Books About Books

Lately I seem to be on a tear of reading books about books. It started a couple of weeks back when I found A Jane Austen Education on the new book shelves at our little library. No sooner had I finished that than my copy of The Wilder Life hit the hold shelves two towns over.

I'm working on reviews of both, but I found myself wanting to jot a few thoughts here. These were both fascinating reads...highly different from one another in some essential ways, and yet similar too. They both seem to fall into the genre I'm coming to think of as literary memoir, or maybe "book lover's confessional" would be more appropriate.

A Jane Austen Education is subtitled "How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter." (In other words, "everything I need to know I learned from Jane...")

The Wilder Life (a title which could probably lead one into unintended trouble if googled indiscriminately) is subtitled "My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie."

Both books are written by highly literate and liberal folks -- good writers, very educated, with a deep love of story. William Deresiewicz, who used to teach at Yale, has the honor of being perhaps the most interesting male writer I've ever read on Austen. His book is about two-thirds thought-provoking literary criticism (he gives readings of all six of Austen's novels) and one-third memoir/confessional. What fascinates me most about this book, written from the perspective of a Jewish academic who seems mostly secular, is that his main thesis boils down to this: reading Jane Austen helped him to be a kinder, more compassionate, deeper human being. In fact, I think you could actually argue persuasively from his arguments that what he learned from Austen is the need for Christian virtues (and the beauty of holiness).

Wendy McClure, the author of the Wilder book, sounds even younger and hipper than Deresiewicz, whom I gather is about my age (hence not so young and hip anymore, though certainly not decrepit). She's also a lot less academic...though her impressive writer credentials include an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her prose style reminds me a bit of Anne Lamott, if one could ever imagine Anne Lamott wearing a sunbonnet and trekking across the prairie in an obsessive search for some elusive...something. That is, something that has to do with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her story, something that somehow might connect to the trekker's own story.

I have to admit I laughed out loud multiple times while reading The Wilder Life. I love (love, love) all the Little House books. I've loved them since childhood, and I've loved reading them all to my daughter (except for the First Four Years, which I've not been able to bring myself to put her through yet). McClure knows the books backwards and forwards, and it was easy to fall into a deep kinship with her experience of inhabiting the world of the books so deeply. I too inhabited Laura's story in my childhood. And whenever I enter the books again, I still feel like I do ~ an experience I've had many a time, not just with Wilder's work, but with other writers too, including Austen.

McClure talks about religion more overtly than Deresiewicz, though in a way that shows her discomfort with zealous people who take it too seriously ~ and while one can easily empathize with that, I found it interesting that she was scared off by religious zeal/passion when she was so good at showing so much of her own -- when it came to literature! She tries to be charitable, but she clearly feels ambiguous about how "Christian homeschoolers" (a group she tends to lump together without much differentiation) have approached Wilder's work. That made me chuckle, partly because I'm both a Christian and a homeschooler, and I would likely have some of the same concerns/critiques she has. Wilder has definitely been embraced by the wider homeschooling community, but not always for the reasons McClure assumes and most highlights. There's a tremendous diversity among homeschoolers, even faith-based ones, that she hasn't quite grasped...though it's hard to fault her for that since it's a common misperception.

What Deresiewicz and McClure have in common, despite their different voices and approaches, is that ability to fall completely into stories, to let stories change and shape them. They are passionate readers who have found not just artistry in the pages of books, but themselves. And they're passionate about sharing their insights about what they've learned in the process. Deresiewicz' journey is much more interior/cerebral, though the book takes a surprisingly personal turn in the final chapter as he relates his own story of courtship/love/marriage and gives it an Austen spin. McClure's journey is exterior as well as interior as she sets out on an actual pilgrimage to see as many Laura Ingalls Wilder "places" as she can, and as she tries to sort out the tensions between truth/fiction and the connections (and disconnects) between Laura's life and her own.

Both books also put me in mind of C.S. Lewis. Okay...a lot of books put me in mind of C.S. Lewis, who has helped me learn how to read and think more deeply. (I sometimes feel like Jack hovers between the lines of most things I read, whispering encouragement and pointing out insights.) His words on "sehnsucht" (that deep yearning or craving for something beyond ourselves, something that often feels just out of reach) kept playing through my mind as I read these two authors. And they both seem to be living examples of Lewis' wonderful quote: "We read to know that we are not alone."