Piece Description

I love books — they’re both my profession and my passion. Over the years I’ve written two of them and bought thousands. You know the kind of house where every scrap of wall space hosts a bookshelf? That’s us.

But too much of a good thing is too much, even for the hopeless booklover; and one day last fall I was afflicted by an acute episode of bibliophobia. I was in West Hartford Center with my three-year-old daughter, Larkin, checking out the annual dog parade with its motley procession of canines — dachshunds dressed up in faux hot-dog rolls, black Labs in Bozo the Clown costumes, that kind of thing.

Larkin had to use the bathroom, so we ducked into the Barnes and Noble. Almost immediately, I found myself assailed by this peculiar dread. I’d experienced it before, in minor mode: the feeling of being overwhelmed by books. But now it ramified wildly. Leading Larkin through the maze of Cookbooks, Travel Books, Psychology, Religion, Art and Architecture, Self-Help and Recovery, Memoir, I began to feel dizzy and disoriented.

The books! There were so many of them!

Suddenly, the very prospect of a bookstore, so often the scene of serene pleasures in my life, gathered a Polanski-like tremor of alienation. I felt crowded not just by the books themselves, but by everything and everyone connected to them. The trees, chopped down, pulped, and churned out in endless torrents of paper, whole forests shrieking in pain. The readers, this vast grazing public ready to add still another book to their already crammed and busy lives. And finally, of course, the writers — the hundreds and the thousands of them, sitting at their desks blasting away, on trains and planes with laptops open, blasting away, in cafes, in parks and office cubicles, all furiously pouring out mad secret visions to fill these shelves, an invisible horde all echoing Whitman’s barbaric yawp, singing the songs of themselves in a nightmarish cacophony.

The room swayed, I felt a tinge of existential nausea worthy of Sartre. It was too much! All the bad books, products of fraudulence or tragic lack of talent or self-delusion or mere routine careerism; the totally unnecessary books, whose writers eddy out their careers in this or that little pool of frivolity; and then the few good books among them — the precious few — swamped and ignored. I quaked before this avalanche of language and its clamor of hopes and ambitions…

… including, of course, my own hopes, my own ambitions — packed long ago onto a boat now leaking and, I feared, beginning to yaw. The writer terrified in a bookstore is a human staring his own superfluity in the face. How to sustain myself atop this vast, pitching ocean of books? How to stay afloat? And even if I should manage to patch my leaking boat and sail onward, who in God’s name was supposed to be waiting on the dock? Who needed me and whatever paltry cargo of words and visions I might bring to harbor?

Trying to calm myself, I clutched at the memory of finishing my first novel, three decades earlier: late night, a thunderstorm raging outside my window, the exalted sense of accomplishment as I wrote the last sentence of the last page. Who cared if my masterpiece ever saw the light of print?, I’d thought back then. But such innocence eluded me now. In its place, despair. To what avail were the stories I had written, the reviews and essays and travelogues and and and and?

Perhaps I was suffering a sort of cultural vertigo at this last moment of the Gutenberg era, the end of books as we know them. Well, I thought, bring it on! Reduce it all to bytes on a Kindle! Close the bookstores, let the harsh wind howl along the empty shelves! Hallelujah! I recalled a dyspeptic remark of the critic Joseph Epstein, concerning the finding that eight out of ten Americans believe they have a book in them. “Please,” Epstein pleaded, “keep it inside you, where it belongs.” Yes! I thought. Let us all STOP WRITING!

              Such savage thrills of annihilation may befit a writer, but not a father. So gladly, very gladly, I let my daughter lead me by the hand to the bathroom, which she used, and onward to the sanctuary of the play area, where I took solace in the endless circuits of those miniature trains she loves. For ten minutes Larkin played, engineering one satisfying calamity after another in the world of Thomas and Percy, while I calmed down.