In praise of quiet books

While the publishing industry seems to demand action, surprise, shock, and reversals on every page, I despair for the future of stories that unspool slowly and encourage contemplation.

Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash

You have to grab your readers from the first page. You must start in the middle of a dramatic scene. You must create constant suspense and momentum. This is the advice in untold numbers of writing advice columns and books.

There is nothing wrong with this advice. It’s good advice. These are certainly the things selling books right now. And perhaps these are the only kinds of books that can hold our increasingly shortened attention spans.

Yet recently, I keep stumbling upon older books that meet none of these requirements. Books that have won National Book Awards or the Pulitzer Prize, but have very little in the way of suspense or action. At the moment I am in the middle of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, imagining trying to pitch it to an agent or editor today. “It opens with an old man in a wheelchair puttering around, musing about various things, and reading his grandmother’s letters. He never leaves the house. Very slowly, he begins to tell us of his grandmother’s life and marriage, with heaps of evocative description on every page.” It seems like it would be a hard sell in the current publishing climate.

I just finished reading Stegner’s book Passage to Safety, a very quiet ode to friendship and the mysteries of marriage (yes, I read everything years later than I am supposed to read it). It doesn’t begin in the middle of anything more exciting than a young couple beginning their lives together at a university in Wisconsin. It’s not Stegner’s most famous book and it didn’t win the awards his others did, but it was published and praised. It is beautiful and moving. I can easily picture every single one of his settings, because he takes the time to describe everything the characters are seeing. The flickers of facial expressions. The dozens of kinds of trees in a Vermont woods. The ever-changing light. 

I didn’t read the book so much as live in it for awhile. I vicariously engaged in lively literary dinnertime discussions, sat and listened to music with friends after a meal, whacked my way through the thick Vermont undergrowth, off-piste. I detected my friends’ feelings from the movement of their bodies. I sat with the narrator and wrote a book, and then another. What drama there is—one character gets polio—is quietly told. No one cheats on their spouse, no one betrays a friend, no one kills anyone.

I’m pretty sure I couldn’t sell a book like this today. At least that’s what I hear. Quiet books aren’t only less likely to get published, they are less likely to be discovered by readers because everyone wants to promote the “pageturners.”

This is a loss. There are treasures to be found in books that offer room for reflection. That leave us with something more than the resolution of a dramatic plot. That leave us with new worlds, insights, and ideas.

I also just reread Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which despite the tragic accident that concludes it, is a quiet portrait of a girl, a woman, and a marriage. I read books by Anna Quindlen, Marilynne Robinson, and May Sarton and wonder who in the future will be allowed to tell such quiet stories to a large audience. Marilynne Robinson’s work is not threatened by the current trend because she is already famous. She gets to keep publishing quiet, lyrical books because 1) she does it brilliantly and 2) we read them before the recent fashions for thrillers, dangerous secrets, and dramatic reversals.

I’m told the French have more tolerance for quiet, lyrical, and literary books. They celebrate authors like Annie Ernaux, whose work has gone on to win the Nobel Prize. I recently read Ernaux’s slim book, A Man’s Place, on the advice of my phlebotomist, an avid fan. “Her language!” she exclaims as she slides a needle into my vein. “She’s perfect.”

The book is a portrait of Ernaux’s father. Nothing happens in the book, other than the slow unspooling of the life of a man the world deems unimportant. A man without privileges or education who spends his life in unrewarding work. A man unable to articulate his own emotions. The language is as unadorned as the man. Yet I set down the book feeling I understood something about the world and people that I didn’t understand before I read it. (I have several other of Ernaux’s books on my desk, to be read).

When I finish reading, I love to feel I have lived other lives. Wandered into the minds of people unlike me. Tasted their breakfast (for some reason I am obsessed with breakfast. Give me all your breakfast details).

These are not the only books I read, of course. I consider it part of my job to read as widely and diversely as possible. And I genuinely love so many things. A good literary mystery—Dorothy Sayers, Tana French, or Olga Tokarczuk. Memoirs that read like instructions for how to be a human, such as those by Maggie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, Sofia Samatar, and Carmen Maria Machado. Dramatic historical fiction by Kate Quinn or William Boyd. Books with important things to say about trauma, war, slavery, race, sexuality. Books by Toni Morrison, Sarah Waters, and Louise Erdrich. Science fiction like Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Fantasy books (by R. F. Kuang) my daughter wants me to read so we can discuss them. Books with dramatic revelations. I could go on.

I just don’t want the quiet books to die out. Also, I want permission to write one some day. I’m in the midst of tearing up and piecing back together the book I am writing in order to make it more likely to sell (I hope!). I need to support my family and I haven’t been doing that lately. As I do this, I mourn the book I wanted to write, with its quiet introduction to a world and landscape Americans know nothing about. I still love the book I am writing; it’s just—different.

Tell me about the quiet books you love. The books that let you live inside of them, that gave you new observation and understandings of the world and the people in it.