Library Notes

 by Rebecca Hyde Rowan Public Library

            A conversation about books and reading might touch on what is the best American novel or what you’re reading now.  Less frequently asked would be “What are you rereading? How many times?  And why?

            Maureen Corrigan shares her rereading experiences in “So We Read On:  How the Great Gatsby Came to be and Why It Endures.”  As a high-school student, Corrigan read Gatsby and thought it “a boring novel about rich people.”  At fifty-five, she considers it “The Great American Novel, “ which deserves to be read at least twice in one’s life, if not every five years.  What happened to Corrigan and why did her opinion of the novel change?

            She became, over the years, a literary critic, book reviewer, teacher, and little older.  Her advice is: “First … you have to wise up a little, get older, become more vulnerable to both the sadness of everyday life and its loveliness.”   “The Great Gatsby” is the grim story of a man’s fall from grace, suggesting that the American Dream may be a mirage.  It takes on the tough subjects of social class and empty idol worship, be it romantic love or the rewards of self-improvement.  For Corrigan, the language of the telling sets the novel apart.  In the “most beautiful sentences ever written about America,” Fitzgerald makes the Dream irresistible.  And Corrigan, because she hasn’t “learned enough,” because she wants to “look harder, read smarter,” will in a year inevitably pick up and read “Gatsby” again.

            “My Life in Middlemarch,” by Rebecca Mead, is a memoir, a biography, and literary criticism.  Mead was seventeen when she first read “Middlemarch” by George Eliot, still living in the English town where she grew up and prepping with a tutor for her university entrance examinations.  She loved “Middlemarch” because it gratified her aspirations to maturity and learnedness.  She completely identified with Miss Dorothea Brooke, and admired what little she then knew about George Eliot.  Every time she went back to it, the novel “opened up” further. 

            Now in her forties, Mead is still reading “Middlemarch” but with the sensibility of one who has experienced what Eliot called “the actual friction of life.”  What now resonates in her rereading is not the hopes and dreams of youth but the resignations attending middle age, of doors closing behind one, of alternative lives unlived.  In her rereading of the book and her research into Eliot’s life, Mead works toward a new sense of a life well-lived.:  Dorothea’s fate is to be a “heroine of the ordinary”: “Having aspired at the novel’s outset to do good for others in some grand but abstract way, she discovers that the good she is able to do is in relation to the lives that touch her own more closely, even if doing so may be inconvenient or painful for her.”

            For Mead, reading and rereading “Middlemarch” is part of her own experience of life.  It is one of those books that seem to grow along with the reader.  Rereading can be transformative.