The native returns

A terror from my reading past, plus my weekly shareables: Twitter brain, magic mushrooms, and the rat-hunting dogs of NYC

OH NO IT’S BACK

(My apologies for the Friday newsletter arriving on Monday … last week was a pretty hectic one in our household—all good things!—and the time skittered away from me. I’ll be back this coming Friday as usual, and will return to a two-a-week schedule shortly. Thanks for your patience.—TT)

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By now you know how much books mean to me. I’m not sure where I’d be without them. Probably hating my job as a junior accountant somewhere. But when I was a senior in high school, I took an English class that just about made me give up books completely.

Whoever designed the class apparently thought the way to get 17-year-olds excited about literature was to force-feed them the most ponderous novels of the 18th and 19th centuries. I remember two in particular. One was Theodore Dreiser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, which is based on a famous scandal from the early 1900s, yet still somehow managed to make murder and adultery boring. But I didn’t really hate that one. I reserved my righteous anger for a book that I still consider the worst book I’ve ever read, the one that wasted so many precious hours of my final year of high school: Thomas Hardy’s 1878 novel THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE.

Over the years, when I get good and mad about the terrible books people feel like they have to read, I remember 12th grade at Brunswick High School, slogging my way through THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE.

So the other day, I went out to straighten up our Little Free Library.

Someone had left behind a copy of THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE.

I assume it was Satan.

My first impulse was to run it through a wood chipper. But then I decided to give it another shot, 41 years later, and see if it was as bad as I remembered.

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Here is the best part of the 1966 edition I sat down to read: The introduction, written by John Paterson, a professor at the University of California, contains this sentence: “The surprising thing about THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE is not that it’s not better, but that it’s not worse than it is.”

This was somebody the publisher paid to write an introduction! Somebody, you would assume, they hoped would make readers eager to jump in! And his conclusion was: Well, this could have sucked worse.

The professor’s point, apparently, was that THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE doesn’t show the same skill as Hardy’s later novels, including TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES* and JUDE THE OBSCURE, although I will never know if he was right because I’m not about to pick up either one.

*I walked out of the movie version of TESS when I was 15 even though it starred Nastassja Kinski, one of the most beautiful women in the world, and I thought there was a good chance she’d end up naked.

The main thing I remembered from the book was the heath. A heath, in England, is what I would call scrubland—grassy, bushy, cut through with trails. In my memory, the book opened with a description of the heath that lasted 275 pages. It turns out the description is just five pages that feels like 275. The entire passage consists of sentences like this: “It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature—neither ghastly, hateful or ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony.”

I have a rule about books*: If you run across a sentence with three or more semicolons, put the book down.

*My other rules: Never read a book that requires a map to follow the action; and never read a book that comes with a family tree or a glossary. To answer the question some of you are asking, no, I have never read Tolkien.

Look, I don’t know much about the history of literature. A five-page description of scrubland might have been the late 1800s equivalent of clickbait. Brits might have been running up and down the cobblestone streets shouting, “The heath! He wrote about the heath!”

But I can tell you that in a South Georgia classroom in 1982, this did not strike any of us as thrilling.

I still wonder why anybody thought we should read it. Our English classes weren’t completely dull—I remember them showing us the short film of Shirley Jackson’s THE LOTTERY, which still spooks the hell out of me—but my definition of “a classic” or “essential reading” was very different than what somebody in our school system thought.

By then I was reading Mark Twain and Stephen King and Dan Jenkins, along with a steady diet of magazines and the most popular publication in our house: the Bass Pro Shops catalog. I didn’t mind long stories—the “director’s cut” of Stephen King’s THE STAND runs more than 1,100 pages. These days I read all kinds of fiction and nonfiction and poetry, from certified classics to throwaway paperbacks. The one thing that drives me crazy is an author who asks for my time and attention, then writes a boring book.

Reader, I would like nothing more than to tell you THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE won me over this time around, and I zipped through all 406 pages, plus 15 pages of appendices … and a map.

I tapped out on page 17.

One of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned is that you can just put down a book you don’t like. Especially once you’re not in high school anymore.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. I subbed in as a one-day-only host of CHARLOTTE TALKS to celebrate the real host, Mike Collins, on the show’s 25th anniversary. It was a blast putting him in the guest’s chair for once.

2. My weekly for WFAE was about the beauty of porch weather.

3. How Twitter broke so many brains. (I am slowly de-tweeting myself, with mixed results.)

4. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about inertia, and why it’s so hard to start new good habits and escape bad ones. This piece by Casey Johnston on “the gravity well” explains it as well as anything I’ve read.

5. DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: The rat dogs of Bushwick.

6. My brother in words Kevin Van Valkenburg’s last piece for ESPN is on athletes who take magic mushrooms in search of physical and mental healing. (Kevin is now doing incredible work for the golf site No Laying Up.)

7. The piece that touched me the most last week was Emma Straub’s essay for GQ on wearing her late father’s clothes. (Her father, Peter Straub, wrote GHOST STORY—another book I loved as a teenager, even though it scared the bejesus out of me.)

8. I just finished Jon Mooallem’s amazing book SERIOUS FACE, a collection of his magazine stories on everything from a harrowing rescue in the Alaskan wilderness to a Ponzi scheme involving pigeons. Every piece Mooallem writes goes deeper than you think it will, and finds those moments where something intensely personal touches the broad and universal.

9. The brilliance of the rice cooker—another one on that short list of stuff that works.

10. I believe I highlighted The Lone Bellow’s “Watch Over Me” in an earlier newsletter … well, they played the Neighborhood Theater here in Charlotte on Friday. I couldn’t go and it’s killing me because they waded into the crowd and played “Watch Over Me” right in the middle. This is what live music is all about. Making a moment.

    See y’all next week, everybody.