now?—fifteen years? twenty? Maybe a trip to the liquor store and, if he was lucky, the delivery of a black-and-white photo magazine from San Bernardino, California, dedicated to the healthfulness of unclothed sun worship.
Steve once again tuned in to Kyle’s words . . .
“To be honest, I’ll read anything, even the four-point warnings on pharmaceutical packages—I like looking at the lines on product bar codes and pretending I can judge which number a line represents from its comparative thickness against the others.”
“Bar codes?” Gloria was puzzled.
Kyle continued, “I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints. I’m always kind of suspicious of young people who, when asked who their favourite writer is, say Henry James or someone equally as dead. Imagine if you asked a young person who their favourite musician was and they told you Vivaldi. Would you trust that person? I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren’t the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does.”
Steve looked across the table and noticed a mosquitolike insect landing on the Scotch bottle’s snout.
“You know,” said Kyle, “I wish, I really, truly wish, Steve, that people were honest with you when they were asked which books influenced them. I think that a lack of honesty about this one question is the shame of the