Youth and young manhood: the Dostoevsky connection

“We read to know we are not alone.”*

We read for all sorts of other reasons, of course, but when I was in my 20s this was a sentiment I largely ascribed to.

One of these books is not like the others...

For a number of years Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales From An Accelerated Culture fit the bill rather neatly. The conversation among the characters was recognizably akin to the conversations I was having with my contemporaries. Certainly the concerns were identical. I’ve lost track of how many times I read that book, or gave it away to friends. My friends seemed to dig it too.

It’s been a bunch of years since I last read it, and I think the copy I currently own was purchased in a used book store. I gave it a glance before writing this. It’s fair to say my relationship to the book has changed. There is a self-conscious performance aspect to the writing that gets in the way of my entering the story anymore.

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I also read Dostoevsky in my 20s (full disclosure: only Crime & Punishment and The Karamazov Brothers). The narratives seemed taffied into existence from a primordial present. I loved the interminable nights, running from house to house, encountering a lit lamp on a table, feverish conversations in a parlour or back alley, passions that could hardly be contained or expressed through words alone. I could recognize those nights from my youth. I knew my parents were familiar with those nights, as were my grandparents and generations more. I knew I was not alone.

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This past weekend I retrieved my old copy of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. I worried I might experience the sort of disappointment I felt with Generation X. Weirdly enough, although Stephenson’s writing is arguably “cooler” than Coupland’s (how deep is a reader’s emotional attachment to the protagonist hero likely to get when the guy is named “Hiro Protagonist”?) I felt more at home re-reading Snow Crash than I did re-reading GenX.

And I think it’s because Stephenson’s old book shares an unexpected kinship with Dostoevsky.

More anon — hopefully soon.

An uncanny resemblance?

*Man, this is one of those “So-and-so sez” quotes. In this case it’s usually attributed to C.S. Lewis, but nobody bothers to indicate just where he wrote or said these words. That’s because “C.S. Lewis” says them in Shadowlands, the fictional play and film loosely based on Lewis’s marriage to Joy Davidman. And in the film the sentiment doesn’t even originate with Lewis — a young man he encounters says, “My father says, (etc)” and Lewis repeats the line later in the movie. When I first saw the movie in '93 I was pretty sure I’d heard the line before, so I went to the Metro Reference Library and spent a lunch hour trying to track it down. Bartlett’s and Co. failed me, so until someone corrects me attribution goes to playwright William Nicholson.