About Being Bored

I TRIED TO READ FICTION. I tried, but couldn't do it! A fan of the movie and after so many rave reviews of the book from people I hold in high regard, I tried to read it. Got halfway through it before I couldn't pretend to be interested anymore. Having seen the movie, I know the selfish, sexist prick of a main character eventually comes to have warm fuzzy feelings for humanity, befriends a lonely outcast weird child and his hippie, neurotic mother, and learns that love and friendship and community are all about being yourself.

So why waste my time reading about it? Yeah, Hornby is a good writer. In the half of the book that I read, he manages to capture the unifying isolation of both bachelor life in London and the awkwardness of adolescence. I get it. I get the symbolism of the title as it relates to the positions of the characters of different ages. I understand how the individual and individual relationships are often lost in the anonymity and conformity of postmodern urban life.

But fiction is still an underappreciated realm for me. I understand the beauty of language, and how an author can create characters and scenarios that make larger statements about life and society and people, or just create pure escapist worlds simply because they don't make larger statements about life and society and people.

Hell, I used to want to write fiction, with my wacked-out, angst-ridden teenage worldview. I also used to read a hell of a lot of it, when there was really nothing else to do in middle and high school. (When you're not allowed to watch TV, everyone from Carolyn Keene to Jane Austen provides appropriate mental escape routes).

Again, though, why read it? Why not just deal with (and fix!) life, society, and people? Why create alternate worlds that can only serve as commentaries, but never offer concrete solutions?

Oddly enough, my two favorite books (In Our Time and The Great Gatsby) are works of fiction! I suspect I like fiction from earlier times because I see them more as historical texts. I can analyze and study them as cultural artifacts.

The historian in me knows that today's fiction will be the artifacts of tomorrow. The sociologist in me can analyze the impact of the commodity and the socioeconomic structures of today's literature. But I can't read it myself. Not now. Not anymore.