Robert Gray: Whose Book Is It Anyway?

Authors write books and readers read them. It's a deceptively simple contract. Booksellers are professional readers who get to discover works before they're reviewed or released, thanks to the ARC avalanches that bury, in the best possible way (mostly), bookstores everywhere. Agents, editors and publishers may justifiably profess to being the readers who truly discover new works, but booksellers still plant a flag of their own with staff picks.

Given the intimate connection on the printed page between authors and their readers--in the book trade and beyond--certain questions inevitably arise. What is the true nature of this relationship? Where is the borderline? What do authors "owe" their readers beyond the work itself? And when a reader tumbles down the rabbit hole and fully enters a fictional world, does the novel's alchemy change? Whose book is it anyway?

I recently fell down one of those reader's rabbit holes while checking out the Paris Review's interview with playwright and author Yasmina Reza, whose latest novel is Happy Are the Happy (translated by John Cullen).

"To my mind, to understand a character is to understand his inner voice," she said. I immediately thought about my favorite authors, narrators and characters; as well as all of those other readers who breathe life into letters on a page with their own disparate inner voices. Reading is a creative, collaborative act, and hearing voices plays a key role. Polyphony? Cacophony? It depends.

This sparked a memory from 15 years ago, when I saw the brilliant off-Broadway production of Reza's The Unexpected Man, starring Eileen Atkins and Alan Bates. The play is about two strangers, in their 60s, sitting opposite each other on a train from Paris to Frankfurt. For all but the final 10 minutes, they speak only in interior monologues (to me, audience members might reasonably think), each caught up in personal obsessions while occasionally, and surreptitiously, observing the other.

Paul Parsky is a dyspeptic Author (his opening lines: "Bitter. It's all so bitter."), while Martha, we soon discover, is his Reader. She recognizes him immediately, but remains discreet. In her handbag she carries a copy of his novel, The Unexpected Man, and she wonders whether she should speak to him or just "fetch out" the book and read it.

For his part, the Author simply passes judgment:

Strange this woman never reads anything. A woman who doesn't read anything the whole journey... Is there today one single person in the whole world, in the whole world, who might know how to read that book?

Martha again considers unmasking herself as his Reader:

I'm fetching out the book. I'll place myself so he can see me. He can't not react. He can't watch me embarking on an intimate relationship with him six feet away without revealing himself. What are you going to do in Frankfurt? The Book Fair? No. First of all, I don't think it's the time of year, and a writer with your nature, flirtatiously antisocial, doesn't turn up at the Book Fair.

She also contemplates an all-to-familiar social dilemma:

Maybe I ought not to get to know you, Mr. Parsky. Suppose I don't like you, why take the risk of no longer being able to love anything about you? I'm told there isn't necessarily an intimate link between a man and his work. How can that be possible?

Then the Reader finally stakes her claim to his books:

I'm the one. The one who loved you, who colored you according to my inclinations, the one who studied every subject under your perpetual catechism, I shall abolish you, I shall make off with you when my time is up and nothing will remain of you or anything else.

At last, like Chekhov's loaded gun, the novel is brandished and the Author struck by its appearance:

She's reading The Unexpected Man. It's really too much. I knew she was an interesting woman. Shall I remain anonymous? Why wasn't she reading it when we set off?

They have a brief conversation. The Author attempts to conceal his identity, but the Reader counters that move by citing examples from his work, concluding:

All these things and so many others you've described, Mr. Parsky, have made me weep... You have no right to be bitter. In your books there have been hundreds of moments like eternity.

I won't reveal how the play ends, but it's safe to say the relationship between Author and Reader remains a complex one even after the applause has died down. Whose book is it? Why spoil the mystery. --Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)