I haven’t bought a new book in years, because I’m poor. As a result, all of my reading has been conditioned by past readers’ annotations and underlinings. These glosses are occasionally useful: someone helpfully provided a note at the start of the first volume of English Wycliffite Sermons (a thrilling read, by the way) indicating all of the places where the Wycliffite preachers inveighed against religious images, saving me hours of work on my senior thesis. Someone else’s underlining got me through Heidegger; if you repeat in class the marginal notes a professor made in a photocopied reader, he’ll think you quite clever.
Other times, the notes are ridiculous. I’m thinking not just of the inevitable penises and swastikas in high school textbooks, but also of the previous owner of my Riverside Chaucer, who wrote “he’s a real hunk and he loves me!” by a passage in Troilus and Criseyde and helpfully glossed “whilom” in “The Knight’s Tale” as “once upon a time,” duplicating the note at the bottom of the page in large loopy handwriting.
But sometimes the notes are awesome. Right now my favorite pre-reader is whoever read Lamont Library’s copy of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer before me. (Spoiler alert, if you will.) It’s as though he/she has an audience in mind — at the end of the long fantasy sequence grafting Amy Bellette onto Anne Frank, the pre-reader asks:
Where does this section come from? Does Nathan know this information? Is this pure imagination?
All of these questions are answered in the next few pages, but the pre-reader is baiting me along, keeping me reading with these thrilling questions. It’s like the dialogue box in the final panel of a narrative comic strip: what will Nathan Zuckerman do next?! Read on to find out!
Even better, the pre-reader also makes his/her own peevish comments criticizing the book as it unfolds. “Same voice in same scene only gets tiring here, after 44 pages,” the pre-reader writes on page 44 (obviously), an underhanded compliment if I’ve ever heard one. One page 174, when Hope Lonoff is storming out, the pre-reader wonders:
Can only adults write the end of marriage? The death of love?
It’s hard to know whether that’s a dig at Roth’s immaturity at age 46 or a melancholy question posed by a young writer. Given that the scene is one of the least convincing in the novel, I’m inclined to think the former.
The pre-reader’s drive to externalize made an interesting complement to the book itself. At the end of the book, when Zuckerman begins to write his “feverish notes,” the pre-reader writes:
Those notes = this story.
You don’t say?
