{"id":165998,"date":"2023-11-07T12:10:18","date_gmt":"2023-11-07T17:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=165998"},"modified":"2023-11-08T14:44:10","modified_gmt":"2023-11-08T19:44:10","slug":"child-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/11\/07\/child-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Child Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_166001\" style=\"width: 1034px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-166001\" class=\"wp-image-166001 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/cormier-2-1024x768.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/cormier-2-1024x768.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/cormier-2-300x225.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/cormier-2-768x576.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/cormier-2-1536x1152.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/cormier-2-2048x1536.jpeg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-166001\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photograph by Timmy Straw.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>In childhood, books have a smell. Not an actual smell: I\u2019m not talking about the sweet mustiness of a Knopf hardcover circa 1977, or the creaking sawdust odor of a Bantam paperback. I mean that, in childhood, books have the <em>hunch<\/em> of a smell: the way, later in life, you might suspect that each thing has a noumenon, a reality independent of our apprehension of it. In childhood, a given book\u2019s particular smell\u2014though it might actually smell, like snow, of absolutely nothing\u2014emits a kind of hovering mysterious message: <em>here <\/em>is something you can give yourself up to, it seems to say; <em>here<\/em> is something you can give yourself over to, and at the same time never quite reach. In this sense, in childhood, books are more serious than they\u2019ll ever be again. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>In childhood, you find a book in the library, or you\u2019re handed one\u2014in my case, my reading program circa 1990 was shaped by a saturnine and pinchingly generous librarian named Cynthia, who noted our shared inclination toward what I might now call optimistic gloom and gave me, at the age of eight, a children\u2019s series on environmental disasters: Chernobyl, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Love Canal. It was Cynthia\u2014alarmingly old, nimble, with fraying hair, and whose face seemed to shatter when she smiled (a wonderful moment in itself, though it was scary to see her face reassemble into its usual austerity, like watching the breaking of a water glass in reverse on VHS)\u2014it was Cynthia who gave me Robert Cormier\u2019s 1977 YA novel <em>I Am the Cheese<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The cover of the book was promising, I saw. It showed a boy, such as I both thought and wished I was, maybe twelve years old, with a wistful, reluctant look, big ears, and sharp elbows; he\u2019s in the gray wash of a prison cell with cracked concrete walls, a wood pallet for a bed, a key (weirdly\u2014why the key?) on a peg behind him. And I had a hunch of the book\u2019s smell, certainly: it was something contiguous to the feeling of a fall morning, and to the horizon looking south, out of town; contiguous, too, to the brackish salt sense of future adulthood, of workdays and money fear, of someone, someday, mysteriously wanting to kiss you. In it I sensed some shadow of the future\u2014as adulthood is, for kids, both inevitable and impossible; as childhood can be intuited, when you\u2019re a kid, as the long shadow of your own adult body cast back onto your child present. <em>I Am the Cheese<\/em> contained a message for me, I felt. I read the whole thing in one go, one morning in the back of our Datsun Maxima, headed to the mountains, probably, the Oregon Cascades, with the ever-present smell of cut grass and gasoline in the car from my father\u2019s landscaping work; I read the whole thing as though goaded to\u2014whipped on like a dog in a pack of dogs behind the musher of the book.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a paranoid book, and desolate\u2014written, I now understand, at the end of the Vietnam War, around Watergate, the grimmer surfaces of world order newly visible in the first hints of Cold War melt-off\u2014and it was hypnotizing. I dread descriptions of plot, blow-by-blow accounts, but suffice it to say here: <em>I Am the Cheese <\/em>involves a family swept up in the nascent witness protection program via the father, a small-town-journalist-turned-whistleblower to the violent excesses of government corruption. The book unfolds through the consciousness of the family\u2019s only child, a quiet boy named Adam, and it takes place in the fall, in New England (itself a thrill: me, who had never left Oregon except to visit, once, Fresno). And it is threaded through with references, tightening my ignorant heart to anticipation: references to jazz; to Thomas Wolfe\u2019s <em>Look Homeward, <\/em><em>Angel<\/em>; to petty shoplifting; to the perpetual haunting of the father; to shabby motels, diner hamburgers, pay phones; to conspiracies, details, forms of love and betrayal organizing like ice crystals just behind the surface of things.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out, however, that this anticipation of the heart feels quite different in reverse\u2014rereading the book this month, I was unnerved to discover how many fantasies, desires, impulses that I had thought my own were in fact informed by it. I saw that I had, for instance, unconsciously interpreted a number of difficult and very real events in my own family through its fictions; I saw too that several people with whom I\u2019ve fallen in love share a glimmer of psychic resemblance to the girl Adam loves. I was unnerved to discover, in short, that a YA novel could be the source of a greater portion of my instincts and reflexes than seemed at all appropriate; that it could make desirable\u2014so desirable, in fact, as to seem outside of desire\u2014a whole array of emotional tendencies: toward shame, melancholy, irreverence, estrangement. As in: <em>hi-ho, the dairy-o, the cheese stands alone.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n<p>In childhood, you find a book in the library, or you\u2019re handed one; and <em>how <\/em>you find the book, and <em>when<\/em>, and precisely <em>where <\/em>you are when you read it\u2014these things matter enormously. The quality of the light, the mood at home, the facts of material circumstance, so normalized as to be both total and unconscious\u2014in childhood these are as much the experience of the text as is the text in itself. The book and the situation in which you read it form a single weather, and this weather contains you\u2014it enfolds you, as Walter Benjamin writes in the fragment \u201cChild reading,\u201d \u201cas secretly, densely, and unceasingly as snow.\u201d It\u2019s easy to think, then, that there is some aspect of yourself still sitting, mittened and suited up, strangely warm, in that same falling snow; still turning the pages, even now. And to think, too, that this is true no matter how ridiculous, or desolate, or paranoid, or merely competent the book\u2014in the light or dark of your adult present\u2014now appears. Or maybe it\u2019s this: that your hunch of the book\u2019s smell\u2014its noumenon, if I may\u2014is in some strange way bound up in an awareness of your own.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Timmy Straw is a poet, musician, and translator. Their poems \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/poetry\/7946\/brezhnev-timmy-straw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Brezhnev<\/a>\u201d and \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/poetry\/7945\/oracle-at-dog-timmy-straw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Oracle at Dog<\/a>\u201d appear in the<\/em> Review<em>&#8216;s<\/em><em> Winter 2022 issue, no. 242. They are the author of\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/fonografeditions.com\/catalog\/fono26-timmy-straw-the-thomas-salto-print-book\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Thomas Salto<\/a><em>, published in October by Fonograf Editions.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cIn childhood, a given book\u2019s particular smell\u2014though it might actually smell, like snow, of absolutely nothing\u2014emits a kind of hovering mysterious message.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2317,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68717],"tags":[3618,67827],"class_list":["post-165998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-childrens-books","tag-childrens-books","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - 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