While waiting for a table at Pok Pok in Red Hook last night — fyi Pok Pok is not really worth waiting for — I stopped in Freebird bookstore on Columbia Street, and promptly fell in love. The bookstore is a pretty ordinary used bookstore, but rather than being a hoarder’s den — like this disgusting one where I’m pretty sure a hermit lives on Court Street — or overwhelming gigantic, like The Strand, it is orderly, neat, and easy to browse through.
I’ve been wanting to read “American Wife” by Curtis Sittenfeld for while, but never felt like it was worth its full price. At Freebird, it was $3, so I bought it. I also bought “Officers and Gentlemen” by Evelyn Waugh, which I will probably never even open.
I read 100 pages of “American Wife” this morning, lying in bed, all the while beating myself up for not doing something productive like, for instance, writing my own novel. No pleasure is without pain. The novel, which is loosely based on former First Lady Laura Bush’s life, is only ok — Curtis Sittenfeld apparently never got the memo that you should show rather than tell. I should have known when Richard Russo, who suffers from a similar affliction, wrote a blurb praising her as “amazing” on the back.
What I did like was a passage in which Sittenfeld’s main character, Alice, realizes she’s found her great love. Those of you have felt such certainty might also swoon:
“It was a sunny afternoon (as it turned out, the temperature would not fall below seventy-five degrees that Saturday, or for another few weeks), and the cicadas were buzzing and the trees and grass were green, and we were walking toward each other, he was squinting against the sun, we both were smiling, and I loved him, I loved him completely, and I knew that he loved me back. I could feel it. That moment — inside it, I could anticipate the thing I most wanted and I could be beyond it, it had happened already, and I was ensconced in the rich reassurance of knowing it was certain and definite…Or maybe this is only what I think now. But it was all we ever had! Approaching each other, him from the gym, me from the library — this was when I walked down the aisle and he was waiting, this was when we made love, it was every anniversary, every reunion in an airport or train station, ever reconciliation after a quarrel. This was the whole of our lives together.”
Hint: He dies.
Anyway, this post is really an excuse for me to delay the eventuality of the run I’m about to go on — or will go on after I eat five or so more fig newtons.
