“The photographer was a man of whims and idealisms; his wife had a strong vein of worldly ambition.”
A photographer in the mid-nineteenth-century is worthy of his own novel. (“A man who had followed many different pursuits, and in none had done much more than earn a livelihood,” is how he was presented.)
“He desired to procure a reader’s ticket for the British Museum.”
This reminds me of the 1980s when the National Library of China was not open to the general public. My father, working as a nuclear physicist, was lucky to have access. Once a month he would announce to us—"It's my day to go to the library”—which filled me with wistful envy.
“He was trying to devise a ‘plot,’ the kind of literary Jack-in-the-box which might excite interest in the mass of readers.”
Oh that cursed word plot! This is a good time to re-utter my anti-plot stance: No real life is lived by plot; only a murderer needs a plot.
Join us on December 13 for a virtual discussion of New Grub Street with Yiyun Li.
Reardon may have made more bad decisions in a single chapter than I've seen in fiction. Single-minded pursuit of your art doesn't mean that you can ignore practical requirements of survival, nor does it mean that you can also opt for bourgeois lifestyle while ignoring economic needs--unless you have an inheritance.
Thank you, Yiyun, for the glimpse of your father's reading room/library in China and how the idea of the place impressed you as a child. In this chapter, I liked seeing the trouble Reardon went through to get admittance and how the library, Milvain's "valley of the shadow of the books," becomes Reardon's place to emerge. (I'm actually in a reading room in a classical library at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece as I write this, as a matter of fact, and don't take the opportunity for granted).
Reardon's backstory reads like the sad novel he’d write. A lot of character, little planned plot. I was surprised by the sudden rush of the Reardon's love life. Ten weeks from meeting to marriage? But more than anything, I love the line; " .....[he] betook himself to the metropolis. To become a literary man, of course."
Decades later, so many New Yorkers drawn up in that single line.