Resolute

A couple of months ago, I started using the Nike running app, and my least favorite part is picking which emoticon to select at the end of my run. I usually select the second- and third-highest “smiley” (just one shy of what is apparently “euphoria,” which is probably an indication that I should be pushing myself more), but I have never once referred back to these to analyze the different conditions that may inch me toward one or the other. It’s too simplistic of a method to chart progress, for although the app syncs with the local weather, it really has no clue how much the whipping wind from the Irish Sea affects my first mile or two. Similarly, although I may enter a relatively happy face because I feel physically good after the run, the little yellow face won’t account for the non-physical issues I’ve been tossing and turning in my mind on a particular day. Mostly, though, I can’t accurately compare my run – the same distance, the same route – to another. This 5-mile route is my only benchmark, and until I stretch out that length or at least huff and puff a little more, I won’t know what any of those frown-y faces on the right of my phone’s screen really mean. Nor will I appreciate the nice and easy little workout I’ve created for myself. (Note to self: It’s never too late to take up New Years resolutions.)

There are some endeavors, however, where I can compare days, instances, and situations because of a consistent baseline. I do enough writing of different genres and lengths to know when one piece deserves an exuberant smile, and I’ve now parented enough days to know when I miss the mark and land squarely on a frustrated sad face. When you do something enough – something that requires constant adjustment to varying circumstances – your arsenal of comparative situations grows.

Juliet Lapidos, an editor at The New York Times, recently penned a manifesto of sorts for The Atlantic simply entitled “Finish That Book!” She lists three good reasons why it’s important to keep up with a book that you’ve started. However, I’d like to add a fourth point: You won’t know what you really like (in literature, or in anything, really) if you can’t articulate what you don’t like.

I’ve been in a bit of a reading and writing slump. We had a house break-in in mid-October, right before the busy-ness of the Dublin Book Festival and end-of-year festivities kicked in. I was prepped to write about Marilynne Robinson’s new book Lila. (For what it’s worth, I like Housekeeping, her only book not set in Gilead, the best.) A few notes were jotted in a Word document, but then – poof – both my laptop as well as the Kindle I was reading Lila on were snatched, as were any extra concentration and resolve to continue this project’s trajectory. Insert major sad emoticon with tears.

I gave myself an out until January 2015: New Year, New Start. And I ended up picking a book that I had to force myself to finish. Once I realized that I probably wouldn’t change my opinion of this book, I decided that at the very least, I should stick with it until the end to see if anything in particular stood out as a deal-breaker. After all, this book was named Novel of the Year by a large Irish bookseller, and many people thought it breathtaking, including an acquaintance who inspired me to start blogging in the first place. My reading was agonizingly slow, and the sight of me with this book, open but face-down on my lap with a more enticing People magazine in my hands, was a familiar one, I’m sure, to my fellow air passengers, my in-laws, my parents, and my own little family – who continued to see the book lying around our house well in to January. Although each page completed and flicked to the left matched my snippy exasperation, I managed to finish what I initially considered a regrettable first book choice for 2015.

But it turns out that I’m actually quite grateful for reading this particular novel, for the author has been compared to Alice Munro, whose stories I hadn’t read in quite some time. Whereas I felt the novel in question hit a constantly and quietly mournful tone without much emotional texture, no “emoji” can encapsulate Munro’s brain-teasers offered up in her exquisite short stories. So downstairs to our bookshelf I went to pick up a collection of Alice Munro short stories that I had never read.  (For the record, I read Too Much Happiness, although I can also wholeheartedly recommend Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades.)

Like Anne Enright, Munro has an astounding ability to combine phrases and words to emote. And I mean, rip right to the base of humans’ often contradicting yearnings and turn-offs. Sorry, Nike, none of your emoticons really represent how I feel after a run (that would be: so-very-glad-it’s-done-but-I-maybe-like-the-thinking-time-plus-health-benefits / completely windswept after running along the sea), but I bet an Alice Munro story could.

How can Munro mine an experience that the majority of us will only gape at via sensational news stories (the first story, “Dimensions”)? Why does she write about childhood cruelty in such vulgar and incomprehensible fashion (“Child’s Play”)? Did she conjure the strange character of Mr. Purvis in “Wenlock Edge” straight from her imagination? I suppose that a reader will never know how forces combined to allow this woman’s “psychologically astute” writing come to fruition.

However, Munro said something interesting in The New Yorker in 2012: “For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that.”

Well, that’s far too humble for a Nobel prizewinning author. But it’s also exactly spot on. How do we know what we like, or what we’re good at, if we’re not aware of where shortcomings – either in ourselves or in literary preferences – fall?

Shall we give a big thumbs-up emoticon to that? Happy New Year.