Beyond books

I just came back from a visit to our local library in Bedford, N.H., where they're currently having one of those "sell the books no one wants" sales. The deal? Four hardcover books or six paperbacks for $1. (That's 16.6 cents per paperback. How do they make change?)

Many of the books for sale were large hefty tomes, including important recent works works of fiction by the likes of Tom Wolfe. Copies of "A Man in Full" (1998) and "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (2004) were both up for grabs: big books of hundreds of pages each, handsomely published in hardcover editions that cost $28.95 per copy when released.

And now here they are, just a few years after their debuts, unwanted by an institution whose traditional mission is the propagation of the written word, priced at 25 cents apiece and not selling. And in terms of their unwanted-ness, I include myself. I glanced at each of them, then put them back on the shelf.

Why? Well, I think it relates to good old-fashioned books and how their role in life, or at least in my life, is changing. The Wolfe novels, which should be cultural touchstones of my age, perhaps discussed and celebrated by all literate people, are instead irrelevant. They may contain all kinds of wisdom and truths, but it's all contained in a form that few people care about or respond to anymore.

Not that longish works of writing are obsolete. But they certainly aren't a mass medium anymore. And the Wolfe books got me thinking about how true this is my life, and must be for so many others.

Yes, I vaguely remember reading ABOUT each of them when they were published—how they were regarded as major accomplishments in the Dickensian style of novel, updated for our age. I recall hearing how each novel captured something important and majestic about our times, how each synthesized elements of modern life in a way that laid bare patterns heretofore unseen and told us a lot about ourselves and could perhaps inspire us to reflect on our evolving humanity. Perhaps. I remember reading how Wolfe labored hard to gather material for both books, doing extensive legwork (actually moving to Atlanta, I think, in the case of "A Man in Full") to give them the ring of truth. As a working journalist (as opposed to the other kind, quite common these days), I respected that.

And I remember all this because I actually read an earlier Wolfe novel, "Bonfire of the Vanities" (1987), that DID capture something important about the spirit of the mid-1980s in the part of the world I inhabit. And as a young person with literary and creative ambitions, I thought I would eventually get to a place where I would be capable of doing the same thing: creating something that captured my world on a large scale-not only captured it, but wrestled it to the ground and wrung out of it surprising truths and startling insights that might help readers, er, get more out of life.

Well, now it's more than 20 years later, and nothing of that sort has happened with me. And looking at Wolfe's subsequent novels sitting there on the library's "not wanted" shelf, it got me thinking. Never mind changing literary tastes and the pace of modern life and all the other reasons that traditional novels, no matter how amazing or well-crafted, generally aren't big news anymore. (Does anyone really care if Thomas Pynchon has a new book out?) In my case, even if I had been able to marshal my energies and discipline myself into creating something on that scale, it would have probably amounted to coals to Newcastle, which is a phrase I learned as an English major.

That's what occurred to me as I reshelved the Wolfe novels with a sigh and a shrug. Would be nice, but who has the time? I certainly don't-neither to read Wolfe's wonderful and important books, nor to compose anything of my own on such a scale. Does anyone? And so, what value can a book possess if it contains the wisdom of a lifetime, but is just too darned long for anyone to read?

It's not like books are disappearing. Even with the advent of reading devices such as the Kindle (and now the iPad), more actual books are published than ever before. It's just that books are no longer a way to reach a mass audience, unless you're Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling, which I am not.

For the rest of us, it's similar to what's happened with television in my lifetime. In the days of three networks, we all watched the same shows, which was a sort of shared cultural experience and creator of comment reference points. (Even if the show was Gilligan's Island.) Now there are so many channels, no one watches the same thing, so the shared experience has been diminished. Increasingly, we define ourselves in terms of groups with interested that are ever narrower, ever more specific. And the media we consume is less and less general, and more and more specific. I'm not sure where this will lead or what the impact of it will be. but it's how things seem to be. And anyway, it's nothing new. It's called entropy.

Well, the point is that Tom Wolfe's unread novels make me think it's time to try something new. Hoping to eventually be ready to create something on a large scale is a strategy that doesn't seem to hold much promise. In terms of books and media and communication, things are changing. And in terms of me, at this point what I might want to say may not work in that kind of environment anyway. Maybe there's a different way.

And books or no books, one thing I know is that for me, the process of writing is often a way to clarify my own thinking. (Not that this is much evidence of that so far.) For some time now, I've resisted putting much energy into all the new online communication tools (blogs, Facebook, whatever) for reasons of privacy, I guess, and also because it's just not a good idea to be too casually personal about anything on the Internet in the age of routine Google searches on job or loan applicants.

But enough. I'm 46, which means at this point if I ever need to go out and get a new job, I'll probably be on outer reaches of any candidate pool anyway, so whatever I post here likely won't be a factor. And also, I recently realized that the age of 46 was significant for three people I admire.

1.) The composer Charles Ives turned 46 in 1920, which was the year when a heart attack and diabetes and ill health finally caused him to essentially stop composing, though he lived until 1954.

2.) The writer Jerome David Salinger turned 46 in 1965, which was the year his final piece of published fiction, "Hapworth 16, 1924" appeared in the New Yorker, though he would lived all the way until January of this year.

3.) The writer Eric Blair, known more widely as George Orwell, was 46 in 1950, the year he ceased being active in a creative sense or any other sense, really, because that's the year he died.

Maybe all of this is a sign that it's time to get busy. Maybe it's finally time for the sap to pour, as William Styron's alter ego "Stingo" phrased it in "Sophie's Choice." (Hey, there's a book I DID read.) But what the hell do you pour sap on, anyway? I guess what he meant was that the sap would be the raw material that would be boiled and boiled to come up with some syrup.

Well, if by sap, he meant coming to terms with stuff that's important enough to actually write out for public consumption, then from the looks of things it's already started running.