By Erica Eisdorfer
Recently, I made the mistake of giving my 11-year-old daughter a copy of The Children’s Miscellany by Matthew Morgan. Mistake? I jest. It wasn’t really a mistake: It’s just that now she’s delighted to deliver such tidbits as, “Mom, a billion seconds ago you were a child.†This, as I’m grappling with whether I can push my reading glasses for one more month before I take the bifocal plunge. A billion seconds? Tick-tock.
But you don’t need a miscellany to provide you with a fact; not at all. Recently, this same daughter asked me what exactly lox is anyhow (an excellent question). “Smoked salmon,†I told her, which made her nod. She then expounded on her knowledge of how to smoke meat – the hollow tree, the proper weather – all gleaned from her reading of Little House on the Prairie, a novel.
Every once in a while it occurs to me that almost everything of consequence
I know, I know from novels. The Hindu-Muslim strife under Indira Ghandi? A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. The birth of our country? The Sot Weed Factor by John Barth. Iceland in the twentieth century? Independent People by Halldor Laxness. Poverty in Martinique? Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau.
But what I know from novels isn’t limited to facts (like the billion seconds) nor to historical/cultural incidents. What novels have taught me ranges the gamut from personal belief to moral behavior. For example, after years of bewilderment about my personal religious beliefs, I read Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman, about a community of Jews of varying devoutness, and felt better. Raymond Carver’s story “A Small Good Thing†reminded me of what it looks like when good people face their mistakes. The great Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook cemented my feminist convictions. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood reminded me of what a liar looks like. And even The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by the brilliant Haruki Murakami bolstered one of my most cherished convictions: that increasingly often, excess really hits the spot.
Given a choice, I’ll always read a novel. I admire the nonfiction readers of the world and have certainly benefited from what I’ve read of it. (Mountains Beyond Mountains! My Own Country!) But I have found, in my reading life, that what happened in someone’s imagination is sometimes precisely what I have needed to help me figure out what’s important or beautiful or terrible about these few billion seconds I can call my own.
Erica Eisdorfer is a writer and manager of Bulls Head Bookshop who lives in Carrboro. Her novel The Wet Nurse’s Tale was recently named as one of Amazon’s top ten Breakthrough Novels.