My appetite for fiction is dwindling (National Post, September 1, 2004)

A week ago, if you had asked me if I was an avid reader, I would have unthinkingly replied that of course I was. But, according to a recently released U.S. government study titled Reading At Risk, I would have to get through 50 or more books of fiction, plays or poems a year to fall into their "avid" category. As a backward glance at my risible summer fiction reading accomplishments confirms, I barely qualify for the "frequent" category (12 to 49 books) and won't be surprised if next year I end up in "moderate" (six to 11).

Apparently I slot into the roughly 10% universal drop-off rate in the reading of fiction between 1982 and 2002. Furthermore, as the study notes, reading declines dramatically in later middle age, so I am twice a lemming to the non-fiction sea.

Wistfully I recall my salad days in Honours English Language and Literature when I devoured at least two books a week without breaking a sweat, and even remembered what I had read. In the summers between sessions I set myself the task of reading huge blocks of foreign literature in translation. Particularly rigorous was my "Russian summer," when I took in War and Peace, Anna Karenina, all of Dostoyevsky and assorted other heavyweights like Gorky, Turgenev and Pasternak. What a lugubrious frame of mind I was in by August. Another summer was devoted to Thomas Mann (deepened respect for subordinate clauses), and a third to Sartre and de Beauvoir (quel waste of time in hindsight).

But that's ancient history. I haven't the patience or the inclination for rereading the classics (except for Jane Austen) and I accept that I will never read James's The Golden Bowl or anything of Proust. But I am not into modern fiction much these days either. After decades of teaching and giving book reviews, work happily integrated with novel-gobbling, I find that writing a weekly column -- it has been a year now -- automatically assigns the bulk of my free time to print or online political and cultural commentary.

Yet, truth be told, even if I had more time, my appetite for fiction and its preoccupation with interiority and relationship dysfunction has been dwindling as I age. (I exempt mystery novels. I wish I had leisure for more.) Perhaps I feel that I already know enough about human nature. I have weathered my own relationship conflicts and crises, made my serious life choices, accepted the limitations imposed by time and nature and drawn my conclusions as to what constitutes a knave or a fool, and what a role model, all themes that oil the wheels of fictional plots. I am outer-directed now. I want more understanding of the actual world in real time while I am still in it.

So for intellectual stimulation I find myself drawn more to explorations of the era we live in: the events that brought us to this historical junction, real-life biographies instead of made-up characters and analysis of the ideological drives that shape our destinies.

Nevertheless, I don't want to let go of fiction entirely. On the weekend I conferred with my friend, another Barbara, who remains an "avid" reader, even by the Olympian standards of the study, and we both agreed that since we have to make choices anyway, we should simplify the triage by defining fictional genres we could happily turn our backs on forever.

Here is our partial reject list: cultural jeremiads by once-authoritative feminists in their bitter dotage; sin-to-redemption apologias, or anything boasting Oprah's imprimatur; novels where dialect or a "hood" figures heavily; anything to do with sensitive, anguished, misunderstood teenagers; memoirs of an impoverished childhood with feckless, volatile alcoholic caregivers; novels in which child abuse and low self-esteem lead to getting lost in Prairie blizzards or falling through Maritime ice (which rules out a great swath of CanLit); approving narratives of frisky menopausal women who abandon their husbands and children on a whim, yet find happiness without guilt or consequences; pornography posing as art; novels in which the reader chooses the ending; sprawling four-generation sagas that begin in the swarming back alleys of Minsk and end in the penthouses of Manhattan; and finally, any novel written by a woman with three names, and/or that is available in a choice of Day-Glo colours, featuring a quilted metallic over-cover with cutouts.

As you read this, I am on vacation. I'm not doing anything, just reading. Yeah, for a week I'm kind of a reading diva. That's avid spelled backwards.

© National Post 2004