While helping out at the school book fair recently, I was surprised at the number of children who bought books they could easily have checked out at the library. I mentioned this to another mother who was helping out, but my American accent must have gotten in the way because she misunderstood me. "I like buying books!" she said, giving me a rather supercilious look. "I buy books all the time, and I'm never happier than when I'm reading a good book!"
I assured her that she had misunderstood me. That I too read books, getting through several a week, but tended to buy only the ones I couldn't find in the library. We then got to talking about our favorite authors and she told me that hers were three very prolific writers -- two Americans and one Briton -- whose names I will not note here because I am a weenie and I do not want to be sued.
Now I'm really not a book snob. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've never read Proust and I find Faulkner a little tiresome. That Henry James gives me a headache (didn't he ever learn how to do paragraphs?) and I am out-and-out bored by John Milton. If I was really a book snob I would hide all those facts from you instead of admitting to them freely and openly. But when this woman mentioned those three particular writers, all of a sudden I felt like an elitist. Because here is the embarrassing truth: I have read the books of all three of these writers and although I blush to admit it, I have pretensions to do better.
I don't deny that these people can write. I don't deny that they can come up with interesting plots, snappy dialogue, and endings that satisfy their readers time after time. I am fully aware that they've done what I have singularly failed to do: honed their craft, marketed their work, and built up a huge readership. I honestly have no illusions about how hard it is to achieve even part of what they have achieved; I am just stubbornly convinced that if I try hard enough and am endlessly patient, I will be able to achieve something more. Something better. I am convinced that my characters won't be so one-sidedly good or bad, their romances will be more believable, and their lifestyles less unrealistically rich-and-famous. (Yeah, I already know: they'll go over like lead balloons, won't they?)
Do I really have it in me to be a better writer than these incredibly successful, bestselling writers? Am I just full of sour grapes because, while lusting after even an iota of their commercial success, I have the sense to know that I will never have one tiny scrap of their selling potential? Who knows? It doesn't even matter: I have this guilty ambition, and I might as well admit it.
I didn't say all that to my fellow book fair helper of course. I just acknowledged that I knew the authors she liked and had read their books too. And I swear to God, I wasn't the least bit snooty about it.
"So who are your favorite authors?" she then asked me. I told her that I liked Kazuo Ishiguro. She stared at me for a few seconds. "Never heard of her," she said flatly. I told her that Ishiguro was a man, that his novel Remains of the Day had been made into a successful film starring Anthony Hopkins, (she'd heard of him), but she commented rather dismissively "I don't read foreign writers."
This needled me. I happen to come from a long line of teachers and missionaries, people who had it in their DNA to try to reach the ignorant and bring The Truth to them, a quality I have inherited in spades, so I told her that Kazuo Ishiguro had lived in the U.K. since he was four, was as fluent in English as it is humanly possible to be, and almost certainly a naturalized British citizen. I said this very politely and I didn't bother to tell her that Ishiguro can write English 500 times better than any of her favorite authors, but my words cut no ice with her. So I got a little mean. I pointed out -- gently! -- that two of her favorite authors were actually Americans, i.e. foreigners, and yet that didn't take away from her reading pleasure, did it?
To this day the woman shies away from me on the street.
