I’m not really too clear on the concept myself, since I tend to read the same kinds and quantities of books all year round. “Summer reading” seems to refer to what you might want to read on a beach, and as a pale-skinned redhead, I don’t spend much time lounging about on sunny beaches, with or without a book. But because of the general tenor of the recommendations in this season, I tend to become more aware of categories—more likely to notice, that is, whether the book in my hand might count in someone else’s eyes as light entertainment or a serious intellectual project.
Good books are to be found on both sides of the dividing line, and I’ve recently read one of each. On the light side, I zoomed through the second volume in Ben H. Winters’s Henry Palace series. This projected trilogy, which began about a year ago with The Last Policeman, is premised on the idea that an asteroid is about to hit the earth, destroying life as we know it. What, Winters posits, would be the effect of such a prediction on human society in general and on the solution of mysteries in particular? In the first volume, our hero, a homicide investigator in Concord, New Hampshire, solved the mystery he had been assigned but lost his job (and a great deal else) as the world slowly wound down around him. At the beginning of The Last Policeman, it seemed as if the Big Hit was just an unpleasant possibility; by the end, the asteroid’s collision with earth was projected with certainty for the upcoming month of October.
Now, in Countdown City, we are offered a vastly diminished time period—specifically, the four weeks extending from mid-July to mid-August in the last summer before the end. By this time, the Concord police, like all other police around the world, have pretty much stopped doing anything. Food scavenging is the only way to survive, because money means nothing anymore. All telecommunications and email and so forth have completely broken down; in fact, there is hardly even electricity, unless one generates it oneself. There is no gas to fuel private cars (people get around by bicycle), so every trip has to be local. There is no readily available internet on which to perform searches, so Henry Palace—who is detecting for his own private reasons, since no one is paying him to find anything—has to obtain all his information face to face. We are back in the dark ages of the nineteenth century, in terms of police methods, and that means that Winters must offer us careful lucubrations in the manner of Sherlock Holmes rather than just run-of-the-mill whiz-bang plots that use all the latest gadgets.
Henry is a likeable guy, and Winters is a clear, fluent writer, and there is something quite enjoyable about the Robinson Crusoe aspect of figuring out life from scratch. But there is also a great deal of anxiety connected with the impending deadline, and as the series races toward its fixed end, it acquires a kind of Zeno’s Paradox–like structure: the closer we are to the finish line, the more we tend to subdivide the remaining time into smaller and smaller bites so as to make the limited experience last. It’s a clever device, and an amusing one. I can say in all honesty that I am truly looking forward—with the combination of eagerness and nervousness that good mysteries always induce—to the final volume in the trilogy.
My second book of the summer, obviously written in a more serious vein, is T. J. Clark’s Picasso and Truth. This book began life as a series of six lectures given by the eminent art historian (not to mention Threepenny writer and poet) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I attended one of the lectures myself, the fourth in the series. Reading the whole volume now, I think I must have been out of my mind to try to absorb a snippet cut out of the middle of such a tightly woven, scrupulously investigated, carefully considered argument. That I grasped anything at all about Picasso between the wars, in that first go-round, was due more to the local felicities of Clark’s style than to my own understanding. Now, though, I can see the entire trajectory, and it’s a thrilling one. I won’t try to recapitulate the argument here, except to say that it begins by focusing on the way Picasso’s Cubism took place, essentially, inside a room; the artist then had to do something with that intimate space (break out of it? let jagged holes into it? transform intimacy to distance through the conversion of humans to monsters?) in order to create the public space that was Guernica. By taking Guernica as its endpoint, the book puts a political as well as personal and philosophical pressure on the idea of Truth. The word, in Clark’s hands, is not some kind of academic shorthand for whatever the latest theory wants it to be; it really means what it says.
There are many wondrous and beautiful things about this volume, starting with the gorgeous array of pictures. The full canvases and pertinent details—mainly from Picasso, but also from Matisse, Ingres, Menzel, the Romans, and all sorts of other comparative figures—are arranged on each page so they come up just as you need them. Unlike a lecture series, the book allows you to absorb Clark’s argument at your own pace, and to go back to first principles as often as you need to.
But more striking even than the physical book is the directness and intimacy of the prose. This is tough material, in all senses—intellectually obdurate, and also painful to contemplate—and without Clark’s companionable voice, we might not feel willing to get through it. But he is always there as a staunch companion, holding out his hand to us at times, insisting we make our own way at others. I love, in particular, the moment at the beginning of Lecture 5 when he posits a skeptical, intelligent reader pondering his remarks about Painter and Model in the previous lecture: “Well, yes, she might say, I can see that the thing is a masterpiece. I may not warm to it, but I understand the effort needed to reinvent the space of Cubism in this way… But here is my difficulty. The whole burden of these lectures so far has been that for Picasso the only space—indeed, the only reality—his painting could fasten onto and recast was private. Room-space, you called it… But is not the whole point about Guernica that its space, and its whole conception, is public? Isn’t room-space a thing of the past? Doesn’t the painting’s achievement hinge on its ability to show us the interior—the place of shelter and habitation—done to death? But if so, does Painter and Model really lead to Guernica at all?” This is no straw man (or straw woman) to whom Clark is giving these thoughts. He attributes to her his best questions, and he raises her doubts in order to address them seriously in the rest of the book.
This ability to think himself inside another mind—to coherently imagine an opposed view even as he is firmly pursuing his own—is what makes this one of the best books Clark has ever written. Picasso has made excessive demands on him as a critic, and he has responded in kind. It is his differences from and with Picasso which have, in a way, made this investigation possible. Or so I take him to mean when he says at one point: “Speaking as a socialist atheist, I would say that the worldviews of Grünewald and Velásquez are as uncongenial to me—to me as a citizen, to my everyday sense of human possibility—as anything I intuit Picasso to be proposing. But assent is not it. I recognize in Grünewald and Velásquez—I fully enter into, in the act of looking—an account of the species in full. The question in Picasso’s case is whether the same is true, or ought to be asked, of his life’s achievement. I say ‘ought to be asked’ because one answer might be that his body of work is precisely the strongest argument we have (and this is what is hateful about it) that greatness…no longer applies. It should not even be tried for.”
And here, perhaps, is where my two recent bits of summer reading begin to come together. There is something apocalyptic about Clark’s view, just as there is about Winters’s mystery plot. Something is over; the end of the world as we knew and loved it is nigh. And yet theirs is not a religious view at all, for no salvation is being offered. The only hope is a small, practical one—the reliance on what we can see and touch and realize firsthand, like the warmth of another person’s skin or the magic of a precise brushstroke on a piece of canvas. If this is a retreat from the media-saturated, infinitely replicable, life-as-thirdhand-experience world that we now find around us, well, that is a conscious move on the part of both these authors. They are both resigned to making what they can of the fact that the case, for every one of us, is evidently terminal.