Bookmarked

Hollywood gossip column, in which the string of short staccato items, separated from one another by ellipses, required pizzazz. Granted she was backed by the authority of her association with Fitzgerald and the College of One. He had even planned a graduation for her, complete with cap and gown, from the two-and a half-year program of study (though his death intervened to cancel the ceremony). But theirs had never been truly academic study. It was more playful, more slanted to appreciation, as teacher and pupil recited poems together and pretended to be characters of their favorite books—Grushenka and Alyosha from The Brothers Karamozov, shortened to “Grue” and “Yosh,” Natasha and Pierre from War and Peace (my mother had rebelled against being cast as the worldly jaded Helene), Swann and Odette from Proust, Esther Summerson and Mr. Jarndyce or the Smallweeds slumped in their chairs from Bleak House, Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley from Vanity Fair, or, for a change, Scott would become fat Jos Sedley. Anecdotes of the education had brought my mother and Fitzgerald alive for me in their zest for one another and for literature. But despite an imagined Fitzgerald joining tacitly in her criticism, I managed, tenuously, to hold my ground. What did my mother, or even her attendant ghost, know of the expectations, indeed the requirements of serious scholarly work?

I followed the masters thesis on Woolf with a doctoral dissertation on George Eliot, a well-focused study with a cumbersome title. I didn’t show any of it to my mother, who in any case seemed content to bask in the solidity of my achievement in completing my PhD and then becoming a professor. Often, though, in my early experience as a teacher, assigning the kinds of papers I myself had been assigned on themes and imagery and literary structure, I found my students’ papers, dare I say, dull and lifeless. The better students made their points clearly, sometimes with grace, but seldom did their most vibrant energies seem engaged in the enterprise. As for weaker students, all too often I found them resorting to a desperate strategy of mimesis, imitating—badly—the kind of writing they thought was expected of them and failing to be either persuasive or genuine.

My dissatisfaction with academic discourse, long simmering, finally erupted in a plagiarism debacle. Halfway through a general education course that was part of our touted Core Curriculum at Brooklyn College, I assigned a paper on one of my favorite novels, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Four students in the class plagiarized from the Cliff Notes, turning in almost identical papers about Isabel Archer’s flaws and virtues as a heroine. The first paper I read seemed competent; by the third I had figured out the source and was forced to contemplate, among other things, my own failure to engage the students.

Shaken, I realized I must find better ways to help students care about the books and to develop and express their own voices. I started assigning ungraded weekly free response papers, in which students could write anything they liked as long as they wrote something connected to the reading. They could say they loved the book or hated it; they could bring in parallels to their own lives. I wanted to disrupt the categories that box us in and constrain both our imaginations and intellects, to help students to find their own point of connection to the literature and to build from there. As I increasingly sought to do in my own work, I wanted them to join academic rigor with freedom of self-expression. I hoped to teach them how freer rigor—if you will—could emerge from this fusion.

MY study of English novels has become a kind of extended reader response. I always ask students to surprise me, and I hope this book will surprise its readers as well. I have also asked it to surprise me, its writer. Though I approach each novel or pair of texts with a sense of initial direction, I have wanted to remain open to unanticipated detours and connections. Simply asking the question of what particular books have meant to me and to other readers, I follow the twists and turns of the emerging answers, seeking, too, to explore how the life of reading and other aspects of a life reflect one another. How does a figure in fiction come to “be” the reader? I am the orphan, I am the immigrant, though in literal fact I am neither. How can this be?

I turn to my life outside of reading to understand better the power of literature and to literature to understand better the shape and impulses of a life. It’s my hope that by pulling them together, I can go deeper into both the books and the life and show, too, how they’re really not separable. Reading and living, the academic and the personal, modes of critical discourse and of memoir: to deny ways they’re enmeshed with one another is to tatter the fabric of experience. So if Sheilah and Freddie and Scott and other persistent ghosts have not been laid to rest, and perhaps never will be, I invite them to join with David and Becky and Tess and Isabel and Mrs. Ramsay, among others—and, of course, with me—to see where together we shall venture.

David Copperfield

I have always had a secret kinship with David Copperfield. He was the literary character with whom, early in my reading life, I felt the deepest bond of understanding and sympathy. Not only did I know and love him; I felt I was David Copperfield, so thoroughly did his sensibility and experience merge with mine. Reading on my bed in my pastel-wallpapered room, oblivious to the rustling eucalyptus trees outside my window, I was transported from my California Spanish-style house with its red tile roof and white stucco walls to a cottage built of stones on the green Suffolk downs. The green was a hue I could only imagine; it was not a color