CHAPTER FOUR

Shelf Life

Legend has it that more homes were sold in the fall of 1982 than in any other comparable period in the history of the United States. That was the year the National Football League went out on strike for six weeks, and desperately unhappy men found themselves with nothing better to do on Sunday afternoons than go shopping for houses with their ecstatic wives, suddenly emancipated from the hegemony of the gridiron. This is what happened in my home. Having thrown in the towel on my youth and my dreams and reluctantly agreed to acquire a house, a garden, and children—almost simultaneously—I accompanied my wife on a short, fateful train trip up the Hudson from our Manhattan apartment to Dobbs Ferry. There we would begin our house-hunting expedition.

Dobbs Ferry was a harmless, well-meaning suburb about ten miles north of the Bronx. It was a community whose name evoked an aura of bucolic charm that the village itself could not quite muster. The real estate agent who greeted us, a furloughed historical preservationist, told us that even though house prices were relatively low, thanks to astronomical interest rates and the crushing recession the country was currently experiencing, we still could not afford to buy a house in culturally monochromatic Dobbs Ferry. But we could probably afford something in Tarrytown, a slightly less vivacious hamlet five miles farther north. House prices in Tarrytown were substantially lower than in nearby villages because the community was racially mixed, with 50-percent minority representation in the public schools. If we were really in the market for a bargain, she noted parenthetically, we could try Yonkers. At no point did we ever seriously consider moving to Yonkers. Particularly my wife, English born. One does not grow up in the verdant, pastoral Cotswolds and then move to Yonkers. It simply isn’t done.

And so we set our sights on Tarrytown. Affordability was the dominant factor here, but several other elements made Tarrytown more appealing than adjacent villages like Elmsford, Valhalla, and North White Plains. For one, it did not have a preposterous name like Valhalla. Second, it had a boisterous, aromatic Italian deli, which made me feel like I was back in Philadelphia, where lively, aromatic Italian delis could be found everywhere. It also had a Woolworth’s—complete with the archetypal lunch counter—which also evoked bygone Quaker City days. Still, for me, a lifelong urbanite who had no desire to move to the suburbs in the first place, the worm that baited the hook was that Tarrytown had a cute little bookstore right in the middle of the village. Being cut off from art, music, and civilization in general is the thing city dwellers fear most when they move to the suburbs, because suburbs are, with few exceptions, cut off from art, music, and civilization. For me, the presence of a bookstore in what I initially feared might be, yea, the very valley of the shadow of death in some way eased the sting of jettisoning the city for the suburbs, cashiering my dreams, bidding adieu to my youth, just generally hanging up the urban six-guns. In some way.

We bought the third house the agent showed us—a dirt-cheap fixer-upper that had never been inhabited by anyone other than Irish Americans going all the way back to the 1850s—and moved in the following May. The house was a wreck, but it was nicely situated—directly across the street from the public library and less than a hundred yards from a small but well-stocked supermarket. It was also just two doors up from the Shiloh Baptist Church, founded in 1883. The church had once been an opera house, and Euterpe, the goddess of music, had never left the building. If you didn’t like gospel music, you were in the wrong neighborhood. We were instantly smitten by the village, though that may have been in part because our first child was born on Christmas morning, and we would have been smitten had we just pitched camp in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Our enchantment survived the disappearance of two of the attractions that had enticed us there in the first place. The Italian deli went out of business within a year of our arrival and was replaced by a heartless, inhospitable CVS, managed by a profoundly grumpy man who never smiled. (CVS, it was suggested by one local cutup, was an abbreviation for “Chuckles Very Sparingly.”) The Woolworth’s didn’t last much longer; times had changed, but Woolworth’s didn’t change with them. When it did go under—largely because CVS had usurped most of its functions—a marginally upscale gourmet store took its place, so its disappearance was not a complete loss. Happily, unexpectedly, the bookstore hung on considerably longer than the fabulous deli or the fabled five-and-dime. And that helped make those first years in Tarrytown very special indeed.

The bookstore, flanked by a jeweler, an optometrist, and a bank, was a serviceable if pedestrian establishment initially called The Book Inn. But it came into its own when it was sold five years later and became Books & Things, a bad name for a good bookstore. The store was ferociously incongruous, a classy, sophisticated operation in a working-class town that generally lacked class and certainly lacked sophistication. People read in Tarrytown, but they didn’t read much—mostly street signs and laundry instructions and cereal boxes and the fine print on the backs of unmerited parking tickets. Under the original management the store was good; under the new management it became excellent. It was run by an engaging, erudite, underpaid young man named Corey Friedlander. The store carried all the merchandise one might expect in a traditional small-town bookstore—mysteries, romances, self-help manuals, junk—but it also offered esoteric items like The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima and How German Is It by Walter Abish and Utz by Bruce Chatwin and Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe. The store tricked the community into being smarter and better informed than it would have been if left to its own devices. It belonged somewhere else, perhaps the East Village or Sedona or Avignon or Mars. The presence of these cosmopolitan titles in a suburban bookstore conferred upon the establishment an aura one would not have expected to find in a town whose streets were lined with hair salons and pizza joints and saloons. The store posited a village that did not in fact exist but soldiered on in the hopes that if everyone pulled together and was very, very discreet, the locals wouldn’t notice. It was as if some puckish god had planted a pricey butcher shop in a town teeming with penniless vegetarians.

For a while the store did quite a handsome business. My patronage helped; between November 1982 and the day it closed in 1994, I bought more than two hundred books there, including titles by Charles Bukowski, Iris Murdoch, Paul Bowles, Julian Barnes, Robert Stone, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Penelope Lively, Richard Price, Thomas Bernhard, Ivan Doig, J. M. Coetzee, Eric Kraft, Margaret Drabble, Michael Frayn, Wright Morris, Charles Baxter, William Boyd, Donald Westlake, and Petronius. I bought The Sun Also Rises and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio in that store the day we bought our house and have read and reread them many times since, because rereading these books takes me back to that precise moment, when the future seemed to stretch out endlessly in front of us and the future was both bright and beckoning.

I was very friendly with the staff, including a peppery senior who ran her own printing press on the side and the assistant manager, who lived across the river in Piermont, not far from the spot where British Major John André was hung by the neck until dead after being apprehended by stout local patriots while carrying a note hidden in his boot heel written by Benedict Arnold, offering to surrender West Point to the Redcoats. Why they were fussing about in André’s boots is beyond me; by the looks of things, the stout patriots were nothing more than highwaymen. The arrest occurred in Tarrytown, or on its outskirts, and is the only thing the village is famous for.

I did a reading at the store after my first book was published, in 1992, and my daughter worked there on several Saturday afternoons, dressed up as one of the Berenstain Bears. It was boiling hot inside the costume, but she put on her game face and gutted it out. It was her first paying job. My children quickly got into the habit of believing that the most natural thing in the world was to visit a bookstore several times a week. Somehow or other I found my way into that shop practically every day for the next twelve years. It was the best thing about living in Tarrytown.

Books & Things was owned by a middle-aged couple who operated another, larger store about five miles north on the edge of Ossining, home to Sing Sing Prison. This is the institution where in 1899 the first woman was executed by electric chair, a device that owed its existence to Thomas Edison, whose casual, reflexive depravity is not as well known as it should be. The electric chair was nicknamed Old Sparky. The Books & Things flagship store, however, was not located in that part of Ossining; it sat about a mile away in a snooty, accessorial village called Briarcliff Manor, smack-dab in the middle of a busy strip mall that featured a supermarket, a bank, and several other statutorily unexciting enterprises of this general ilk.

The store had a devoted following, or so the owners believed. It, too, purveyed a classy line of goods. If you were in the market for the latest Chinua Achebe title, you’d come to the right place. But when the landlord who owned the building precipitously raised the rent, the owners decided to relocate to a much less well-traveled strip mall more than a mile away. They were certain that their clientele would follow them, and the more faithful ones did. But the owners had miscalculated here, significantly underestimating the enormous volume of casual, walk-in traffic they had enjoyed all those years because of their ideal location. The new store had virtually no walk-in trade. To get there, you had to go out of your way, and you had to travel by car. It was a perfectly fine location for a Japanese restaurant or a pet store or even an undertaker’s, but it was a bad place to put a bookstore. Books & Things went belly-up within a year or so, taking its Tarrytown sibling down with it. The owners were probably bitter about what had befallen them; they had a right to feel betrayed. A few years later, when I read Penelope Fitzgerald’s heartbreaking novel The Bookshop, I was transfixed by the final sentence describing the heroine’s departure from the village of Hardborough: “As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop.” This is exactly how the owners must have felt. Books & Things had been their gift to the community. Two communities. And the communities did not want them.

It was a sad day when the Tarrytown branch of the bookstore closed, a modern suburban American tragedy, if such a thing is possible. I do not recall what happened that day, or what I felt, or when I last visited the store or what my final purchase was, just as I cannot recall what happened the day my mother died. Who would want to commit to memory the details of such an unpleasant event? And to what purpose? There was talk that the store would reopen under new management, but this was wishful thinking. In the end it was replaced by a tearoom. Given my druthers, I would have preferred something less pugnaciously twee, like a hardware store or a barbershop or a cut-rate taxidermist’s or any other business that did not rely on Andrea Bocelli to generate an ambience of chintzy Neapolitan refinement. But a tearoom it was. Once the bookstore was gone, many people forgot that it had ever been there. I didn’t. The closing of the bookshop was an event in my life that I would never forget. I had loved Tarrytown unconditionally for the first twelve years we lived there, and continued to enjoy many of its delights after that. But the town was never the same after the bookstore closed. Nor was I the only one who felt that way. Friends shared that opinion, dating the gradual but inexorable decline in the quality of life in the village from that moment. The town had lost something rare, precious, and beautiful, something enchanting that it could never replace. Its heart was still beating, but its heart was no longer beating fast.

• • • • • •

That Tarrytown experience aside, I am not terribly sentimental about bookstores. I go to the bookstore for a specific purpose; I make my purchases quickly; I am in and I am out. If I visit a bookstore, it is either to buy something I need for my work, which will then immediately be discarded, or to buy a book I plan to read that very day, as I did recently when I picked up The Tempest, a book I had never even glanced at before. But it is almost never necessary for me to do this, because I already own most of the books I plan to read between now and my death.

I rarely visit bookstores simply to pass the time of day. I’d rather sit in the park or read a newspaper. I do not go on aspirational book-buying binges, lining my shelves with the complete correspondence between Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, a fearsome collection I will not read for years, if at all, and only after first finishing the complete works of Walker Percy and Shelby Foote. For similar reasons, I have never bought the Bhagavad-Gita or the Tibetan Book of the Dead or The I Ching or Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, because I have no intention of ever reading them and I am not going to pretend otherwise. When I was in college, in the late 1960s, it was fashionable for young people to cite passages from these works, particularly from The Decline of the West, as if the mere recitation of a few daft Teutonic theories would in and of itself hasten the West’s decline. Since then, my college classmates have entered into an accelerated period of decline, as has Oswald Spengler’s reputation. The West seems to be holding up just fine.

I do not make ceremonial purchases of books and then act as if acquiring them signals a sincere desire to read them. This is like buying pants one size too small in the hope that you will shed twenty pounds and one day fit into them. I have a pair of black jeans in my wardrobe that I bought when I was thirty-two years old and weighed 162 pounds. I used to think that the day would come when I would be able to wear them again. My weight has since soared as high as 227, though it is now down to around 195. In the fullness of time I might make it back down to 175, but I will never again hit 162. Thus, I will never fit into those jeans again. I merely keep them around as an objective correlative, as a physical symbol of Paradise Lost. Those jeans are like the proverbial snowfalls of yesteryear. Où sont les neiges d’antan? the poet asks. Dans mon placard.

The difference between those jeans and Daniel Deronda is that I still love those jeans and believe that if I could ever fit into them again, my life would improve markedly. I do not feel this way about Daniel Deronda. I will never love Daniel Deronda. And I will never believe that reading Daniel Deronda will dramatically improve my lot in life. Reading Daniel Deronda would have the same effect on my life as visiting Buenos Aires. It would not be uninteresting. It would not be unpleasurable. I would come back with a few good stories. But it would be a clear-cut case of fulfilling a lifelong dream I had never actually had.

More to the point, I have no desire to turn my books into little more than souvenirs, though one or two do fit into this category. I bought Colette’s L’ingénue libertine when I was twenty-one years old and living in Paris. It was an eye-catching little Livre de Poche with a somewhat risqué illustration on the cover. It cost me ninety-five centimes, about eighteen cents at the time; the penciled-in price is just barely visible on the inside cover of the book. L’ingénue libertine is yet another link with a distant, fondly remembered past when I was beatifically happy and life’s possibilities stretched before me. Now that I am sixty-one, though I am intermittently happy, life’s possibilities no longer stretch in any specific direction, if at all. But every time I look at the cover of that book I think about the year I spent in Paris, before life took me into the back alley and roughed me up. So it’s here for the duration. That said, I have no intention of ever reading L’ingénue libertine. I tried other books by Colette and never warmed up to them. It is a classic case of Chacun à son gré, as the French might put it. Colette is not à mon gré.

Although I purchase most of my books in bookstores, and rarely online, I have had very few bookstore experiences that stand out in any way. I would love to be able to say that there was a musty old shop I haunted as a youth—The Bookworm’s Nook, let us say—where I curled up in a corner reading The Master of Ballantrae and Kon-Tiki beneath the beneficent gaze of some kindly old gent who had abandoned a promising career as a barrister to open a matchbook-sized bookstore that catered exclusively to the poor. But this was not the way things happened. There were no bookstores in the neighborhoods I grew up in. There were very few bookstores in any of the neighborhoods that ordinary Philadelphians grew up in during the 1950s, unless they happened to live all the way downtown, where ordinary Philadelphians tended not to go. To get to a bookstore, unless you lived in Center City, you had to travel miles and miles by foot or bus or trolley, and when you got there, nothing special awaited you. Certainly not any kindly old gents. What passed for bookstores in that era were mostly hole-in-the-wall operations staffed by oafs, curmudgeons, and lechers. There was always a section in the back dedicated to smut, a kind of literary cordon pas tout à fait sanitaire, but you were not allowed to go in there if you were under the age of eighteen. Still, some of us tried, desperate to get our hands on seedy paperbacks with names like Part-Time Harlot, Full-Time Tramp, and Hell’s Belles. They were usually written by somebody named Ben Dover or Norman Conquest. Aside from that, these rattraps have left little imprint on my consciousness. My experiences with the bookmobile that visited our neighborhood every Friday when I was a kid had been epochal. My formative bookstore experiences were uninspiring. I remember just about none of them.

For this reason I have no precise recollection of the first book I ever bought or the bookstore I bought it in. It may have been an Agatha Christie mystery or an anthology of creepy stories “presented” by the famous director Alfred Hitchcock, who moonlighted as the host of a popular television series in the early 1960s, specializing in a choreographed weirdness that Americans for some reason found quite engaging. It was one of the strangest things about Americans of that era: They were not themselves droll; they did not go in much for drollness; but they were enthralled by the droll Alfred Hitchcock.

Whatever my first purchase was, it probably took place in a drugstore while I was waiting for the K bus to take me home from my Saturday job in a clothing store on the other side of town. Prior to this momentous purchase, I would buy a new comic book every Saturday night, sometimes Batman, sometimes Justice League of America, occasionally Superman, but quite often one of the beautiful issues of Classics Illustrated, which brought stories like Les Misérables and Frankenstein and even Caesar’s Gallic Wars to life. I would have been around thirteen or fourteen years old when I started retreating from comics and buying books, though the details of these transactions escape me.

I do remember some of the books I bought as a teenager; I simply cannot recall the order in which I bought them. There weren’t all that many, because I only pulled in six smackers a week working at the ramshackle clothing store and, like most of my peers, I would much rather spend my spare cash on records or movies or candy or girls than on books. My boss, a barrel-chested ex-Marine who devoured motivational guides like How to Win Friends and Influence People, frequently offered to lend me his reading material, but I preferred something less stultifyingly hortatory. One early purchase that does stand out was The Cardinal, a high-class potboiler by Henry Morton Robinson. I bought it at a drugstore in what was then a brand-new, state-of-the-art mall about two miles from my home. The mall no longer exists. This seminal purchase would have taken place around June 1964. I was getting ready to enter the seminary to become a Maryknoll missionary at the time and had hopes of one day rising to the lofty rank of cardinal, even though I was already falling in love with every third girl who crossed my path. The Maryknolls were always getting themselves hacked to pieces by godless communists or disgruntled fascists, which definitely took the bloom off the ecclesiastical rose, and as a result my career never achieved serious liftoff.

The Cardinal was published in 1950, the year I was born, and was loosely based on the life of Francis Cardinal Spellman, a New York City prelate about whom I knew nothing except that he was one tough customer. By the time I bought the book, my father had already taken me to see the motion picture based on the novel, an engaging and occasionally moving film starring Tom Tryon. The handsome, iron-jawed Tryon had previously played the sagebrush drifter Texas John Slaughter on a popular Disney television show. At the time Tryon was navigating the high chaparral on the small screen, he was concealing his real-life homosexuality from his employers, as homosexuality did not exist in the Old West and most assuredly not in the high, deeply Christian chaparral of the Lone Star State. Tryon, never a serious threat to Gielgud or Olivier, subsequently left the movie industry and became an extremely successful novelist, producing such varied late-Seventies fare as The Other, Harvest Home, Fedora, and Lady. His was quite the career. I never got around to reading any of his books, though I did see several of the films based on them. The Other was a hoot, I seem to recall, and Fedora, one of Billy Wilder’s sign-off projects, was actually rather good. Tryon, a most unusual man, died far too young.

I was proud of owning The Cardinal. Unlike many paperbacks of the era, which looked cheap, the paperback edition of Robinson’s novel was shiny and elegant, with a Stendhalian black-and-white-and-red cover, altogether appropriate for the topic at hand. This was at the time when paperbacks were undergoing a transformation from disposable, off-the-rack detritus into what they remain today: inexpensive yet presentable objects suitable for any library. The book was published by Pocket Books. It cost seventy-five cents, more than twice the price of the Agatha Christie mysteries and the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, which ran no more than thirty-five cents. I have checked the prices; my sister Ree still owns many of them.

The Cardinal was the first high-quality paperback I ever bought. I was really looking forward to reading it. But in the end, my plans were thwarted. I started it and tried getting into it, mostly at my father’s behest, as in his youth he also had dreamed of taking the cloth, though his ambitions never spiraled as high as mine: No prelacy for him; he would have been more than happy to be a monk. The problem with The Cardinal, I soon realized, was that it was somewhat dense and took a while to get going. Much as I hate to admit it, it was a bit on the boring side. And to be perfectly honest, it was not entirely suitable reading material for a thirteen-year-old boy, as it contained a few racy passages where the hero, doubting his faith, briefly left the priesthood and hooked up with a perky Austrian über-floozy.

In the movie version of the book, which I saw later that summer, the femme fatale was played by Romy Schneider, a cunningly packaged vixen who also died young. At the time I was trying to read the book, my father was wearing out his 45 rpm recording of “Stay with Me,” the theme song from the movie, a powerful tune written by two songwriters who wrote no other powerful tunes I know of. It was belted out with uncharacteristic sincerity by Frank Sinatra, who often treated this kind of material in a breezy, almost contemptuous fashion. It was one of those songs that was not a hit in the wider world but was a legend inside our house. I loved that song and still do. It was a song about a man whose strength was buckling, who saw his world slipping away from him, and who hoped that his faith would abide. This was my hope at the time as well. But my faith did not abide.

I never finished reading The Cardinal. Our doltish, paranoid, antisocial mutt Frisky got hold of it one afternoon and gnawed it to pieces. My mother insisted that everything would be all right, that we could smooth out the pages with a steam iron, but I was having none of it. That stupid dog had gone and wrecked everything; wasn’t the deliberate destruction of a book dealing with religious themes a perverse form of canine simony? I certainly thought so and hoped that God would make him burn in Hound Hell. I held on to the savagely mutilated paperback for years but never read it, in large part because by the following spring I had decided that I did not want to be a priest, so there was no possibility of ever becoming a cardinal. Doubling back to polish it off at that point would have been like reading Mutiny on the Bounty or Two Years Before the Mast after you had already decided to join the Air Force. The paperback hung around the house for years, a sad and vandalized reminder of dreams gone awry. Years after the fact, when Frisky wandered off one night and disappeared for the next three days, I refused to join the search party my father organized. He was no friend of the arts, that hapless cur, and as far as I was concerned, he could stay out there forever. Like the Nazis, he was a depraved sociopath, and like the Nazis, he had it in for books.

Another purchase from that same drugstore in that same general era was Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. This was one of the most influential, widely discussed novels of my adolescence, a book that everyone read and everyone else talked about. I bought it, like many others, not so much because everyone was talking about it but because it had a striking steel-blue cover that was infinitely more eye-catching than anything I had seen up to that time. But Catch-22 was another book I never got around to reading, again because of structural sabotage, though that wasn’t the only obstacle. The big problem, at least at the outset, was that the book was too long and too long-winded. It had small, ugly type, a widespread problem in those days, though one that has since been corrected by publishing companies. And it was one of those books that got quoted so much in the years after it came out that it made you feel that you had already read it, that made you want to read something entirely different, like Kid Colt and the Legend of the Lost Arroyo or Satan’s Sorority or even Daniel Deronda. One other high negative: The student activists in the college I later attended were always demanding that our teachers give Hamlet and Absalom, Absalom! the old heave-ho and assign The Sirens of Titan and Catch-22 instead. A cultural reactionary from the word go, I had always treated the titans of the past with enormous reverence, so I thought these student activists were unlettered jackwagons. In the end, the whole Strawberry Statement Kulturkampf fiasco turned me against Catch-22 for good.

Catch-22 was my first exposure to the concept of “this year’s model,” where everybody everywhere started reading the same book at exactly the same moment, even though a lot of them got only thirty pages into it before bailing out. It was one of those inescapable books that are universally revered until they get made into films. The films based on those books are always horrible and in some way tarnish their image. It seemed like the entire planet was talking about Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code until Ron Howard’s Da Vinci Code came out. Then the planet stopped talking about it. The same thing happened with The Hours, where Nicole Kidman sported that jarring prosthetic nose, and The Shipping News, where everyone was completely miscast, and Peter Jackson’s cataleptic The Lovely Bones, fatally hamstrung by a shortage of Hobbits. There was also the curious case of Atonement, irreparably damaged by the disastrous decision to cast James McAvoy as the male lead, thereby prompting viewers on both sides of the Atlantic to side with the nasty little tyke whose lies destroy the protagonist’s life.

It’s not so much that the bad movies make the books seem less good; it’s simply that the premiere of the bad movie signals that the high-water mark of the book’s popularity has arrived, that its moment as a cultural colossus has now passed. By and large, a book will retain a certain grandeur and cachet so long as it has not been transmogrified into a bad film. After Hollywood gets its hands on it, the bad movie competes for attention with the good book. Until you see the movie Catch-22, you have an image of Yossarian in your head that is enticing, though vague. But once Yossarian becomes embodied in the person of the overbearing Alan Arkin, once the Girl with a Pearl Earring ceases to be a figure of mystery and romance and morphs into Scarlett Johansson, once the undernourished sparrow Penélope Cruz makes a complete hash of Corelli’s Mandolin, the spell is broken forever. Only the greatest books can withstand the damage inflicted on their reputations by bad movies: The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice. Hollywood has always been reasonably good at turning electrifying hooey like Gone with the Wind and The Bridges of Madison County into movies that are far superior to the novels that begat them. But it has trouble when it takes a run at War and Peace. Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with serious fiction, so it does what it does best: It annihilates it.

Books designated as this year’s model do have a certain value as props. One day, when I was carrying my Catch-22 paperback around, trophy-like, hoping that some nubile teenaged girl would be smitten by my intellectual prowess, my friend Joe Alteari’s sister, Joanne, asked if she could borrow the book. I said sure, be my guest, as I had never finished a book anywhere near as long as Catch-22 and that situation was unlikely to change anytime soon. Joanne, I was sure, would make it straight through to the end. Joanne had a job at Sears Roebuck out on Route 1 and used to drive me to my summer job at the Naval Supply Depot, which sat directly behind that massive department store. I’d always liked her; she was a bit of a wiseacre. You never saw her without sunglasses. And she was a serious reader. A few weeks later, she returned the book, but it was now all dog-eared and matted. I was livid. Had she left it out in the rain or the snow or the sleet or what? She didn’t understand what I was grumbling about; she said that paperbacks were always intended to be stuffed inside your back pocket or into your pocketbook; they were supposed to get jacked up. If you wanted a classy-looking book to add to your tragic little collection, you should go out and buy a hardback. She didn’t seem to understand that the publication of Catch-22 was a watershed moment in the history of the industry, as it marked the moment when paperbacks stopped being thought of as pre-fab refuse and started to be thought of as quality merchandise that could be displayed—proudly—in one’s home. Actually, nobody realized that at the time, least of all me. Watershed moments only become apparent decades later. All I knew was that a classy paperback that had set me back six bits had callously been bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated and that I no longer had any desire to read it. So I never did. Years later I read Something Happened and Good as Gold, both of which I liked very much. But for some reason I never went back and read the book that made Joseph Heller famous. Whatever happened to that defiled, debased copy of Catch-22, I have no idea. But it was never replaced.

• • • • • •

I have rarely been treated especially well in bookstores. I think this is because I do not look like a book lover. I look more like a cop. I certainly do not look like the kind of person who frequents serious cultural establishments. What it all comes down to is this: I do not look like I have ever read a book by Bill McKibben. Though it pains me to admit it, I look like somebody who can’t make up his mind whether to buy the new Clive Cussler or the new W. E. B. Griffin. Bookstore personnel pick up on this. Spindly boys with thick Clark Kent glasses wearing ill-advised polo shirts and unpersuasive facial hair routinely come up to me and say, “Can I help you with anything?” as if I were a disoriented extraterrestrial or the last man to straggle home from Gettysburg.

Commercial bookstores are often staffed by transitory loners who are merely punching the clock, troubled youths and cast-off retirees who do not have all that much interest in books. Staff recommendations are pitifully generic—Fight Club, Outliers, Infinite Jest. It’s like soliciting dessert tips from four-year-olds. Why doesn’t the staff ever go out on a limb and select something by R. K. Narayan or Alan Sillitoe or Chrétien de Troyes? Oh, how many nights have I lain awake, gazing up at the stars, dreaming of the day I would stride into a bookstore and find a rack teeming with staff recommendations that might include such personal favorites as Octave Mirbeau’s The Garden of Torments, Aidan Higgins’s Bornholm Night-Ferry, Heinrich Böll’s Action Will Be Taken? It would be even nicer if I walked into a Starbucks, a sort of para-quasi-bookstore, and stumbled upon a stack of books by Ward Just or Nathan Englander piled up to the ceiling. But I do not think this is going to happen.

Nor is it likely to happen in most independent bookstores. Independent bookstores, whatever their other virtues, are often staffed by condescending prigs who do not approve of people like me. The only writers they like are dead or exotic or Paul Auster. Independent bookstore employees have disproportionate respect for writers named Banana and Arno. If your name is Janos or Czeniew or Bjini, you’re in like Flint. If your name is Joseph T. Klempner or O’Henry, you’re not. People like this often like weird, obscure writers, but they never like the weird, obscure writers I like. Sometimes I think that I was born on the wrong planet, a planet where almost nobody reads and where the people who do read assume that I don’t.

My unfortunate experiences in bookstores started a long time ago, when I was a student in Paris. Back then it was a rite of passage for aspiring young writers to visit Shakespeare and Company, the legendary bookstore on the bank of the Seine that is forever associated with Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. In fact, the original bookstore—the one that got Ulysses published just in time for me to never finish reading it—closed its doors forever when the Nazis put in a surprise appearance in 1940; the bookstore I visited in the Seventies was a replacement in the fabled 5th Arrondissement named in honor of the original Shakespeare and Company. It was like the House of Burgesses down in Ye Olde Williamsburg: ersatz but iconic. The shop was filled with hirsute, emaciated, poorly dressed, poorly shod young men who were desperately trying to emulate the George Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London. They looked famished, wan, and impoverished, some of them seemingly at death’s door. You could never tell whether they’d gone to Phillips Exeter or Andover. The store was still being run by George Whitman, the successor to the mythical Sylvia Beach. I visited it twice, and both times I asked him what I thought was a reasonably serious question. Both times the grizzled bastard totally blew me off. He perhaps had me sized up as just another Papa Hemingway wannabe, just another F. Scott Fitzgerald manqué, just another would-be Henry Miller. But I did not want to be Ernest Hemingway, much less F. Scott Fitzgerald, much less Henry Miller, famously bald and ugly and mean. And I certainly had no desire to be Anaïs Nin. I wanted to be Nathanael West, the dyspeptic author of The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts, who died in a car crash in El Centro, California, the day after Fitzgerald went to meet his maker. The date of West’s death was December 22, 1940, the thirteen hundredth anniversary of the most recent burning of the Library of Alexandria. Obviously no one at Shakespeare and Company had any way of knowing of my arcane, improbable dreams. They treated me like scum anyway. So I stopped going there and bought all my books around the corner on the Boulevard Saint-Michel at a gigantic store called Gibert Jeune. It was a barn and nothing more, entirely without charm or mythology. It was actually a series of charm-free barns, each specializing in a different subject matter. But its books were cheap. I bought dozens of them there, all of which I still own: Opéra by Jean Cocteau, Le diable au corps by Raymond Radiguet, La sorcière by Jules Michelet, Les caves du Vatican by André Gide. And at least at Gibert Jeune, no one made a special point of being rude to me.

When I moved to New York, in 1976, everyone raved about the Strand, which had miles and miles of used books. In thirty-six years of living in or around Gotham, I have gone there only twice, because I never liked buying used books. People who have grown up poor don’t like buying things secondhand, because they’ve already grown up wearing secondhand clothes and playing with secondhand toys. There isn’t anything special about buying a used book; somebody else got that special rush first. I only buy secondhand books out of desperation, like the time I found myself stranded in downtown South Bend, Indiana, a hellhole if there ever was one, and saved the day when I unearthed a copy of Jean Anouilh’s Becket, ou l’honneur de Dieu in a used bookstore. I think God Himself may have interceded here, compensating me for that long, hard year I spent in a seminary ten miles outside Scranton, Pennsylvania, which was also short on pizazz. But there is another dynamic at work here: Purchasing a secondhand book does absolutely nothing for a writer. Less than nothing. There is, it seems to me, a poverty of spirit about not wanting to purchase the shiny new book by Gabriel García Márquez. People should consider it an honor to pay full price for a book by Don DeLillo or Margaret Atwood. An honor.

My favorite bookstore in New York City was not any of the obvious ones, like the Gotham Book Mart or Rizzoli’s or Scribner’s or one of the dank crypto-commie bookstores in the East Village. It was the Commuter Book Centre, a dive that used to sit in the Lexington Avenue Passageway at Grand Central Terminal. It was literally a hole in the wall, roughly the size of your average bedroom. You had to climb up a couple of well-worn steps to get to it, and when you got inside, there wasn’t a whole lot waiting for you. It was run by a big, relatively inanimate guy who sat at the cash register by the front door all day long and genuinely seemed to enjoy presiding over such a ragtag operation. He didn’t say much, and you never saw him move. But whenever you bought a book, he looked it over carefully and then flashed you a knowing little wink that seemed to say: Nice choice, bub. I can see I am in the presence of the literati. The stock didn’t turn over much; it looked like no fresh inventory had been added since Dickens put the finishing touches on Little Dorrit. All of the books were entombed in a thick patina of dust and grime. The store didn’t have catchy window displays, and there were no author signings. It was not chic. It did not have that je ne sais quoi quality. Yet there was something so inspiring about this obstinately uninviting establishment that I could never resist visiting it. The store reminded me of my stogie-smoking, hard-drinking, guitar-strumming, saloon-singing Uncle Charlie: damned but saucy. I bought Silas Marner and Ethan Frome and Lord Jim and The Idiot there, among dozens of other titles, and I have never parted with them. All of these books told sad stories, as did The Awakening and Billy Budd and The Castle. I suspect that every single book in stock was heartbreaking, that the owner or manager or whoever was in charge deliberately refused to order any cheerful reading material like Little Women or My Friend Flicka because he feared that the store would lose its dyspeptic mojo. This was part of the store’s allure. It was so forlorn and beaten down, with such a miasma of doom hovering about it, that it would have seemed inappropriate to buy something festive or upbeat like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court there. It would be like asking for a fudge sundae halfway through Armageddon.

On New Year’s Eve in 1991, without any warning, the bookstore shut its doors forever. It had lasted exactly thirty years, an eternity in New York. Apparently, the owner owed a ton of back rent and finally decided to call it a day. This was around the time the train station was getting primed for a face-lift, so the bookstore probably couldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. I never found out what happened to the manager or owner or whoever it was who camped out by the front door every day. But I knew that an important part of my life was gone. It was the same way I felt when the Great Jones Diner just off Lafayette Street got shuttered or when the department store B. Altman’s got taken over by scumbags from Toronto and imploded shortly thereafter. The bookstore was succeeded by a dandy little shop on the other side of the terminal called Posman Books. It is a much better bookstore than the one it replaced, with a far more engaging, personable staff, and I have purchased lots of reading material there. But I miss the Commuter Book Centre. It is broken-down and dirty and entirely without pretense. It was a dump for the ages.

• • • • • •

I sometimes wonder whether all bookstore stories must end badly. Scribner’s, an upscale operation on Fifth Avenue, closed its doors. So did the pip-squeak French bookstore that used to ply its trade in Rockefeller Center. Also down for the count went the Gotham Book Mart, a venerable institution in New York’s Diamond District until the axe fell in 2007, after eighty-seven glorious years. For that matter, all those Borders stores I used to visit all across America are gone. There was also a first-rate bookstore in my wife’s hometown in England. Every summer when we went over to visit her relatives I would stop by Alan Tucker’s shop and come back lugging a dozen or more Penguin Classics: Picture Palace and The Family Arsenal by Paul Theroux, The Suffrage of Elvira, The Mimic Men, and A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul, Hermit of Peking by Hugh Trevor-Roper. A lot of these books had orange spines, and for some reason I thought they were beautiful. People said I was insane to buy books in England and then carry them all the way back to the United States, especially if they were orange. But people like that are peasants. Even if they are right about the insanity business. The way I looked at it, as soon as I owned the books, I was well on my way to reading them, even if it took me ten years to get around to it. These were days tinged with euphoria. When you are young, you think that if you read enough Penguin Classics, you can learn everything. You cannot. You will also forget much of what you have learned and never get to some of the books you always wanted to get to. And you will discover, as Samuel Johnson observed, that not all wisdom is to be found in books. But an awful lot of it is.

My daughter went to college with a boy whose Russian-Jewish parents left the Soviet Union in the late Brezhnev era and moved to the suburbs of Boston. When their suitcases were inspected at Logan Airport in Boston, the immigration officers were surprised to find that they were filled with books. “We took our books with us when we left Russia,” Gregory’s father once explained to me, “because in Russia books were like gold.” This was the way I felt about those treasures I used to cart all the way back from the west of England to the east of the United States. The whole time I was in the air, I would keep pulling them out to inspect them, to caress them, rhapsodizing about how much pleasure they would give me when I got back home. Not one of those books disappointed me. I have never parted with a single one of them; they are all right there in my living room or office; I will be rereading them the day I die, and their physical presence will remind me of those days in Stroud when I was young and the world was new. This is another thing you cannot do with a Kindle.

I used to have spirited, engaging chats with the bookstore owner in Stroud, and looked forward to our annual visits. Conversely, I never patronized the W. H. Smith bookstore right around the corner, because it was venal and crass and sold candy and cigarettes and books by Jilly Cooper. A few years ago, I arrived in Stroud and found that the bookstore that sold the Penguin Classics had closed its doors. The W. H. Smith is still there. This is the way of the world.

My most memorable bookshop experience took place in Canada. Few people can make this claim. It was not even in a particularly fashionable part of Canada. My wife had an elderly aunt who lived in a small town in Ontario about a hundred miles east of Toronto. She may actually have been a cousin. She was one of only two people I have ever met who was entirely without malice. She never met a nutritionally suspect pastry she would not purchase or a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken she would not serve, sometimes to confused and chagrined guests. Aunt Adah was the closest thing to a grandparent that my children ever had, as my wife’s parents died shortly before I met her, my father was an alcoholic with whom the children had little contact, and my mother was an emotionally distant manic-depressive who had only slightly less interest in her three grandchildren than in her own four children. She was Irish and then some.

Every couple of summers we would make the ten-hour trip from Tarrytown to Ontario to see Aunt Adah, widowed before my children were born, who lived alone in a cute little house on a bay that fed into Lake Ontario. We would not take the major routes to reach her but would meander northwest on local roads along the old Mohawk Trail, wending our way up from Albany until we reached Watertown, a once-flourishing but now barely extant city. A few miles north of Watertown lies Cape Vincent, a pokey fishing village where a ferry plies its way back and forth from Wolfe Island, halfway between the United States and Canada. We would clamber aboard the ferry, then drive the seven miles around Wolfe Island, and then take a second ferry to Kingston, a thriving city on the Canadian shore. The children loved the ferry rides. From there it was a two-hour drive down Highway 401 to Adah’s house, where the twenty-piece bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken would be waiting. Sometimes thirty-piece. The kids did not enjoy the drive on 401; it was unremittingly uninteresting. But they enjoyed the fried chicken.

At the time, our vacation destination boasted an active downtown, with a movie house, a public library, a jeweler’s, an appliance store, several quaint restaurants, and a bookshop. These are now mostly gone, replaced by unsightly dollar stores. Dollar stores are like those tiny white stones one sees on unmarked Civil War graves: Someone once lived here, but we do not know who, and we can no longer remember when. While the town thrived, the bookstore thrived. In 1980, on my first visit, I struck up a conversation with the owner. He noticed that I was looking at books written by Canadian authors and made a few recommendations. Until then, I was only familiar with the work of Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, and Brian Moore, though Moore is probably more Irish than Canadian. The owner recommended that I try Bear by Marian Engel and This Side Jordan by Margaret Laurence. I read them as soon as I got back to the States and loved them, though I was somewhat surprised that this straitlaced Canadian would recommend a book about a lonely female historian who treats herself to a short, ergonomically implausible love affair with a bear. The bear was a bit surprised, too. These two books will remain in my collection forever. The next time I passed through town, we had another confab or two about Canadian literature, and he said I should give Ethel Wilson’s The Equations of Love and Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth a try. I did, and they were both outstanding. They, too, are permanent fixtures in my collection.

One summer, late in the 1980s, the man who owned the bookstore asked if I had ever read Morley Callaghan, who lived in Paris at the same time as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, and who had written a memoir called That Summer in Paris, which was basically A Moveable Canadian Feast. This book he actually gave me. For me, the Canadian Connection opened up a secret garden of delights, but it was also useful when I would find myself engrossed in conversations with English-speaking Canadians, people who would naturally assume that I knew nothing about Canadians except that they played ice hockey and drank Molson. They were particularly impressed—more like bewildered—that I had also read a number of French-Canadian authors, like Gabrielle Roy and Marie-Claire Blais. They certainly hadn’t. English Canadians don’t read that kind of stuff. It’s not in them. Especially the men. Aside from my tête-à-têtes with that gregarious Ontario bookseller, I have never had a wide-ranging conversation about Canadian literature with anyone. Nor do I expect to.

My kids started to grow up, and for a few summers in a row we went over to France and England, so we did not get up to Canada. But the next time we visited Aunt Adah, I was overjoyed to see that the bookstore was still a going concern. I went in to see my old friend, eager to pick up where we had left off, but he did not seem to remember me. I visited several times that week, and we eventually swung back into the rhythm of things, and the day before I left for home, he gave me a copy of W. O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind. It was not a very good book, but on the inside flap are written the words “A gift of the shopkeeper.” As with all my previous gifts, I will cherish it forever.

The next time we drove north, I returned to the bookstore I loved so much. But the conversation did not flow. I realized now that the shopkeeper had no idea who I was. He did not remember our conversations, and he did not remember the gifts he had given me. The store had fallen on hard times; books were going dirt-cheap, especially the black-bordered Penguin Classics. So I bought thirty-six of them. I bought History of the Franks and The Confessions of Saint Augustine and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and The Prince. I bought Burmese Days and Spanish Testament and The Road to Wigan Pier and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I bought A Burnt-Out Case and The Ministry of Fear and Our Man in Havana and England Made Me. I bought The Rainbow and Women in Love and The Annals of Imperial Rome. I bought Plato and Herodotus and Livy and Henry Fielding and Isaac Babel and Robert Graves and V. S. Pritchett. I also bought a copy of The Iliad, even though I already owned three copies. And, just for old time’s sake, I bought one final book by a Canadian author: The Whirlpool by Jane Urquhart. These books line the shelves in my bedroom closet to this day. So may they always.

One day at age ninety-four, Aunt Adah died, and we stopped going to Canada. Her family felt that the time had come to put her in a nursing home, but she had other plans. The next time we visited, many years later, the town had become unrecognizably ugly, and the bookstore was on its last legs. Now it is gone. And, as was the case when the bookstore in Tarrytown closed its doors, the town was the worse for its passing.

• • • • • •

Last spring I had a bookstore experience that more than made up for all the bad ones I had ever had. It happened in a most unusual way. I had just finished lunch with an Australian friend I have known since the day we met in Paris in 1972. I had run into his French girlfriend in a store around the corner from my boardinghouse, and as soon as she realized that I was American, she told me that her boyfriend was not all that crazy about the French and would welcome a chance to converse in his own language. She invited me over for dinner that Thursday night. The three of us became fast friends; in fact, a few years later we all lived together for a month in a spooky, otherwise unoccupied high-rise in the southwest corner of France. The building housed German tourists in the summer; the rest of the year it housed no one. Living there was like being in a French horror film, perhaps Le Shining. Mick eventually went back to Australia to visit his ailing father, and a few years later he and Claudine broke up, and I did not see him for the next twenty-one years. But we stayed in touch, as I did with Claudine, now a longtime resident of Berlin. When I went out to visit Mick in Sydney with my family in 1997, it dawned on me that he was one of my closest friends, even though we had not seen each other since 1976. The time we spent in France together—drinking, watching midnight screenings of classic films at the Cinémathèque, drinking—had cemented our friendship for life. France is like that.

A few years ago, in his capacity as a flight attendant for Qantas, Mick began flying to New York every two weeks. Prior to that, there was no regular Sydney–Los Angeles–New York flight. We would now meet for dinner on Tuesday night, then reconvene for a Wednesday lunch, after which he would fly back to Los Angeles and then to Sydney. One afternoon after our usual sumptuous repast, I watched him disappear down the stairs at the 68th Street–Lexington Avenue subway station. It just so happened that there was a bookstore, Shakespeare & Co., directly across the street. At the time I was in the market for a novel by Ali Smith that a friend at The Wall Street Journal had recommended. Back in Paris, as previously indicated, Shakespeare and Company had never been especially cordial to me. In fact, they had been downright nasty. But that was long ago and in another country, so I figured I should let bygones be bygones. Anyway, I wasn’t even sure that the two establishments were related, the Gotham bookstore choosing to distinguish itself by the use of an ampersand. I entered and asked the Irony Boy at the front desk if the store had a book by Ali Smith, called—now what was the name? Oh, yes: There But for the Grace of God . . . or something to that effect. Irony Boy said, “If we have it, you’ll see it on the shelves.” Now, why hadn’t I thought of that? I did not see it on the shelves, at least not under the “s’s” in the fiction section, so I returned to the front counter and, just for the sake of argument, asked if he would mind tearing himself away from whatever he was doing and look up the title on the computer. He did so with the worst will in the world, as if I were asking him to euthanize a particularly charismatic dachshund. He fumbled about for a bit, then hit pay dirt.

“The actual title is There But for the . . . ,” he said.

“There But for the Grace of God is in the ballpark,” I replied.

“It’s a new book,” he went on. “It’s in the new-books section. That’s why you didn’t find it on the shelves.”

That made sense. It really did. So we went off to find it. As luck would have it, it was stacked rather high on a shelf, out of his reach. He shuffled off to fetch a stepladder, but I said, “That won’t be necessary.” I reached up, without even needing to perch on my tippy-toes, and yanked the book right down off the shelf. That felt good. He could tell that I was going out of my way to be mean. But I couldn’t help myself. He was an Irony Boy. And I’d waited thirty-nine long years to even the score with these snooty sons of bitches. Even if they weren’t actually related to the snooty sons of bitches back in Paris. Now the moment of vindication had arrived. It was on. It was so on.

I paid for the book, and on my way out the door I spotted a title called Paris Was Ours. It was an anthology of stories by writers who had lived in Paris and included an essay in which I discussed my long-standing friendship with Mick. I walked out of the store and immediately collided with a man who was roughly my age, though better dressed, and slender. In my essay in Paris Was Ours I had talked about strolling into the Jardin du Luxembourg one evening in the late Nineties and bumping into an old friend from my student days that I had not seen in twenty-five years. In fact, I wrapped up the essay by describing that exchange, in which I asked him what he was doing in the gardens that day, and by extension, what he was doing in Paris, and he simply answered, “I could never get this place out of my head.” He might have been talking about the Jardin du Luxembourg. But I think he was talking about Paris.

My friend’s name was Jay Jolly. The man I collided with outside the premises of my old nemesis Shakespeare and Company—or a simulacrum thereof—that afternoon was Jay Jolly. Two weeks later Jay and Mick and I broke bread together for the first time since May 1973. We had a grand old time. It was as if no more than a day had passed since we had last seen one another, merrily knocking back drinks at the Alliance Française student cafe. This had all come about because I ventured inside a bookstore that was probably trying to pass itself off as the New York branch of a legendary Parisian bookstore that had always treated me like vermin, and spotted a book in which I mentioned both Mick and Jay, and all this happened just seconds after I had put Mick on the subway so that he could fly back to Australia, and just seconds before I crossed paths with Jay for the first time in more than a decade.

I don’t think this kind of stuff happens with a Kindle.