These are busy times for reading badly. Legislators, school boards, and citizens have bowdlerized Critical Race Theory to target grade-school math and history textbooks. Efforts to ban novels featuring LGBTQ authors and characters from school libraries are on the rise. Op-eds are polluted with bothsidesism and strawman woke mobs. Joyce Carol Oates, alas, tweets.
Anybody dipping into literary Twitter can fill a good part of their day following and contributing to the dunk contests such stories provoke. There’s no shortage of opportunities to attain the glow of self-satisfaction that comes from seeing a lunkheaded take getting properly ratioed. Less scrutinized, though, are the reading cliches that even those same well-meaning, JCO-dunking readers might engage in: The hollow calls for representation. Celebrating marginalized writers for producing “timely” and “urgent” (read: short shelf life) works, while white authors produce “timeless” ones. And the relentless parroting of the notion that reading makes us more empathetic, without questioning who or what it’s making us more empathetic toward.
Much of Elaine Castillo’s bracing, informed, and often funny essay collection, How to Read Now, is built around exploding these pieties. Bad reading runs deeper than bad takes, she argues — rather, there’s a systemic problem of misreading that does a disservice to minority writers and often warps how we interpret white ones. “All the ‘representation matters’ rhetoric in the world means nothing if we do not address the fundamentally fucked-up relationship between writers of color and white audiences that persists in our contemporary reading culture,” she writes.
She’s brought receipts, some of which come from her own experience. Castillo, a self-described Filipinx writer from Milpitas, California, wrote about that community in her fine debut novel, 2018’s America Is Not the Heart, and recalls being pressed by a white audience member at a reading to rattle off a list of must-read authors from the Philippines. (“Go!” she commanded.) That’s in keeping with a literary culture in which predominantly white readers turn minority writers into racial confessors, and treat their works less as works of literature and more as field reports, a “kind of ethical protein shake.”
That much-memed empathy that literature allegedly gives us, then, can look a whole lot like narcissism — reading as a way not to explore but to stay in place. One of her strongest examples of this is an extended critique of Austrian Nobelist Peter Handke’s 1986 novel, Across, in which the main character accidentally kills a man after seeing him defacing a tree with a swastika. Most reviews of the book, she notes, see this event as a transformation for the character, albeit of an ambiguous sort. But Castillo’s close reading pinpoints something more menacing in the novel’s character, who isn’t an anti-Nazi do-gooder but a misanthrope “with a victim complex, beset by a hostile modernizing world.” And in a failure to see that, readers — and more specifically, prize jurors — miss something both more complicated and blinkered in Handke’s work.
If “ambiquity” signals a certain unwillingness to engage with the sentiments an author is promoting, so does “cool.” And in addressing cool, Castillo has an easy target in Joan Didion. Focusing on her 1984 Vietnam War novel, Democracy, and writings about Hawaii, Castillo shows Didion as quick to dismiss, ignore, or vaporize indiginous residents. “With all of Didion’s writing, her primary audience is always everyone but the people who live in the places she’s writing about, from California to Colombia,” she writes. Castillo frames herself as an example of an “unexpected reader,” one who, if the writer acknowledged her existence, might be more inclined to visualize them instead of marginalizing them, or blowing them up.
Ambivalent as I am about Didion’s legendary cool — her description of discovering a toddler dosed with LSD as journalistic “gold” remains one of the grossest things I’ve heard a notable author utter — it doesn’t always have to be as problematic as Castillo makes it out to be. Cool has its place, especially when it comes to attacking misinformation and hot, dumb rhetoric; that cold gaze allowed Didion to see the wrongful convictions in the Central Park jogger case to be the travesty of racist injustice for what it was. (Even if what she saw most clearly in her essay about the case, “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” was more the callowness of the white cops, legislators, and lawyers involved than its victims.) Regardless, Castillo is fair to call out a failure to see, which in turn is a failure to particularize. And both, for her, represent dereliction of duty for a writer.
Seeing and particularlizing are Castillo’s main demands throughout How to Read Now. “Representation” is often feeble because it can be shallow both from gatekeepers (“interested in people the same way Didion is interested in people, which is to say, not at all”) and writers (“no one wants your Shein haul of Diverse Characters”). What Castillo seeks is context and depth, and though she finds it in the poetry of Tommy Pico and Toni Morrison’s essays, it’s not the sole province of marginalized writers. It’s in George Eliot and Marguerite Duras and Henry James and Homer — though in that last case, she notes in her final essay, The Odyssey and perhaps all of Western literature looks a lot different if we shift the perspective away from Odysseus and toward the Cyclops.
The best literature — and film, and TV, which she also covers — needn’t be threatened by an awareness of the larger world it occupies, Indeed, as she points out in a riff on Jane Austen and slavery in the Regency era, that awareness can be additive. She’s rightly, deeply skeptical about literary culture’s ability to shift course. (I wish the book might have said more about publishing’s role in this process. Critics, too. I might claim working-class roots and first-generation immigrant status, but there’s no question my whiteness made it easier for me to enter journalism and, later, criticism.) But she’s a deep enthusiast and a close reader in the cases where she finds it: The depiction of Buenos Aires in Kar-Wai Wong’s film Happy Together, the vandalization of a plaque in a New Zealand nature preserve, John Berger’s short story “Woven, Sir,” Watchmen.
Despite its title, How to Read Now isn’t prescriptive — or, rather, its announcement of the problem with reading is so clear that the answers should be obvious. If we read to discover “the things that make us human,” as the reviewer’s cliche goes, the solution should be to recognize humanity. But doing that means escaping a whole host of lit-world cliches, the ones that are so baked into the culture that it can be easy to avoid considering alternatives. Write what you know, show don’t tell, and so on. But Castillo has a few new ideas. “Write what you don’t know, about what you supposedly know,” she writes. “Write what you haven’t ever felt permitted to call knowledge, about what you see and feel and live. Show that which exceeds your ability to tell it. Tell that which exceeds your ability to show it.”
[Published by Viking on July 26, 2022, 352 pages; $27.00 hardcover]