About
fifteen months after I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I attended a going-away
party for a former colleague at the Massachusetts Municipal Association, who
had taken a job as the town manager in Amherst, Massachusetts. Another former
colleague asked me a pointed question: “Can you still read?” I answered her
immediately, noting that I was writing a weekly blog about Alzheimer’s. But her
frank question made me think. It was the first such question that I had
fielded. I turned around the question to ask myself, How long will I be able to
read?
A simple answer is elusive. In the basic sense, a Stop
sign is a very important sign. So is a crosswalk. During the eighteen months I
worked in the Waterbury, Connecticut, area, I reported on a gruesome neck
injury. Because the authorities had failed to replace a Stop sign in a timely
fashion, a man broke his neck. But more broadly, of course, I am talking about
the challenges of decoding what we call reading and writing. I am drawing on
two accomplished writers who don’t have much have in common: Ron Chernow, an acclaimed biographer of George
Washington and other founding fathers, and Don DeLillo, best known for novels that
seem to portend the near future. DeLillo’s sprawling masterpiece Underworld was published in 1997, four
years ahead of 9/11. The original dust jacket seemed to portend 9/11. The twin
towers still stood. An old church stood in the foreground.
Of the two writers, Chernow is much more accessible. He is
first a historian, but also a gifted storyteller. As I was reading this tome, I
realized how little I knew about George Washington. As a young officer in the
French and Indian War, he almost succumbed to dysentery. And two decades later,
the scene in Valley Forge is downright horrible. Many of the soldiers didn’t
have boots, and spores of blood littered the ice and snow. There are other gruesome
scenes in this section. Lafayette, the French officer who led France to
intervene on behalf of the colonies, ended up in a ghastly dungeon in Revolutionary
France. Incredibly, he survived to meet George Washington after the war was
over. At certain times I found myself skimming some portions. And that is not
Chernow’s fault.
Pre-Alzheimer’s, I
only skimmed if I found the writer boring.
DeLillo’s The Names is
only about 340 pages, but it is the opposite of a fast read. I decided to peek
at the original review in The New York
Times, which appeared in 1982. The reviewer described the book as a “brilliant,
ultimately rather elusive meditation on America’s place in the world.”
First, it is a work of fiction, but not a mainstream fiction.
Some of DeLillo’s novels are dark comedies, and White Noise is probably his most popular book, on account of its
dark comedy. But The Names was the
book that made him a prominent writer in 1982.
Here is an example from the book, depicting a chaotic
scene in Tehran at a time when Islamic radicals were clashing with secular
protesters: “As hundreds of thousands of people marched toward the Shayyad
monument, some of them wearing funeral shrouds, striking themselves, with steel
bars and knife affixed, David was hosting a Chain Day party at his house in
North Tehran, an area sealed off by troopers and tank barricades. The
partygoers could hear the chanting mobs here but whether they were chanting ‘Death
to the Shah’ or ‘God is great,’ and whether it mattered. ... The drivers were
in free form.” And then kicker: They did not
reduce speed when driving in reverse.
In another scene, the main character muses about his disappointment
that his funeral will not be televised. Someone else, casually, asked, “do you
film the murder?’”
“The other person says, casually, “Eat your eggs.”
“You haven’t thought that far ahead?”
“There won’t be a murder. No one gets hurt. At the end,
they raise their arms, holding up the weapons.” One character is an
experimental Western film director.
In the same conversation, the Manson cult is brought into
the conversation. This makes sense, because the key plot point in the book is a
cult murder. “They’re adding material to their public dream,” one of the
characters remarks. “They want to vault into eternity.”