Intro, part Four

My theory here is that Harriet is very clear on who she is. She’s a reader. She’s not a writer manqué. She doesn’t read every book somehow on some level secretly convinced that she could have written it better herself – like some of us do. Me? Guilty as charged. I have two unpublished novels sitting under my bed – one is a little chick lit romp about a woman whose life is so boring that she feels compels to make up things so she can scrapbook them with her girlfriends (autobiographical? Says who?), while the other is a somewhat darker chick lit novel about a women’s bunco club in a certain Tidewater subdivision whose newest member turns out to be the reincarnation of the witch of Pungo (and if you’ve never heard of the real life historic Witch of Pungo you may either go look it up on Wikipedia, or you may, a la our heroine harriet decide that it really doesn’t matter and you didn’t need to know about it anyway). Neither one has been published (and truth be told, the second one hasn’t actually even been finished) though I came darned close on that first one! Had several reads by some prominent literary agents, but somehow still got that note saying, “Sorry. Not right for us.” And this after, of course, having devoured multiple how-to volumes on: how to write a novel, how to improve a novel, how to sell a novel, how to get an agent, and so forth. Harriet? Nary a whisper of interest in the topic.
All of which has left me with a bit of a mystery. Here she is the number one reviewer, arguably the most influential voice on amazon.com – and it’s a voice that lacks personality. Where is the humor? The rancor? The aggression? Can she truly say that she never read anything that made her angry? That startled her, frightened her, rocked her world? All I’m saying is that this seems strange for a librarian, for someone who has devoted her life to books.
Here’s my take on it: If you ask me, Harriet Klausner is the Antonio Salieri of book reviewing. Do you remember him? He was the guy who was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s contemporary. He’s the narrator for the play “Amadeus.” He’s the guy who wakes up early every morning, sits down at a desk and cranks out yet another symphony every year. He’s Mr. Productivity. Not Mr. Ingenuity and not a genius by any means, but someone who feels that he deserves to be an award-winning composer, simply by virtue of the fact that he’s more disciplined than his competition.
Now I’m not saying that I’m Mozart or anything, but I will tell you that it was Mozart that I was cheering for in that movie. Undisciplined, immature, full of outbursts Mozart. Who was great when he sat down and did some work, but most of the time he didn’t. When he did, what he produced was genius – moving, touching and unique. Clearly a cut above the astonishing large piles of drivel produced by Salieri, his competitor.
So there you have it. As I read all these reviews by harriet Klausner, this crazy idea started brewing in my mind. Someone needed to unseat her. Someone needed to unseat the smug librarian who never reveleaed anything personal in her reviewers, who never “loved, loved, loved” a review, who never sought salvation or absolution in a book, who never used too many exclamation points. Someone like, well, someone like me. For I am the anti-Harriet.
What do I read? Why do I read? Well, if you were to pull up my reviews on amazon.com for the past year, here’s what you’d see. I ordered:
-4 books on dealing with a child who is underachieving in school (and here I’ll freely confess I was seeking absolution, not help. It’s the same reason I’ll always buy any book with the words Bad and Mother in the title. I wanted to be told that ti wasn’t my fault and that Some Children are Just Like That (which would make a wonderful title for a book, by the way. You may use it if you like.)).
-3 books on fixing your marriage, one on learning to communicate better and one on how to stop being such a bitch (seeking salvation, not absolution here. I really do want to stop being such a bitch.)
-4 books on improving your spiritual life (most of the born-again Christian variety, though I’ll occasionally dabble in something new agey)
-countless diet books (none of which have really helped significantly. I’m still fat.)
-books on academic writing and avoiding procrastination
Are we sensing a pattern here? Perhaps reading about solving problems instead of actually solving them yourself? Kind of like the way that we’d all rather read a good cookbook or one about exercise than actually preparing the meals or taking the walk. You might even label me as undisciplined – as someone who seldom exercises, wakes up early, as someone who’s always looking for a short cut on how to clean my house (try a book by Don Aslett on that subject), as someone who is, well, fat.
Clearly, I am NOT nearly as secure as good old Harriet Klausner. I worry all the time – that I am a bad mother, a bad wife, that I am fat, that I don’t exercise enough, and that I should be more productive at work and at home. And clearly when I read a book, I AM seeking something – a fix for my problems, and somehow despite my many, many abortive attempts at fixing these problems, I still go on seeking, convinced that there, somewhere in that vast amazon warehouse lies a book (prefereably one with a pink cover and maybe a graphic of someone drinking something) that contains the answer, the SOLUTION, to all my problems. Salvation – randomly typing things into the internet

Intro, Part Three

Once again, here’s a place where Harriet is completely unlike me. I tend to go off half-cocked, act (and speak and write) before thinking, only later realizing it’s too late to reel my words back in, to wish them unsaid. Much of my life is spent wishing for a do-over. And I feel guilty, a lot. Somehow I feel that although I’m a political science professor, I should know more – about everything. I read to close up and fill the gaping holes of ignorance which I’m constantly identifying in myself. I’m not entirely sure who Lloyd George is, or Lloyd’s of London, for that matter. I occasionally force myself to watch C-SPAN, amazed by all the legislation – and senators – which I have never heard of. I don’t have an opinion on Madonna’s latest adoption attempt. Should I? Shouldn’t I?
I feel a strange need and perhaps even a duty to know about things – to have an opinion on global warming (though my specialty is actually Russian information warfare), on whether a dog or a cat makes a better pet, on whether or not you should medicate your child, wear your baby, give birth without drugs, hold a séance and try to contact your dead relatives, invest in real estate. And at some point, I’ve read a book on all these subjects.
I imagine that Harriet is simply much more psychologically secure than I am. To my knowledge, she has never read (or reviewed) a book because Oprah told her she should, because the ladies at the pool told her she would really like it or because her pastor suggested that she should (“Getting a grip on your Anger: For Beginners and Intermediates” springs to mind). Me? Guilty on all counts, I’m afraid. I’m an inconstant reader, I’m disloyal, changing my favorite author from day to day, growing sick and weary of individuals and genres and constantly jumping ship. (“If that Jodi Picoult kills off one more character at the end of her books, that’s it! I’m over her.” And yes, I’d probably write that in a review.)
She’s also very steady. Harriet would never tell you that she “loved, loved, loved that book!!!!” with six exclamation points – anymore than she would tell you that it saved her life, or saved her marriage. Harriet never attempted to deal with her menopausal symptoms by reading a book on the subject, underlining the parts that made the most sense, and then hightailing it off to the natural foods store to stock up on black cohosh and omega fatty acids as the book suggested. (Guess who did, on the other hand? You’d be right. And no, in case you’re wondering, black cohosh doesn’t work.)
Let me be clear here. Old Harriet stays in her lane, but she’s not one of those ‘ghettoized reviewers’ – as I tend to think of them – who specializes only in one or two obscure subjects, thereby revealing more about themselves than you might otherwise know. There are the obsessed homeschoolers, the Jesus freaks, the anti-jesus freaks, the colon cleansing raw food freaks (who usually post entirely too much information about exactly what a particular diet did to their digestive tracts), the “women whose children are just so startlingly gifted that no school would ever exist that could possibly serve their needs,” the security moms who never seem to tire of reviewing and posting lists of consumer reports tracts and home safety products. No, we still know startling little aobut harriet – except that she likes historic novels.
She’s also not a basher, once again maybe a sign of her own security. She will never tell you that she hated a book, that she thinks the writer is an idiot, that maybe SOMEONE should give up writing entirely and take up a new hobby, like packaging industrial solvents. The most she’ll ever allow is that she was perhaps a tad bit uncomfortable with the historic inaccuracies in a particular piece of writing. The costumes were wrong for the period, or a bit of the dialogue left her miffed. She’s a diplomat, that Harriet.