A girl was reading Franny and Zooey. Or maybe it was Nine Stories. The important thing is that the girl was a girl I had fallen badly for, and the book was lying on the floor of her dorm room, and after I had made my intentions known, and she reciprocated, and I reciprocated, and we reciprocated ourselves right out of our clothes, I saw the small white book sitting on the floor and picked it up as she ran off to the bathroom, bare knees buckled together, to wash off the least important part of me. While she was gone, I began reading, and then she returned and began to get dressed and said she had to go class, but asked if I wanted to stay, and I said, all right and so I kept on reading. I read all afternoon in this girl’s bed whom I hardly knew, turning the pages, enjoying the sour milk smell of the girl’s sheets, the glorious perfume of her faint sweat and shampoo and toothpaste. And there was something about reading that book, in that particular room, at that particular time in my life that made an inimitable impression on my life. When I was finished, it was dark outside and I went out into the dark and wandered around, stumbling, reaching out to touch the leaves on the trees, the petals of flowers, an iron fence, and for the first time in my life, I was struck dumb by a profoundly serious sort of wonder, which, in the end, is the exact same thing as falling in love.

The inherent amateurishness of the novel, of its writers and implied readers alike, seems vital in this. Not that no authors relied on writing novels to make a living; obviously many did and do. But (as the fictional novelist Bill Gray remarked in Mao II) the novel was essentially a democratic form, and writing one a feat that potentially anybody could pull off at least once. Among the audience, even less expertise or specialization was required. To read a novel you had to be literate and to take an interest in life as it’s lived by individuals, and that was about it. The great novelistic subjects—manners, family, growing-up, alienation, friendship, nostalgia, running away, love—tended to be things everyone had experienced, feared, or fantasized about. The novel portrayed common elements of life in a way that could be commonly understood, something true even in the case of the more rebarbative texts of the avant-garde. Malone Dies or The Waves or The Dead Father may have taxed some peoples’ patience, but they didn’t really defeat anybody’s powers of cognition; a few exceptions prove the rule that there’s no such thing as “difficult fiction,” an expression favored by people who never read anything truly difficult at all. Fundamentally, the novel implied that ordinary language and untutored insight furnished adequate devices for the understanding of individual life, and that prose was their proper medium. An economist or psychologist or sociologist would naturally possess a store of knowledge about his discipline, and therefore about the world, that a nonspecialist lacked, but the same scholar had to stand and face his own life—only one tidy corner of which could be illumined in technically economic, psychological, or sociological terms—with the same basic ignorance and amateurishness uniting everybody else, including the novelist. Even a middle-aged person too busy with work and family to read novels still knew that no other book than a novel could be written about his life that would do the least justice to that life in its complex way of taking place, as it had to, simultaneously in his head, in his household, in his society, and in history. The novel formed the shared culture of a literate secular society trying to apprehend life, or at least feeling that in principle life could be apprehended, through the medium of fictional narrative prose. Whatever far reaches of scholarship, analysis, introspection, or euphony any other variety of writing attained, there was as much justice as arrogance in what D.H. Lawrence said: “Being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.”

Here the past, yet again, proves valuable. In 1898 Tolstoy defined art as “that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others by certain external signs the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” This is communion, which is also catharsis—art as exercise for the empathetic muscles that define us as human. If the novel has ceded ground to other entertainments, it maintains a distinct and formal advantage in the realm of communion.

The books that have had the greatest impact on my life are not the ones that entertained me the most—rather, they’re the ones I’ve had to endure. Ulysses wasn’t a “good read”—it was a project, a mission, a brief military stint undertaken by a strong-willed, idealistic youth. It was a labor to carry, it required innumerable accoutrements to be read (not just the two other texts but also a notebook and a pen, a highlighter, slips of scrap paper to mark particular pages). Even the page design was more an opponent than a partner: There were line numbers on each page. Line numbers! This book wasn’t kidding around. Reading it, you felt you were staring down the business end of Literature.

But to arrive at the end of a book like that—to complete the project of reading it—there is for me no greater satisfaction. Wracked, enlightened, tortured, exhausted, bettered, you come out the other side of a book like Ulysses feeling as though you’ve had an experience, as though you have actually, actively read. And there are, for those of us who enjoy such literature of endurance, many authors who write books like bricks you could use to build a sound shelter for the three little pigs: William Gaddis, John Barth, Doris Lessing, Thomas Pynchon, Neal Stephenson, David Foster Wallace (to mention just a few of the most recent examples). Granted, there are some big books that make you feel, as you close them, that they haven’t quite been worth the effort. For me, that’s the risk that makes the expedition all the more thrilling.

It’s possible that books are like relationships. Some people may be quite happy hopping from one book to the next, looking for easy reads in the same way you might troll the bars for easy lays. There are thousands of completely forgettable books that will amuse you for an evening or two; they seduce you with their market-tested cover art, their comfortable length (not to overwhelm commitment-phobes), even the unabashedly lewd pick-up lines that open their narratives, the lines referred to in writing workshops as “hooks”: The summer my dog died, I learned how to stop time.

I once had a relationship with William H. Gass’s The Tunnel. It was a difficult couple of months. We didn’t get along—even though on the surface it seemed we would be a perfect couple. It was certainly no Ulysses. But I stuck with it to the very end, searching for any glimmer of connection or love, so sure was I that there must be one. At the very last, however, we parted quietly, with little fanfare, a bit embarrassed at our failure to make it work.

Do I wish that book were easier to read?

No. I admire its depths, even though I was not the one meant to plumb them.

Do I wish that book were shorter?

No. I respect a book that respects itself—a book that is not ashamed of declaring itself in bold and profuse terms.

Do I regret having spent time reading it?

Not at all. What I wanted was not entertainment but an experience—and I got that experience, and it has stayed with me. I feel that The Tunnel and I accomplished something, and I am reminded of that accomplishment whenever I see the book resting, still admired and enduring, on my bookshelf.

TP: Meaning first of all that I like books that I can hold in my hand. Made of paper. I don’t need to plug them in, and I don’t have to buy batteries for them. They look different from each other, and I like that. I like looking at Bleak House and being able to tell that it embodies a different sense of life than Jesus’ Son does. I like carrying the fuckers around with me. One weighs more than the other. If you like to read your books on an Etch A Sketch, that’s fine with me. Especially if you’re reading my books. But it’s like looking at a book of paintings where Guernica is the same size as a Holbein portrait. You get no sense of the scale of things, of the nature of the artist’s ambition.