The Size of My View

Dedicated to my cousin Night, for laying the first foundation

About a week ago, I was talking with my 16-year-old cousin Night, and the topic turned into the recurring themes in the fiction she writes. She acknowledged that these themes are often at the heart of many of her favorite books and I quiped that “writers do not have recurring themes, they have obsessions.”

Later, I thought more about her comment, and began to wonder, has anyone ever thought about why they read what they read similar to how writers have obsessions they are drawn to? I don’t mean just in the genres they read (historical, mystery, fantasy, biography etc.) but in the way that their reading preferences reflect their inner psyche; reading as a therapy session.

Being autistic has colored my reading themes a good deal. I find that I am often drawn to “novels of manners“ (see definition here), which is not a surprise given my social anxiety. I am often fascinated by rigid social codes and pecking orders that govern societies and worlds. I think I am less interested in people who rebel against them and more drawn to the conformists who are slowly suffocating as a result of them and unable to express themselves.

One of my favorite novelists, Anthony Trollope, was, in public life, a conservative Tory with a love of traditionalism, but the humanist/novelist side of him constantly reminds him in his fiction that everything that he holds sacred is built on a rotten foundation. It is a conflict I am not sure he was aware of, and it makes reading his novels a fascinating tug-of-war between the values of the Victorian patriarchy and a more liberal humanism.

In Doctor Thorne (1858), the third book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series, and the novel Trollope considered his favorite, this tug of war is on full display. The novel romanticizes the Tory landed-gentry of England and mourns their decline, contrasting them against the more prejudiced characters who are Whig Liberals, without letting either off the hook. It is a scathing portrait of a society that sees people only in terms of their bank accounts and social class.

Another recurring reading theme is the fear of wasting one’s life. If I look at the small shelf I have in my bedroom devoted to “the books of my life,” there are two books that deal explicitly with this theme: Anton Chekhov’s 1897 play, Uncle Vanya and Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-prized classic, The Remains of the Day (1989). I have read both several times and last year I saw a production of Uncle Vanya at Lincoln Center with Steve Carell in the title role. Both ask the question, what should we do with our lives? And what do you do when you fear/know you have wasted yours by putting your own needs on hold for someone else? The title character in Vanya has spent much of his life in the service of his brother-in-law, a noted professor, only now to see him as a hack. Stevens the Butler in The Remains of the Day devotes himself to his employment to Lord Darlington, unaware of his boss’ Nazi sympathies, and as result, loses the love of his life.

I have never been in the position of putting my needs on hold, but what I identified with in these works were characters who were trying to find meaning in the wrong places and realized too late what they had done. Even now it is something I still worry about; the fear of wasting my life and letting the chance for something better pass me by. Or even trying and having it all come to nothing.

Patrick Paul Barrett