Unreadable At Any Speed

A poet friend, Bridget, writes that her boss says she should read William T. Vollman. She wants to know what I think of Vollman. My email back:
“I’ve never been able to read Vollman, he bores me to tears. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to. He’s highly regarded and very eccentric for an American literary author. His output is awesome and a little terrifying. He literally has written books thousands of pages long. He is titanic! But again, I’ve never read a sentence of his I felt like completing.”
I’ve never started a sentence of his I felt like completing. And let me say, I’ve read the beginning of his sentences since his first book (1987), You Bright and Risen Angels was handed to me by my friend Josh. He thought I would love it. The first page put me to sleep. Then I dipped into the 7 Dreams cycle, fascinated, in search of one I could read (The Ice Shirts, etc.). There was Whores for Gloria. I love the idea of Vollman. I’ve read he doesn’t have an agent. I don’t know how he managed to do what he has done: write long, difficult books about subject matter that is disturbing to average people. I want to read and love these books but I never will.
How important is it to read things you don’t like because they are important? It is a question that faces me daily, especially with contemporary fiction and poetry. There’s a lot out there of course and some time ago I decided I never had to read a book I didn’t love, if I didn’t want to. I know for a fact I could spend the rest of my life, even if it’s really long, reading only great books I adore. But then I might not read anything less than fifty years old, maybe even a hundred! And at some point, as an author, you do have to know what the competition is up to. And I’m not such a curmudgeon as to believe that there is no decent fiction or poetry being written. The thing is, I’m usually after something more than decent.
I used to read things that were difficult because they interested me, or I felt I needed to. Nightwood is a difficult modernist book I read once, because a friend gave it to me (he was at Columbia, where it is assigned, or was). I read it the second time because I adored it. But Gravity’s Rainbow I read out of a sense of duty. V I could never complete. I didn’t hate Gravity’s Rainbow, I just didn’t get a lot out of it proportional to the effort. I’m happy I read it because it explains a lot about American fiction since 1973, because it was in its way fascinating, and because I felt like I had seen the limit of what could be done in that form of late modernist experimental fiction. Like Finnegans Wake it is a limit I would not even be able to approach, in a sense a dead end, in another sense a treasure trove of techniques. It also means I can write that I didn’t like it with the authority of having read it. I don’t feel that way about Vollman. I can only say, ‘Try for yourself!’
David Foster Wallace is another example. I feel I should read Infinite Jest even if I would hate it because I do enjoy not liking Wallace. Call it envy or jealousy, I don’t care. I’ve never read a sentence of his with any pleasure. I think he has a tin ear and is emotionally, spiritually and aesthetically immature. However, I can’t assert that opinion with any authority! I may be wrong. But I do have to be able to read the damn thing and if I can’t I take that as a strong indication of its quality.
I have read two books by Jonathan Lethem. She Climbed Across the Table was infuriating. I felt like I could just go read Delillo. It seemed like Lethem had made a study of something and then set out to do it. The Fortress of Solitude was a much more accomplished piece of writing, and I enjoyed it as a novel, but it was in the end derivative, more the book of a man who has really good taste in literature. It’s a little like the films of Peter Bogdanovich, as opposed to Stanley Kubrick. But I’m happy I read it and might read something else, just to keep my hand in.
There are others. I could go on. I don’t feel any longer that I need to read things. I’ve got my own thing to say. I’ve paid my dues as a reader long ago. In the end it’s all very subjective. I do believe in aesthetic standards, but I don’t believe they are universally or objectively applicable. There are all kinds of ways to write and read a book, and whether Vollman or Wallace suck or are great, whatever the claims made for them by others, is not important. What’s important is whether you enjoy reading their books. Certainly all of the authors I have mentioned have much to give the reader. But I reserve the right to say I find them to be unreadable.