Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

Pereira Transforms

I AM SOMETIMES ASKED to name my favorite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E. B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison, and Manto. And then I have my wild card, the one I tend to show last and with most pleasure, because it feels like revealing a secret.

Sostiene Pereira, I say, by Antonio Tabucchi.

These words are usually greeted with one of two reactions: bewilderment, which is far more common, or otherwise a delighted and conspiratorial grin. It seems to me that Pereira is not yet widely read in English, but holds a heroin-like attraction for those few who have tried it.

My own Pereira habit began a decade ago, in San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore, where an Italian girlfriend suggested I give it a try. San Francisco was the perfect place for my first read: its hills and cable cars and seaside melancholy were reminiscent of Pereira’s Lisbon setting; its Italian heritage, from the Ghirardelli chocolate factory at its heart to the wine valleys surrounding it, evoked Pereira’s Italian author; and its associations with sixties progressivism and forties film noir went perfectly with Pereira’s politics and pace.

I have always had a thing for slender novels, and I liked the way Pereira looked, the way it felt in my hands. I took it back to my hotel, and straight to bed, at that unadventurous age still my preferred place for a read. It lay elegantly on the sheets beside me. I ran my thumb along its fore edge, narrow and sharp against my skin. I lifted it, opened it, and plunged in.

That first reading spanned a single afternoon and evening. I made it from cover to cover, pulled along relentlessly.

I was transfixed by Pereira’s beauty. In its compression it approached perfection. It swept me off to Lisbon in the thirties, to a “beauteous summer day, with the sun beaming away and the sea-breeze off the Atlantic kissing the treetops, and a city glittering, literally glittering” beneath a window. I developed a crush on the character of Marta, so briefly sketched, who in her “straw hat” and “dress with straps crossing at the back” asks Pereira to dance, a waltz he performs “almost in rapture, as if his paunch and all his fat had vanished by magic.”

Despite its economy, Pereira was never perfunctory. It conjured out of its small hat a vast and touching sense of the humane. When the eponymous protagonist, an elderly and overweight journalist, confides each day in the photograph of his dead wife, I experienced their relationship as a living thing. When he tells her the young man Rossi is “about the age of our son if we’d had a son,” I understood why Pereira risks paying him for articles he knows cannot be published because of their implicit critique of Portugal’s authoritarian regime.

I have never agreed with the claim that art must be kept separate from politics. In Pereira I found the definitive rejection of that position. I was captivated by the protagonist’s reluctant political awakening, by his final act of rebellion, so quiet and so reckless at the same time. Here was a novel with the courage to be a book about art, a book about politics, and a book about the politics of art — and the skill to achieve emotional resonances that were devastating.

When I returned to New York from San Francisco, I promptly began to recommend Pereira to everyone who asked me for the name of a great book to read.

It was not long before I went back to Pereira myself. I had just published my first novel earlier that year, and I had begun work on my second. I had consciously chosen to do something different this time, to abandon multiple narrators and essayistic interludes for an approach more restrained, seemingly simple — and brief. I had first encountered Pereira primarily as a reader. When I looked at it again, months later, I did so as an apprentice.

I began by trying to understand how Pereira managed to achieve so much with so few words. But I was soon asking myself another question. How, with such serious and pressing concerns, did Pereira manage to be so difficult to put down? Put differently, how could this most literary of novels also be such a thrilling page-turner?

I found my answers in Pereira’s form. Pereira’s brevity, it seemed to me, gave the novel a lightness that counterbalanced the weight of its subject matter. Moreover, because it was short it was able to move quickly, or at least able to give the impression of moving quickly. After all, there was only so much ground for the reader to cover between beginning and end.

But even though its compactness was unusual, what seemed to me most striking about the form of Pereira was its use of the testimonial. The novel is not a traditional third-person narrative in which Pereira is himself merely a character. Nor is it a traditional first-person narrative in which Pereira tells us the story of his “I.” Instead we have a testimony, with Pereira presumably testifying to an account of his actions transcribed by someone else.

The result is mysterious, menacing, enthralling, and mind-bending — all at once. Through the testimonial form, Pereira makes detectives of its readers. We are unsettled and given more to do. An unexpected interpretative space opens up before us, nags at us, seduces us. We feel more like characters than we are used to. And if my experience is anything to go by, we love it.

Pereira’s politics grow more pressing by the day, as absolutist ideologies and paranoid states increasingly impact our lives. And the lessons Pereira teaches about how fiction works have the power to transform. Certainly they changed this writer. Without Pereira, my own second novel would not have been written as it is. For that, and for the pleasure Pereira has repeatedly given me, I am deeply grateful.

(2010)

My Reluctant Fundamentalist

IN THE SUMMER OF 2000, I began writing my second novel. I was living on Cornelia Street in New York’s West Village, working as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company with the unusual understanding that I would be allowed to disappear from the office for three months a year to write. I was close to paying off the hundred thousand dollars in loans I had taken out to finance law school; I had published my first novel, Moth Smoke, a few months earlier; and I was able to return regularly for extended periods to Lahore, the city in Pakistan where I had mostly grown up. The time had come for me to decide what to do with my life, and where to do it.

The choices I faced were confusing. New York or Lahore? Novelist as my entire profession or as only a part? And the choices were related. If I left my job to write full-time, I would lose my employment-based work visa and be forced to depart permanently for Pakistan. As I had done once before, I turned to my writing to help me understand my split self and my split world. Moth Smoke had for me been a look at Pakistan with a gaze altered by the many years I had spent in America. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I thought, would be a look at America with a gaze reflecting the part of myself that remained stubbornly Pakistani.

By the summer of 2001 I had produced a draft. I had consciously moved away from the multiple first-person narration and freestyle riffs of Moth Smoke. I had instead written a stripped-down, utterly minimalist love story of a young Pakistani man in New York who is troubled by the notion that he is a modern-day janissary serving the empire of American corporatism. The style was that of a fable, of a parable, the kind of folk or religious story one looks to for guidance, because of course guidance was what I needed.

But upon reading it my agent told me he was puzzled by the protagonist’s inner conflict: why would so secular and Westernized a Muslim man feel such tension with America? I told him there was deep resentment in much of the rest of the world toward the sole remaining superpower, and I resigned myself to a process of writing that would mirror that of my first novel, which took some seven drafts and seven years to complete. I also accepted a temporary transfer to my firm’s London office as a way of deferring my life decisions, thinking the city lay geographically and culturally midway between New York and Lahore. And so it was from across the Atlantic in September that I watched the World Trade Center fall in a place I still thought of as home.

The rest of that year was one of great turmoil for me. Muslim friends of mine in America began to be questioned and harassed; I was distressed by the war in Afghanistan; traveling on my Pakistani passport became increasingly unpleasant; and then, following the December terrorist attacks on India’s parliament, it looked as though India might invade Pakistan. Lahore sits on the border, just a few miles from what would have been the front line. I knew I needed to be there with my family. So I took a leave of absence and went back, moving into my old room.

That crisis eventually passed. But my novel made little progress. I had chosen to keep it set in the year before September 11, so that my characters would not be overwhelmed by an event that spoke so much more loudly than any individual’s story could. I grew personally more divided, saddened and dismayed by the heavy-handedness of the Bush administration’s conduct abroad. I decided to make my transfer to London permanent. I met the woman I would later marry when she was visiting the city on holiday. I was inspired to quit my job. Until she moved to London after our wedding, I was often on airplanes between there and Lahore.

Eventually, I realized that, just as in my exterior world, there was no escaping the effects of September 11 in the interior world that was my novel. The story of a Pakistani man in New York who leaves just before that cataclysmic event would inevitably be bathed in the glare of the reader’s knowledge of what would happen immediately after. I also felt enough time had passed for me to have something of the distance that distinguishes a novelist’s perspective from a journalist’s. So I rewrote the novel once again, this time set around the period of September 11, and I finished early in 2005.

The novel was still short, and the basic arc of the plot was unchanged. But I had chosen to shift the voice into an American-accented first person. My intention was to tell a story that felt, for the first third, deceptively familiar, a tale of the sort of American dream now so often told that it lulls us into a lazy complacency. Then, relying on the strength of that bond between reader and narrator, I would venture into more and more emotionally disturbing territory.

This did not entirely work, unfortunately, as my agent and a former editor made clear to me when they read it. But I could see I was close to something now. For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. I had tried variations of minimalism in the third person, with voices ranging from fable to noir. I had tried the comforting oral cadences of an American-accented first person. But there was not enough of Pakistan in my novel, and it felt wrong somehow both to my ear, in its sound, and to my eye, in its architecture.

I was energized by this near miss, and I soon had my answers: the frame of a dramatic monologue in which the Pakistani protagonist speaks to an American listener, and a voice born of the British colonial inflections taught in elite Pakistani schools and colored by an anachronistic, courtly menace that resonates well with popular Western preconceptions of Islam. Even as I wrote it I knew it would be the final draft. I was done a year later, in February 2006, and it sold almost immediately.

Writing now, in March 2007, as The Reluctant Fundamentalist is finally born, I feel its difficult gestation has helped me. I am still split between America and Pakistan. But I feel more comfortable with my relationship to both places than I have in a long time. People often ask me if I am the book’s Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself.

(2007)

Rereading

I TEND TO REREAD small books. This wasn’t always the case — when I was younger I reread long volumes, too. I spent many a summer making my way, again and again, through Tolkien’s capacious fantasies and Frank Herbert’s sprawling sci-fi. But in the two decades that I have been writing novels myself I have reread infrequently, and what I have reread has mostly been short. Tabucchi’s Pereira Declares tugs me back now, and Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart. Perhaps it is because I find the slender literary long form innately interesting. Perhaps it is because novels are like affairs, and small novels — with fewer pages of plot to them — are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.

(2012)

Get Fit with Haruki Murakami

WHEN I MOVED back to Lahore a few years ago, I left my writer friends behind. I had cousins in Lahore, a couple dozen of them, and tight childhood buddies, and aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces. But no writers I was really close to, not at first. No one I could meet for a drink to talk shop. For that, I still needed to visit my former hometowns of New York and London, which didn’t happen more than a couple of times a year.

I was happy to be away from the noise of publishing: the book launches, the award ceremonies, the cycle of who got reviewed how this week. But I missed the camaraderie. Novel writing is solitary work. In Lahore it became a solitary profession, too.

So I started reading novelists to hang out with them. Not their novels, which of course I’d always read, but their memoirs, their essays on their writing, their interviews. I dug out old classics like A Moveable Feast. I asked my neighborhood bookshop to order up Márquez on Márquez, Calvino on Calvino, the multiple volumes of the Paris Review Interviews. Ah, the Paris Review Interviews: orgiastic to a writer who’s been on his own awhile, let me tell you.

It was in volume 4 that I came across one with Haruki Murakami, a writer I’d long admired. And halfway into that interview, I found this quote, which I wound up rereading so often that I copied it out and taped it to my printer: “Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”

I liked this. Not that I thought it was true. But I liked it. Yes, Tolstoy did his share of war fighting, and Hemingway was a tough guy. But I’m not sure Nabokov could bench his weight. And I had the sense Virginia Woolf couldn’t, either (although her biographical details were sketchy in my mind; maybe Bloomsbury was the Octagon of its era).

Nonetheless, like much else that comes from Murakami, that quote only seems easily dismissed while managing somehow to stick with you. There’s a fine line between “you’ve got to be kidding” and genius, and Murakami walks it all the time. Or runs it, as it turns out. Because I next bought his memoir-cum-musings-on-writing, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and learned the man runs like a fiend. He runs miles a day, every day. And then sometimes he swims. He’s done ultra-marathons, triathlons. He doesn’t just talk the talk. He splashes-runs-pedals the hell out of the walk.

Now, at the time I encountered the Murakami quote, I was stuck. My third novel was going nowhere. Maybe it was being a new father. Maybe it was the spate of terrorist bombings hitting Lahore. Maybe it was the heat — and the cold, because although Lahore is mostly warm, the short winters can get pretty cold and natural gas shortages plus poor insulation mean you’re cold indoors, constantly. But probably it was none of those things. My first two novels took seven years each, and I throw out draft after draft. Being stuck comes as naturally to me as running comes to Murakami.

I needed to get unstuck. And, nearing the age of forty, I’d already used up many of the usual tricks writers before me had employed to shake things up when they were in a rut: travel chemically, break your heart, change continents, get married, have a child, quit your job, etc. I was desperate. So I started to walk. Every morning. First thing, as soon as I got up, which as a dad now meant six or seven a.m. I walked for half an hour. Then I walked for an hour. Then I walked for ninety minutes. My wife was amused. Good-bye Hamid, hello Hamster — that sort of thing.

(As an aside, a cousin of mine in Karachi, an anti-intellectual, hard-partying, gun-carrying, off-for-the-weekend-in-his-jeep-hunting kind of guy, took up reading around this time. His wife would wake to find him with the night-light on, engrossed in a novel. “It’s weird,” she told him, “but I like it.” She called it his midlife crisis.)

Murakami’s quote is about writing long novels. I write short novels. So it made sense that while he has to run to get fit enough to do what he has to do, I could manage with just walking. And, the significant speed difference notwithstanding, a daily five-mile walk turned out to be exactly what I needed. My head cleared. My energy soared. My neck pains diminished. Sometimes I texted myself ideas, sentences, entire paragraphs as I walked. Other times I just floated along, arms at my sides, stewing and filtering and looking.

Walking unlocked me. It’s like LSD. Or a library. It does things to you. I finished my novel in only two more years (for a total of six), walking every day. And I don’t plan on stopping. If the choice is between extended periods of abject writing failure and prescription orthotics, I know which side my man Murakami and I are on.

I’m now gearing up to launch into novel four. Murakami’s quote is still taped to my printer. It’s been joined by a cluster of others: senior writers I haven’t met, helping out a frequently struggling younger colleague in Lahore.

They collectively surround, I’ve just noticed, an old piece of paper. It’s a to-do list I’ve been ignoring, and should really take care of.

(2013)

Enduring Love of the Second Person

I THINK I’VE ALWAYS been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was “your” boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get “you.” Make-believe storytelling, which is to say fiction, wasn’t exclusively about being an observer — not for me, at least. There was this other strand as well, of being a participant.

Just before my family moved back to Pakistan, I encountered Dungeons & Dragons as a nine-year-old in California. That fantasy game was spellbinding for me. To understand the rules, you had to read books. But then you were free to create. It was collective imagining with a shared narrative. The Dungeon Master — a figure somewhere between an author and a referee — set in motion a tale that players spun together. It was as a DM, I’m pretty sure, that my proto-novelistic skills were first honed.

Of course, I read a lot, too. There seemed to be a constant stream of asides directly addressing the reader in children’s books, a sort of conspiratorial “you” that cropped up again and again. Then there were those hybrids of role-playing game and children’s book: game books like the Choose Your Own Adventure series, which briefly, in that time before computers were readily available, occupied a full shelf of my neighborhood bookshop in Lahore.

Slowly, from comic books and sci-fi and sword and sorcery, my reading interests stretched out in my late teens to encompass Hemingway and Tolstoy and Márquez. When I moved back to America for college and signed up for a creative writing class, I had no idea I wanted to be a writer. When the semester ended, I didn’t want to be anything else.

In my final year, as I was starting my first novel, I read The Fall by Camus. It is written as a dramatic monologue, with the protagonist constantly addressing the reader as “you,” and it changed how I thought books could work. I was amazed by the potential of the “you,” of how much space it could open up in fiction.

The book I was writing then, back in 1993, became Moth Smoke, the tale of a pot-smoking ex-banker who falls disastrously in love with his best friend’s wife. You, the reader, are cast as his judge. The story has what might be called a realistic narrative — there is no magic, no aliens — but the frame of the trial that it uses isn’t realism. It is something else: make-believe, play, with “you” given an active role.

In my second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I wanted to explore this further, push the boundaries of what I knew how to do with “you.” Camus’s novel was a guide, but my project was my own: to try to show, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, how feelings already present inside a reader — fear, anger, suspicion, loyalty — could color a narrative so that the reader, as much as or even more than the writer, is deciding what is really going on. I wanted the novel to be a kind of mirror, to let readers see how they are reading, and, therefore, how they are living and how they are deciding their politics.

By the time I started work on my third book, I’d come to believe that novels weren’t passive forms of entertainment. Novels were a way for readers to create, not just for writers to do so. Novels were different from, say, film and television, because readers got more of the source code — the abstract symbols we call letters and words — and assembled more of the story themselves. Novels didn’t come with sound tracks or casting directors.

I thought my next novel should try to be explicit about this, about the nature of the reader-writer relationship, the notion that “you” could simultaneously be audience and character and maker. My growing sense was that a kind of self-expression (and self-transcendence, and even self-help) is central to what fiction does, both for writers and for readers. And so How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia was born, a novel that is a self-help book that is a second-person life story that is an invitation to create. Together.

We’re born with an in-built capacity for language. It is wired into our brains, just as an in-built capacity for breathing is wired into our lungs. We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

The self we create is a fiction. On this point, religion and cognitive neuroscience converge. When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image. I think this protagonist, this self, often recognizes that it is a fictional construct, but it also recognizes that thinking of itself as such might cause it to disintegrate.

Maybe, therefore, it prefers to encounter itself obliquely. Maybe our selves are more comfortable exploring their fictional natures in stories that are themselves avowedly fictional — in novels, for example. Maybe novels are where our selves get to put up their feet, take off their clothes and makeup and dentures, cut loose with an echoing fart, and be a little truer to what they are for a bit, before they are once more pressed into service, sealed in their uniforms, and dispatched to face a reality in which they can’t, for good reason, entirely believe.

(2013)

Are We Too Concerned That Characters Be “Likable”?

FOR MOST OF my life, I can’t remember having thought much about whether fictional characters were likable. But when I was visiting New York recently, my editor of fifteen years told me she liked to go to the website of a leading Internet retailer, as well as to the site of a formerly independent book community, since acquired by that retailer, and see what readers had to say about the books she published. One of the things readers discussed a great deal, she said, was whether characters were likable — nonlikability being, in the minds of many, a serious flaw.

How interesting, I thought then. How different from how I read. But I’ve been reconsidering the matter. And, on reflection, maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

I’ll confess — I read fiction to fall in love. That’s what’s kept me hooked all these years. Often, that love was for a character: in a presexual-crush way for Fern in Charlotte’s Web; in a best-buddies way for the heroes of Astérix & Obélix; in a sighing, “I wish there were more of her in this book” way for Jessica in Dune or Arwen in The Lord of the Rings.

In fiction, as in my nonreading life, someone didn’t necessarily have to be likable to be lovable. Was Anna Karenina likable? Maybe not. Did part of me fall in love with her when I cracked open a secondhand hardcover of Tolstoy’s novel, purchased in a bookshop in Princeton, New Jersey, the day before I headed home to Pakistan for a hot, slow summer? Absolutely.

What about Humbert Humbert? A pedophile. A snob. A dangerous madman. The main character of Nabokov’s Lolita wasn’t very likable. But that voice. Ah. That voice had me at “fire of my loins.”

So I discovered I could fall in love with a voice. And I could fall in love with form, with the dramatic monologue of Camus’s The Fall, or, more recently, the first-person plural of Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, or the restless, centerless perspective of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. And I’d always been able to fall in love with plot, with the story of a story.

Is all this the same as saying I fall in love with writers through their writing? I don’t think so, even though I do use the term that way. I’ll say I love Morrison, I love Oates. Both are former teachers of mine, so they’re writers I’ve met off the page. But still, what I mean is I love their writing. Or something about their writing.

Among the quotes I keep taped to the printer on my writing desk is this one, from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

I wonder if reading, for me, is an attempt to recognize who and what are not inferno, and if the love I sometimes feel is the glimmer of this recognition.

I wonder if that is the case for many of us. Perhaps, in the widespread longing for likable characters, there is this: a desire, through fiction, for contact with what we’ve armored ourselves against in the rest of our lives, a desire to be reminded that it’s possible to open our eyes, to see, to recognize our solitude — and at the same time to not be entirely alone.

(2013)

Where Is the Great American Novel by a Woman?

WHERE IS THE Great American Novel by a woman? Well, have a look at your bookshelf.

What else are those mind-blowing late-twentieth-century works by such American women as, among others, Kingston and Kingsolver, Morrison and Robinson, L’Engle and Le Guin, if not great novels? And in our own still-young twenty-first century, much of the most interesting American writing I, at least, happen to read seems to be coming from women, including Jennifer Egan, Julie Otsuka, A.M. Homes, and Karen Russell. (Nor is this a United States — specific phenomenon: over in Britain, where I served as a judge for this year’s BBC National Short Story Award, we found ourselves announcing an all-women shortlist.)

Ah, I’ve heard it said too often, those woman-written books may be fine, there may be some good American novels among them, even great American novels, but they aren’t the Great American Novel. So I’ve come to make an announcement. There is no such thing.

The point of there being a notion of the Great American Novel is to elevate fiction. It’s a target for writers to aim at. It’s a mythological beast, an impossible mountaintop, a magical vale in the forest, a place to get storytellers dreaming of one day reaching. It keeps you warm when times are cold, and times in the world of writing for a living are mostly cold.

But if the idea of the Great American Novel is blinding us to exquisite fiction written by women, then perhaps its harm is exceeding its usefulness. Attempt, therefore, to resist the admittedly rich resonances that attach to the fact that a Muslim-named man who lives in Pakistan is performing this task, and bear with me as I advocate the death of the Great American Novel.

The problem is in the phrase itself. “Great” and “Novel” are fine. But “the” is needlessly exclusionary, and “American” is unfortunately parochial. The whole, capitalized, seems to speak to a deep and abiding insecurity, perhaps a colonial legacy. How odd it would be to call Homer’s Iliad or Rumi’s Masnavi “the Great Eastern Mediterranean Poem.”

Elevated fiction reaches for transcendence. Gatsby’s beauty, Blood Meridian’s beauty, Beloved’s beauty don’t lie in their capturing something quintessentially American, for there is no such thing. These novels reveal an America too vast and diverse to support unitary narratives. They split atoms to reveal galaxies. Their beauties lie in attaining wisdom and craftsmanship so exalted as to exceed our petty nationalisms — so exalted, in other words, as to be human.

This wisdom may come from Americans and be set in America, but it is bigger than notions of black or white, male or female, American or non-. Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered, or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.

It’s a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves. Otherwise, why imagine at all? So drop the caps. Drop the “the.” Drop the “American.” Unless you think you’re working on the Great American Novel. In which case, if it helps, keep the notion of it alive in your heart, no longer as a target to hit, but as the gravity you must defy to break from orbit and soar into space.

We’re out here. Waiting for you. Foreigners. Freaks, every last one. Your laws call us aliens. But you know better. You’ve grappled with the freakiness within. You’re part of us. And we of you.

Welcome, American. Now tell us about Topeka. Or Taiwan. And, by the way, have you brought along a copy of the latest Oates?

(2013)

How Do E-Books Change the Reading Experience?

THE ADVANTAGES OF e-books are clear. E-books are immediate. Sitting at home in Pakistan, I can read an intriguing review of a book, one not yet in stores here, and with the click of a button be reading that book in an instant. E-books are also incorporeal. While traveling, which I do frequently, I can bring along several volumes, weightless and indeed without volume, thereby enabling me to pack only a carry-on bag.

And yet the experience of reading e-books is not always satisfactory. Yes, it is possible to vary the size of the font, newly important to me at age forty-two, as I begin to perceive my eye muscles weakening. Yes, e-books can be read in the dark, self-illuminated, a convenient feature when my wife is asleep and I am too lazy to leave our bed, or when electricity outages in Lahore have persisted for so long that our backup batteries are depleted. And yes, they offer more frequent indicators of progress, their click-forwards arriving at a rapidity that far exceeds that of paper flipping, because pixelated screens tend to hold less data than printed pages and furthermore advance singly, not in two-sided pairs.

Nonetheless, often I prefer reading to e-reading. Or rather, given that the dominance of paper can no longer be assumed, p-reading to e-.

I think my reasons are related to the fact that I have disabled the browser on my mobile phone. I haven’t deleted it. Instead, I’ve used the restrictions feature in my phone’s operating system to hide the browser, requiring me to enter a code to expose and enable it. I can use the browser when I find it necessary to browse. But, for the most part, this setting serves as a reminder to question manufactured desires, to resist unless I have good cause.

Similarly, I have switched my e-mail account from the attention- and battery-consuming “push” setting to the less frenzied manual one. E-mails are fetched when I want them to be, which is not all that often. And the browser on my slender fruit knife of a laptop now contains a readout that reminds (or is it warns?) me how much time I have spent online.

Time is our most precious currency. So it’s significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.

I crave technology, connectivity. But I crave solitude, too. As we enter the cyborg era, as we begin the physical shift to human-machine hybrid, there will be those who embrace this epochal change, happily swapping cranial space for built-in processors. There will be others who reject the new ways entirely, perhaps even waging holy war against them, with little chance — in the face of drones that operate autonomously while unconcerned shareholding populations post selfies and status updates — of success. And there will be people like me, with our powered exoskeletons left often in the closet, able to leap over buildings when the mood strikes us, but also prone to wandering naked and feeling the sand of a beach between our puny toes.

In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: for these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.

(2014)

Are the New “Golden Age” TV Shows the New Novels?

MOVIES HAVE ALWAYS seemed to me a much tighter form of storytelling than novels, requiring greater compression, and in that sense falling somewhere between the short story and the novel in scale. To watch a feature film is to be immersed in its world for an hour and a half, or maybe two, or exceptionally three. A novel that takes only three hours to read would be a short novel indeed, and novels that last five times as long are commonplace.

Television is more capacious. Episode after episode, and season after season, a serial drama can uncoil for dozens of hours before reaching its end. Along the way, its characters and plot have room to develop, to change course, to congeal. In its near limitlessness, TV rivals the novel.

What once sheltered the novel were differences in the quality of writing. Films could be well written, but they were smaller than novels. TV was big, but its writing was clunky. The novel had Pride and Prejudice; TV had Dynasty. But television has made enormous leaps in the last decade or so. The writing has improved remarkably, as have the acting, direction, and design.

Recently we’ve been treated to many shows that seem better than any that came before: the brilliant ethnography of The Wire, the dazzling sci-fi of Battlestar Galactica, the gorgeous period re-creation of Mad Men, the gripping fantasy of Game of Thrones, the lacerating self-exploration of Girls. Nor is TV’s rise confined to shows originating in only one country. Pakistani, Indian, British, and dubbed Turkish dramas are all being devoured here in Pakistan. Thanks to downloads, even Denmark’s Borgen has found its local niche.

I now watch a lot of TV. And I’m not alone, even among my colleagues. Ask novelists today whether they spend more time watching TV or reading fiction and prepare yourself, at least occasionally, to hear them say the unsayable.

That this represents a crisis for the novel seems to me undeniable. But a crisis can be an opportunity. It incites change. And the novel needs to keep changing if it is to remain novel. It must, pilfering a phrase from TV, boldly go where no one has gone before.

In the words of the Canadian writer Sheila Heti: “Now that there are these impeccable serial dramas, writers of fiction should feel let off the hook more — not feel obliged to worry so much about plot or character, since audiences can get their fill of plot and character and story there, so novelists can take off in other directions, like what happened with painting when photography came into being more than a hundred years ago. After that there was an incredible flourishing of the art, in so many fascinating directions. The novel should only do what the serial drama could never do.”

Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel.

In the future, novelists need not abandon plot and character, but would do well to bear in mind the novel’s weirdness. At this point in our technological evolution, to read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings, exceeded only by sex. Novels are characterized by their intimacy, which is extreme, by their scale, which is vast, and by their form, which is linguistic and synesthetic. The novel is a kinky beast.

Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual.

Sufis tell of two paths to transcendence: one is to look out at the universe and see yourself, the other is to look within yourself and see the universe. Their destinations may converge, but television and the novel travel in opposite directions.

(2014)