Gentle Readers will not be altogether surprised to discover that after digging out a copy of The Chosen in order to extensively quote the discussion of a verse of Perke Avot, I would wind up re-reading the whole book. And I did.
What I wound up noticing, this time through, were a bunch of authorial decisions, and wondering about them. Why put this bit about the spider here, rather than later? Why not have that blind chasid come down the street again afterward, or have him be an actual character, with lines and a name and everything? Why not revisit some of Reuven’s high school buddies, during the stretch where he is cut off from Daniel? Is there some purpose in having this bit here, rather than there? What about this other bit? If you swapped them, would they work better, or worse?
The thing is, I can’t tell. I generally can’t tell—for all that I do read a lot, and enjoy reading a lot, I am such a fiend for narrative that I have a lot of difficulty telling what effect writerly bits, good or bad, have on the overall atmosphere and whatnot. But I particularly can’t tell for this book, because I have read it so often it’s in my bones, as it were, and I can’t really imagine it being different than it is, or the experience of it being new.
A bunch of students at the University that employs me (I really should give the institution a nickname for this Tohu Bohu, rather than keep referring to it as my employer) are reading The Chosen as a text for some sort of humanities distribution course for science students. It’s an interesting choice. I would have thought that college was the wrong age to first read it, too old for the kid stuff and too young for the stuff about fathers. On the other hand, the book brings Danny and Reuven up to their college years, ending more or less with their emergence into to the world of grupps, which is presumably nearly the position of these kids at the moment. And then, I wonder how it would feel reading the book as a requirement for a course; I read for my own pleasure, and haven’t read an assigned twenty years.
Digression: OK, that’s a tiny exaggeration. I certainly read some of the books I was assigned in my Junior year in college. So nineteen years. And I’m not counting my responsibility for preparing Torah discussions for several months, which required reading a chapter or two a week. Nor am I counting stuff read for this Tohu Bohu, or books acquired from the publisher under the agreement that I would write a short review, or like that, or stuff that people asked me to read. But, you know, that’s a different class of stuff than required text for a class, isn’t it? End Digression.
Er, and I suppose End Book Report, on account of not actually having anything more to say.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.