A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg
I.
For me the pandemic began in earnest on March 11–the same day I first made the acquaintance of my now old-frenemy Zoom. One of my graduate students had recommended it the night before, after a straw poll had found that most of her colleagues would rather the week’s class not be held in person. I’ll admit it’s a bit hard, so many months later, to explain why I myself wasn’t better prepared for this; had I not spent an entire session, back when I’d barely heard of Wuhan, lecturing from the classroom’s remotest corner and insisting between sneezes, “Don’t worry–hay fever!”? Hadn’t my mother-in-law (of doughty pioneer stock) left behind an entire closetful of toilet paper and canned beans at the end of her last visit, five days ago? And hadn’t the first documented case of community spread in New York walked into an ER a half mile from campus in the interim? Weren’t swaths of Westchester County already locking down? But denial is a mother, too, I guess, and cordons sanitaires and “airborne toxic events” still seemed possible only in novels. So when I called my department chair the next morning to check was I allowed to hold this week’s class online, my main feeling was a (perhaps prophetic) dubiousness about distance learning. His response? “Well, as of Friday, the college has suspended all in-person interactions for the rest of the semester, so you might as well get a jump on things.”
Gulp.
On the syllabus that day was Mrs. Dalloway. I should state for the record that I already vibrate at a sympathetic frequency with this novel, bursting into unaccountable tears every fifteen pages or so–and at different places each time. Indeed, my ideal reading of Mrs. Dalloway, a reading of perfect Buddhist attunement, entails crying continuously from the first sentence to the last and then dying immediately after. (Of joy. In the year 2072).
Wikipedia informs me it’s , not , who said that happiness writes white–i.e., generates no contrast, leaves no mark on the page–and though exceptions range from the denouement of to ’s short story “The Happiest I’ve Been,” the rule more or less holds…which is why Clarissa Dalloway is so singular in world literature. Through the whole of the novel that comprises her, she remains of her happiness, so exquisitely in the face of the virile alternatives–the self-pity of Peter Walsh; the self-satisfaction of “admirable” Hugh Whitbread; the terrible auto-auto-da-fé of Septimus Smith? Every fiction must on some level address the Passover question, Why is this day different from all other days?…and with Mrs. Dalloway, to whom, as in a Seinfeld episode, so little seems to happen.