I finished, last night, my fourth reading of a novel I first read when I was twenty-six. The book is a literary novel about a small group of people in a midwestern city over the course of one summer. It is not famous. It is not obscure. It is the kind of book that an attentive reader of contemporary fiction might have on her shelf without having strong opinions about it. I have strong opinions about it, because of the rereading.
I am writing about it here without naming it because I do not want this entry to become a review of a specific book. I want it to be an entry about the practice of rereading, which is a practice I have been deliberate about for the last six or seven years, and which I think is one of the most quietly important things I have done as a reader.
What the new sentence was
The sentence I noticed last night was a small one, in the middle of a paragraph in the second chapter, describing a minor character's reaction to receiving a piece of news. The sentence runs approximately twenty words. It contains no dramatic image. It is grammatically straightforward. It is, in the context of the chapter, doing the work of bridging two more emotionally weighted passages.
I am almost certain I have never noticed this sentence before. I have read this book four times. The previous three readings — at twenty-six, at thirty-one, at thirty-five — all happened during periods of my life I remember well. I can recall, for each of the previous readings, what I thought the book was about, which characters I most identified with, which passages I underlined.
The sentence I noticed last night does not appear in any of my memories of the previous readings. It is, as far as I can reconstruct, genuinely new to me this time around. The sentence has been there the entire time. I have read it, by definition, three times before. I have not seen it.
Why I think I did not see it before
I think the sentence was, in earlier readings, doing work I was not capable of receiving. The sentence describes a small kind of disappointment that I think you have to have lived through to recognize on the page. The disappointment is about a discrepancy between what one had expected of an arrangement and what the arrangement actually became. It is not a dramatic discrepancy. It is an ordinary one. It is the kind of thing that, in earlier readings, I would have read past because I had no internal referent for it.
This is the argument I have come to about rereading. The book does not change. The reader changes. What the reader is now capable of noticing changes. The same sentence, on the same page, becomes available or unavailable depending on what the reader has lived through in the interval. The book is, in some sense, doing a sustained measurement of the reader's capacity to receive what is on the page. The measurement is most legible when you can compare the readings.
What I had noticed in the previous readings
The first reading, at twenty-six, I remember as a kind of pleasant absorption. I was in graduate school. I read the book on a long weekend at my parents' house and I remember the experience as being most about the atmosphere of the prose — a particular dense, careful, slightly humid quality that the writer is very good at. I remember the plot incompletely.
The second reading, at thirty-one, I remember more clearly. I had recently ended a long relationship and the book's treatment of the structural sadness of certain kinds of failed adult intimacy felt acutely accurate. I marked the passages that worked on me and they were all in the back half of the book, in scenes between two of the older characters who were managing a long companionship that had quietly become something other than what they had thought it would be.
The third reading, at thirty-five, I remember almost as a different book. I had moved to this town. I was working at the library. The passages that worked on me had shifted again — this time toward the descriptions of the city in which the novel is set, the small recurring observations about specific streets and specific weather, the long passages where the writer is just being precise about how a place feels in a particular month.
The fourth reading, last night, has produced again a slightly different book. The structural-disappointment sentence is one of several I noticed this time around that I would say were genuinely invisible to me before. I do not think the book has changed. I have changed. The book is doing the measurement and reporting back.
The case for rereading I want to make
I am increasingly convinced that rereading is one of the most generous things a reader can do for a book and for herself. The book gets the close attention that a single reading cannot supply. The reader gets the chance to encounter what was on the page that she was not previously able to see.
This is not the standard cultural pressure on reading, which is oriented strongly toward novelty and toward forward motion through one's to-be-read pile. I am not against the to-be-read pile. I keep one. I read new books constantly. What I am against is the implicit assumption that reading a book once is enough — that once you have read it, you have read it, and the experience is now fixed in a category of completed activities.
Some books — most books, I would now say — are not finished after one reading. Some books are not finished after four readings. The relationship between a reader and a serious book is structurally more like a friendship than like a transaction. It develops over years. The book accommodates the reader's development. The reader accommodates what the book is doing.
The shelf I keep for rereading
I have a small shelf in the apartment, about eighteen inches wide, where I keep the books I expect to reread. It contains, at present, eleven books. The novel I finished last night is on it. So are several others I have read more than once and several that I have read only once but suspect I will return to. The shelf is, in some sense, the most important shelf in the apartment.
I am going to put this novel back on the shelf today. I am not going to read it again for some years. By the time I do, I will be someone different again, and the book will be different again in the way that a thing measures something it has not changed by being measured against it. There is probably a sentence in the third chapter that I have not noticed yet. I am looking forward to finding it whenever I find it, which will be on a quiet evening in a chair by the lamp in a year that has not arrived yet, in this apartment or in some other apartment, with a cup of tea on the table and the radiator ticking and a life that has, by then, accumulated further things to be measured by.
