Finding that special passage

I’ve been taking time this summer to catch up on my reading, which is a fancy way of saying that I’m reading those books that I’m embarrassed to say I never read when they came out or, in the case of a bunch of dead white men, when I was in college.  I’m picking out books with titles known to just about everyone.

Reviewers are prone to lot of literary fallacies—the main character is really the author, the entire novel is autobiographical, the hero is the author’s cousin who got into drugs in exactly the same way, and on and on. These reviews can spoil the book for some of us, me, for instance, by messing up how I see the entanglements. I’m glad to not read the reviews, and go by nothing more than the familiarity of the title. Who hasn’t heard of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, or John Updike’s Couples? Both gave rise to hours of juicy gossip and, just as likely, a lot of ill will. I’m glad to ignore the warnings, which are also suggestions on “how to read” the book. I don’t need to be told where the story blossoms into personal truth.

Often when I’m reading I come to a passage that stops me, holds me from riding forward on the narrative river. There is something in the tone, the detail, the feeling that tells me this really happened. This is real, this is the truth. It could be lines in the dialogue, a setting and how the main character, or a secondary character, reacts to it; it could be a surprise, a reversal, in behavior, a character stepping out of character. But the sense that I’ve come to something out of the author’s life is compelling and convincing—the feeling conveyed reaches me. The passage may go on for several pages, or no more than a few paragraphs, but it does come to an end, and the story flows on as before.

I occasionally recognize the same quality in nonfiction, when the author comes to a moment of truth, as it were, and her struggle with it is revealed on the page. It may or may not be the issue that is the focus of the work, and may not be resolved, but it’s there for the reader to recognize and dwell on. I found this in Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking, and have wondered if she returned to it later.

Occasionally a reader will ask me if a certain passage is real, or, more likely if it’s another writer, she’ll say, that really happened. And in most cases she would be right. When we’re writing, we’re pulling things out of ourselves to make sense on the page, and after doing this for a while, a few minutes or an hour, we may be so deep into the excavation, touching things set aside, that we don’t record in our own mind that this is different from the surrounding passages. 

Choosing a setting because it’s real and readers will recognize it is not the same thing. Using a real politician as a character because he is known to readers isn’t the same thing either. The passage that stands out is something whose meaning and experience is known only to the writer, but when it is shared, it is recognized and felt as special by the reader.

For me, as both writer and reader, this is the best part of the entire experience because I know I’ve come to a passage that is true and unique, lived and remembered and shared.