Re-reading The Sound and The Fury for the umpteenth time this summer produced a curious sensation. I dismissed my unease due to the setting. Faulkner isn’t a common sight on a Los Angeles beach. A bikini-laced woman misinterpreted the hardcover as a green light to cluelessly flirt, and an older man shuffled by and asked if I was OK.
One morning, I caught myself flipping quickly through the pages of Beloved at a sidewalk cafe, treating Morrison’s masterpiece like the latest issue of Vogue. It’s a natural behavior, I told myself, to a story I’ve read multiple times.
Yet a question gnawed in the back of my skull: why did I instinctively reach for well-worn books and expect something new? The answer took a while to chew on.
After nearly five years of skimming new releases in independent bookstores and putting them down, gliding fingertips across ever-shortening “new” literature shelves in public libraries and never stopping, and starting several recommended novels only to abandoned every one before page 200, I had to admit the obvious. I was bored with literature.
An intellectual late bloomer, I didn’t tip a toe into the literary pool until college, but then I jumped head first into the deep end. By my late twenties, I moved across the country with 1,200 books—my most prized possessions. In recent years, I have been turning to the classics and modern cannon not out of force of habit but desperation.
I hunger for new books, but they provide little nourishment. Current writers always leave me wanting more: Solid writing but trite ideas; myopic authorship veiled in rehashed plots; beautiful prose undermined by anemic characters; innovative craftsmanship masked in conceit; great expression without self-awareness. When I hear about the next great writer, I open my heart and mind, but within a few pages, I involuntarily let out a sigh of “meh.” Disappointment returns me to the same classics.
Why do I think new writers don’t come close to their predecessors? Is it me who has not evolved? Either my reading skills have hardened beyond my ability to experience enjoyment, or a cancer within modern literature has metastasized. I keep hoping the next book will open a secret doorway into a world I somehow missed.
When I was a kid and bored in German language class, I wrote “Zärrẞund” all over my notebooks. It’s a made up word using funny sounds and letters that I imagined to be a hidden utopian village of thinkers and writers—and kindred spirits of all kinds—who exchange provocative ideas in word and art. Every time I visit a quaint college campus, or happen upon a back alley bookstore, or open an obscure paperback while under the covers, I yearn for that plane of existence. I wish to experience Zärrẞund in today’s fiction, but I worry the imaginary village is lost to a bygone era.