The Serialist by David Gordon
It’s hard to say that I ‘liked’ or ‘disliked’ this book. The author is a writer, who works in publishing and pornography. The book’s main character and narrator is a writer, who works in publishing and pornography. The plot turns on the repellent idea of a writer who is persuaded to create fictional pornography featuring real women and a serial killer, in return for exclusive interviews with the killer. The hard-up writer also pens a vampire-romance series under his dead mother’s name (funny) and has an ongoing sexually tense relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl that he ghost-writes papers for (creepy).
At one point Gordon’s narrator says something about reading that I have never seen articulated this quite this way before. This kind of insight made it impossible to dislike the book entirely, despite the sleaziness.
“Why do we read? In the beginning, as children, why do we love the books we love? For most, I think, it’s travel, a flight into adventure, into a dream that feels like our own. But for a few it is also escape, flight from boredom, unhappiness, loneliness, from where or who we can no longer bear to be. When I read, the words on the page replace the voice in my head and I cease, for a little while, to be me, or at least to be so painfully aware of being me. These are the real readers, the maniacs, the ones who dose themselves with fiction the way junkies get high, the way lovers adore the beloved: beyond reason.”
Reading is lot like that, for me at least.
The narrator goes on to say that “This kind of reading, ironically, precedes all judgment.” Ironically, because it is just these manic, omnivorous devourers of genre fiction that go on to become book snob academics – or book reviewers.
