The final representative figure in my reading, the late twentieth-century immigrant, plays with notions of the self and society, alienation and assimilation in recombined ways. Most obviously, the immigrant departs from his or her original home and traditions (like the new woman or the artist) and seeks to assimilate into a new society (like the orphan). The interplay of to and fro movement, however, is far more complex than this tidy formulation. In a world where, on the one hand, CNN is piped into Punjabi villages and, on the other, Londoner-born-and-bred Karim in The Buddha of Suburbia “plays” an Indian, what it means to be English or Indian, French or Algerian, American or Latino loses distinct edges, and the immigrant is caught in the trajectories of this confusion, someone living both in and between cultures, a transnational and hybrid figure. The immigrant narrative speaks for the age, for in this time of diaspora and globalization, especially now with all the instant connections of social media, hybridity becomes our cultural metaphor of choice.
BUT the book you read here is not, for better or worse, the study of English novels just described. It remains true to my original conception: I focus on my genealogy of fictional prime movers—the orphan, the new woman, the artist, and the immigrant—still interested in the ways these figures are both marginal and representative and create a historical line. But impersonality, it turned out, was not the best mode for me. As I went along, I found keeping to it hard—it seemed too dry, and perhaps I wasn’t done yet with my own story. The personal seeped back into my project and transformed it to “an odd mixture.”
My idea became to write a memoir of a life of reading. This would still be a study of literature, but it would document something intensely personal as well. It would be nonfiction about fiction, focusing on a key relationship—that between myself as reader and the object of my lifelong affection, novels—and honoring the remarkable literary characters, whom, ironically, I felt I knew and understood as well if not better than I had ever managed to know or understand those inevitably perplexing parents, lovers, children, and friends. Perhaps literary characters, intimately grasped in our reading, become transparent in ways that actual people, even our familiars, never can be. Also I could hope my story would be a means of communicating with other readers. I had been pleased when my books prompted people to speak or write to me about parallels in their own experience, confiding their stories of charismatic mothers or family secrets. Now as I put forward my fifty years of experience reading, studying, and teaching English literature, surely my account of a reading life would land me in good company—that of people who were not only readers but also readers in the same tradition—people for whom Shakespeare or Dickens were as contemporary as Roberto Bolaño or Jennifer Egan, for whom Becky Sharp was as engaging as Bridget Jones, for whom the fortunes of classical literary characters were as vivid as their own experience, indeed for whom such fortunes constituted part of their experience. In “The Decay of Lying” Oscar Wilde has his protagonist Vivian proclaim, as part of his extolling of Balzac, “One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.” I hoped in my memoir of reading to understand the way certain books manage to compel and haunt us in this way.
My seemingly opposing schemes—scholarship and memoir—began to converge when I realized they involved the same books. While the scholarly work would trace the trajectory in English novels from orphan to immigrant, the memoir of reading, if limited to fiction, would show a similar chronology. I, too, as a lifelong reader had progressed “from orphan to immigrant.” The figures of the orphan, the artist, the new woman, the immigrant had each, in turn, absorbed me, marking a particular stage of my life and preoccupations. I had been a typical young girl reader of horse and dog books and then of the Landmark biographies that helped me to wonder if I could emulate Thomas Alva Edison or Clara Barton. Then my mother handed me a copy of David Copperfield. I was eleven, in sixth grade in 1950s California. From that entry point into Victorian fiction, the lives of David Copperfield and Pip and other orphan figures became my own life’s adventures and my proxies. Reaching across a century and a continent, they fought my battles, joining with me to defy an unreasonable adult, seek a little popularity at school, make choices as to where and where not to belong.
Beginning my senior year of high school and continuing into college, which I entered in 1960, I discovered the modernists. Myself then aloof and awkward, I identified with the artist who seeks “silence, exile, and cunning,” yet also, as with Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, looks longingly at the well-adjusted friends to whom he will always seem odd. I chose the modernists as my initial period of specialization in graduate school. They seemed to know everything there was to say about art and loneliness.
Up to this point in
