Real Reading

I have been riding on Charlie's coattails of summer reading, but I have had time to reflect on the sort of books we have been choosing lately. And I have noticed an interesting pattern to my reading choices--each book included at the end an acknowledgment, or bibliography or appendix or the author's research. All are firmly grounded in historical fact. "The Dante Club," "The Road to Wellville," and most recently, British novelist Ian McEwan's 1997 novel, "Enduring Love," are all the creations of gifted novelists who have grounded their stories in deep and meticulous research.

Matthew Pearl is, himself, a Dante scholar, but it is clear that he is equally an expert in the New England poets who are the reluctant detectives of this literary murder mystery. The story is alive with the details of post-Civil War Boston and Cambridge; you can smell and feel the crowds on the horse trolleys, the closeness of Longfellow's study, and the iciness of winter. But more griping is the psychological underpinnings of Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the dynamics between them. Clearly Pearl has done his homework.

T.C.Boyle's "The Road to Wellville" like "The Dante Club" has a number of characters that are purely the author's invention, but they swirl around the very real Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the historic phenomenon of the cereal wars of Battle Creek, Michigan. The story is chocked full of bizarre cures, and a reader might be tempted to dismiss them as Boyle's satiric fancy if it weren't for the fact that the novel is peppered with authentic photos of some of these therapies from Dr. Kellogg's sanitarium. Couple that with the serious bibliography and you can tell you are firmly grounded in the world of historical fact.

"Enduring Love," an apt pun for a book about a man putting up with an obsessive and unwanted fixation, is McEwan's 1997 novel. The object of the attention is a science writer, who eventually pinpoints the problem as de Clerambault's syndrome. Yes, that is an authentic psychotic disorder, and not only does McEwan have the appendix at the back of the novel to prove, it, he also includes the case history that was the basis for his novel. McEwan has transformed the case study into a work of literature; nevertheless, the characters and plot have a real life existence.

Although each of these novelists has a unique style, and each book is as different from the other as it is possible to be, what Pearl, Boyle and McEwan have in common are stories grounded in real life events. They are all delving deep into libraries, archives and studies for the bones of their characters and plots, but then crafting their research into works of literary art. Rather than taking their readers on flights of fancy or trips of magical reality, these writers find meaningful themes in the complex and subtle behavior of folks who have walked among us.

At moments I have paused to think about these figures in a way I haven't in other novels. I have really wondered at man's complexity, and infinite variety.