It has been a good year for the obituarists among us. I suppose every year is, when you think about it, though it nevertheless seems that there have been more obituaries than usual lately, at least within my own particular spheres of interest. Death notices, appreciations, take-downs. (It’s always better to wait until someone is unable to respond before you put the boot in.) There was Wolfe, then Roth, then Bourdain, then Naipaul, with names new to me—Jonathan Gold’s, for example—thrown in for good measure along the way, added to the must-read list. Each death has brought with it a tide of pre- and post-packaged post-mortems, some literary, all literal.
It almost goes without saying that my engagement with these hundreds of articles—which have ranged from your standard New York Times-style fare to more specific, even niche, analyses—has precluded any engagement with the work the dead actually produced while living. I have downloaded that work and will eventually get around to it, but someone else is always dying and adding to the pile. A hundred new obits are dropping each week, meaning that Portnoy’s Complaint remains unread, A House for Mr Biswas unopened.
I mainline these articles like some kind of addict, my once perfectly-cultivated garden of news and literary feeds having grown unwieldy over the years. Between Feedly and Twitter, I probably sift through a thousand headlines a day, choosing, in the end, between twenty and thirty pieces to add to the list, only a few of which I’ll ever get to. They eventually pile up as well, and soon the list requires culling. As with the regular waves of obituaries, lapping constantly at the shore of my to-do list, there is an elegiac air about much of what comes my way: when not lamenting the actual dead, the articles in my various feeds lament democracy, civility, the climate. There’s no denying that these are somewhat more important than articles about the death of the novel, or the death of a certain idea of the novel, or the death of a certain idea of the Great American Novel, or the death of a certain idea of the Great White Male American Novelist. Yet I paused before embarking upon Nathaniel Rich’s 30,000 words on the history of climate change, choosing instead to read at least that many, a lot of them echoing one another, about Naipaul. The Rich piece, too, has been added—or perhaps, fatally, relegated—to the list.
I doubt that this preference has anything to do with my feelings about the lingering importance of literature. You would think that I might turn to novels were that the case. But these articles are as much of a distraction from the books I’m reading (or supposed to be reading) as they are from anything—everything—else. I’ve been reading Paul Scott’s The Day of the Scorpion, the second book of his Raj Quartet, since I was in India two months ago. Two months! It had been my intent to read the whole cycle while I was in the country, but there, too, I was inevitably distracted. The books deal with the lead-up to partition, but the legacy of that divide, so evident on the ground in places like Kashmir and the Punjab, kept getting in the way and taking up my time. Even when I got around to sitting down with the book, it was impossible not to read it through the prism of my experiences: the riot in Srinagar after Friday Prayers, my interview with a leading Hindu nationalist. I have found myself involved in a few Twitter scrapes with India’s ascendant right-wing as a result of my musings, which is perhaps why the last book I managed to get through in its entirety—without distraction, as it were—was Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a structurally formulaic but nevertheless sobering look at the mob mentality that all of us, whatever our political leanings, seem to succumb to whenever we’re online.
As far as my non-fiction reading goes, I’ve followed that up with Mark Galeotti’s history of the Russian mafia, The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia, which, like The Day of the Scorpion, has been similarly difficult to read without turning away—a very easy thing to do given I’m reading it on my phone—to relevant articles. In the case of The Vory that has meant articles about the Skripal affair, which have inevitably led to articles about Putin in general, the Russian collusion scandal, and so on. As I wrote recently in a piece about The Americans, all roads, these days, tend to lead back to Trump, and thus, again, to Twitter, where I suppose the question ‘what are you reading?’ is most conclusively answered. Like everyone else, I’m reading tweets, and takes on tweets, and takes, like Joshua Cohen’s for n+1, on how reading endless takes on tweets is destroying our capacity to read much of anything. That’s perhaps the saddest obituary of all: the one marking the passing of our ability to read for more than a couple of paragraphs at a time.
And so the books I’d like to be reading pile up, albeit, because I’m on the road, in digital form. What I’m reading bears little resemblance to what I’d like to be reading: Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic, Melissa Broder’s The Pisces. I’m in Morocco right now and would like to read Jane and Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, the works of Mohamed Choukri. I doubt I’ll get to any of them in the end, despite the fact that I’m taking coffee in the places where the works are set, and, in many cases, where they were written. Even if I do, though, I’ll doubtless wind up reading as well about the migration crisis on the Moroccan-Spanish border, or about some other contemporary disaster that seems pressing. Is it possible to read anything when the world is—quite literally, in some places—a raging dumpster fire? Is our inability to read anything except in fits and starts somehow justified by the acrid smoke in our nostrils? It can be difficult, at times, to tell—the urgency, however, feels real. Perhaps the obituaries are merely a reminder that reading still matters, or did, once, and may yet do so again. Yes, thus do the books pile up.
Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.
