I'm not entirely sure why I don't blog more often about novels I happen to be reading. I do read far more than the dry and frequently brittle political and religious analysis about which I seem to be perpetually babbling on here. In fact, throughout my entire reading life (that is, from the time I was six years old), it has been stories--fiction, novels, fables, myths, plays, short stories--that have formed the backdrop to my thinking, to my entire being, far more than anything I've ever read in an academic context.
I read fiction (and poetry) continuously, but seldom blog about what I'm reading at any given time. And, as I say, I'm not sure why that's the case, when I very much enjoy reading other bloggers' accounts of their latest reading.
So today, in case this is of some interest to a reader or two: I recently finished Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, and found it a fairly engrossing read. Critics who have compared the novel's protagonist James Sveck to Holden Caulfield may be overreaching just a tad, but the comparison is nonetheless apt.
The book caught my attention, of course, as a fictional account of a contemporary American teen's attempt to come to terms with being gay. It ended up holding my interest for two rather idiosyncratic reasons--one of them perhaps more synchronistic than idiosyncratic.
The first is the theme of the grandmother and the grandmother's house, which looms large in Sveck's story. As readers will know from stories I've shared repeatedly at this site, my maternal grandmother and her house played a formative--and stabilizing--role in my childhood and adolescence. And so I'm a sucker for stories about young people who find little peace and not much affirmation in the house of the mother and father, but who find peace and love abounding in the house of the grandmother. This was one of the attractions of George MacDonald's Princess and the Goblin and Princess and Curdie stories for me in my childhood, and why I read those two novels over and over as I grew up, to the point of obsession.
But the second surprising discovery I made as I read Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: the novel's plot (and its gay Bildungsroman) turn on a scene in which a troubled young Sveck absconds from a young leaders' convention in D.C. to go to the National Gallery. Where he revisits the room in which Thomas Cole's four-part series of allegorical paintings, "The Voyage of Life," hangs.
And where he has a breakdown, which begins the process of his coming to terms with being gay and coming out of the closet.
And here's why that scene grabbed my attention, and why I call it synchronistic: something very similar happened to me with that same set of paintings, at a somewhat later moment in my life. But it happened at a moment in which I, too, was struggling hard with the coming-out process, and the paintings affected me in very much the way Cameron describes the paintings affecting young Sveck.
And so I wonder about the synchronicity: who'd have thought this set of somewhat pedestrian, but still moving, paintings could have had an eerily similar effect on both a real-life person coming to terms with being gay, and on a fictional young teen moving through the same process? What are the odds?
In my case, the encounter with the Cole paintings took place, as well as I recall, in the early 1980s, just as I began my full-time teaching career. And, just as with James Sveck's momentous breakthrough viewing of the allegorical set, this was my second time to see these paintings--and they moved me as unexpectedly and passionately on the second viewing as they did Sveck in the novel.
The paintings depict the progress of a person's life--a male's--from childhood to old age. The symbolism is unsubtle. It's obtrusive, in fact. You won't have to struggle to get the story the paintings are telling if you see the series. In each, there's a boat, a stream, an angel, and the male whose progress through life is being depicted in the series--the passage from infancy to childhood to adulthood and finally to old age.
Somewhere in the journal I was keeping at the time, I wrote about all of this. I'm too lazy to dig out that journal now (and unsure how to find it in the welter of journals inhabiting my shelves), but as well as I recall, here's what happened:
As I made my way from painting to painting and came to the tableau showing the adult man being launched onto a dangerous river, the guardian angel receding into the distance, I unexpectedly broke into tears. Embarrassing myself mightily. Since one doesn't suddenly break into tears in a museum, while fumbling with one's fountain pen and clutching one's journal to distract attention from the crying.
I did not expect the paintings to affect me in this way. At the time, I had no absolutely clinching explanation for why they did so--and why that particular scene did so.
Later, however, it began to become clear to me. I felt, obviously, as I began my work teaching theology in a Catholic university as a closeted gay man in a long-term relationship: I felt exposed. Vulnerable. Confused. In danger.
And I felt that whatever angel had watched over my life up to the point of the launching of my career had, indeed, receded into the distance. I had no clear sense of how to manage the treacherous currents of my life (and Steve's) as professional theologians in an institution in which we could never be honest about who we were--if we expected to keep jobs, to have careers, to do the vocational work for which we had prepared for many years.
I felt exposed, vulnerable, in danger in a very specific way as I daily had to endure the subtle, nasty insinuations of one colleague after another in the theology department in which I taught--almost all of them former priests, seminarians, or nuns, who had left the priesthood, seminary, or religious life to marry.
And who felt better than because of their choice to marry: better than the gay or lesbian hordes they thought were taking over the priesthood, seminaries, and convents, and who had driven them out of their vocations. And certainly better than me, as a closeted gay man trying to find some toehold in an academic theological world they owned and for which they had written all the rules.
And it was all of this that I was mourning when I was suddenly struck so strongly by the Cole painting. I was mourning the unavoidable difficulty of living my adult life as a self-accepting and honest gay man. I was mourning precisely because I knew, at some deep level, that I could not continue the charade demanded of me as a closeted and partnered gay man in a long-term relationship, who also happened to be teaching theology in a Catholic university.
I was mourning because I knew that my need to be honest, to accept myself, to live my own life, was going to result in considerable grief for Steve and me. So that the painting of a man hurtling down a river in a boat he could not control, headed to the rapids, as his guardian angel looked on helpless and horror-struck in the distance, was an allegory of my own life.
I knew this ineluctably as I walked from one Cole painting to another on the day that all this happened to me. Just as young James Sveck knows something very similar in the Cameron novel, as he carefully "reads" the four Cole paintings and then sits down overcome with grief, sobbing uncontrollably, and has to be taken from the museum.
As I say, one of the unexpected discoveries I made as I read Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is that the fictional depiction of a young gay teen's coming to terms with being gay unexpectedly paralleled events in my life at a somewhat later period of human development--but events centered precisely on the coming-out process. I did not expect to find this scene in the novel. I can't say I have ever expected to find it in any novel.
And now I'm thinking about the strange ways in which fiction suddenly becomes truer than all the other "realities" around us. And about whether others have had a similar experience with a novel, a play, a film: an experience in which they unexpectedly encounter a quite specific scene from their own lives in a fictional mirror.
I feel sure this does happen to others. It's why we read, after all, isn't it--to find that there are other stories very much like our own in a world that often feels alien, hostile, and intent on making us seem entirely alone?
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