My Share

It must seem an odd—even disqualifying—admission in an editor, even a guest editor, but I don’t really like to judge fiction, though that hasn’t stopped me doing so for Ploughshares, or in the past (not least each winter when I, along with my colleagues, read several hundred MFA applications). On reflection, my unease is less about judging than being judged. Judge not, as the gospel warns us, lest ye be judged.

While my professional life has provided plenty of opportunities to second guess my own judgment—the rejected candidate, say, whose book went on to sell millions of copies—I suspect most of us feel a similar anxiety about our judgment, or to use another word, our taste. It’s what underlies that flash of indignation when we disagree with the prize committee for this year’s Pulitzer, or that year’s National Book Award. Why we throw up our hands at the decisions of Nobel or Booker or Oscar voters. We’re enraged by their flawed judgments, by the injustice of it all, but part of our outrage is surely fueled by self-doubt. Those panels are judging the works and artists before them, but also obliquely our tastes, implicitly approving them if we agree, disparaging them if we diverge. How dare they! Who do they think they are! (The very fury that fuels the familiar countercharges of judicial elitism, or cronyism, political correctness, or populism.) In my own case, this readerly anxiety is reflected and magnified in writerly paranoia: if my judgment is suspect, how can I rely on my judgment of my own work? But I suspect it may be traced back even further, like so much that is traumatic, to high school. I can still remember shyly declaring a passion for some band or other only to be ridiculed by my peers. I can’t recall a similar instance where I was mocked for liking a particular book, but that’s probably because I never made such a confession—merely liking books, any book, being grounds for derision at that age.

Is this why we’re so intent on best-seller lists, and prizes? For all that we might dispute the latter, there’s also safety in such imprimaturs, a safety in numbers. The way we congregate as readers around genres may also have roots in this pack mentality. If everyone’s reading it, it must be OK. We don’t have to expose our own judgment if we follow others. Oh, that? Yeah, my book group/Oprah/my professor picked that.

But lately, I’ve come to wonder if there isn’t another, perhaps more positive reason for this anxiety of judging. Having one’s opinion questioned shouldn’t be daunting so long as one can defend it, after all. And yet, I hesitate to offer such a defense, to explain why I picked something. Oh, I can put on a decent show if pressed, as teaching sometimes obliges me to do, but anyone who’s taught literature knows that it’s often painful to teach a text you love. It’s disappointing when students don’t love it (that old high-school anxiety writ large) and frustrating in that it’s often difficult, even painful, to explain why we love what we love. The key word here, of course, is love. It’s impossible to explain why we love, to reduce the irreducible. Explanation belongs in the realm of the rational. Love is something else—in life as in literature—and it transcends (for good and ill) judgment. I’m not religious in the least, but it’s hard to escape the notion that this is precisely the break the New Testament makes with the Old.

Finally, I’m reminded here of that common question asked of writers in interviews or Q&As after readings, sometimes phrased “What books do you recommend?” or even more chillingly, “What’s your favorite book?” I have stock answers/evasions now, after too many instances of deer-in-the-headlights paralysis (panicked by choice, I’m apt to forget every book I’ve ever read) and on one occasion a flat-out boorish refusal to answer. But beneath my panic lies a surprising truth. I don’t actually want to disclose these titles, and not (only) for fear of being judged. It’s because I don’t want to share what I love.

At first glance this seems a strange selfishness. Books are mass produced objects, after all, there are plenty of copies to go around. But a love of them implies something more rarefied—intimacy. We feel an intimate connection to a book we love, more personal even than the connection we feel to favorite movies or music, which we often encounter in actual or strongly implied groups—at a theater, a concert, as a member of a mass TV or radio audience. Books, by contrast, we read alone (even if we read them for a class or a book group, we read them alone, at our own pace, pausing where we will). Or rather, not alone, but in the ghostly company of others—the characters, and the author. A movie may be funnier or more exciting if viewed in a crowded theater, a song more euphoric if experienced on a dance floor, but a book is enhanced by this intimacy. And intimacy is in some sense inimical to sharing. My relationship with my wife is precious by virtue of its exclusivity. Similarly my relationship with a book or a story is precious because it feels unique, as if no one else might understand that work or that author in quite the same way. (A best seller, a prizewinner, enjoyed and admired by many is perhaps less likely to offer this quality, unless we find in it something we think that all those other readers missed.) Intimacy, by these lights, is the ultimate elitism. Never mind that it might be illusory—what is fiction, after all, if not illusory? And this is the thrill I found in each of these stories: the sense that they spoke to me alone. That’s what made me fall in love with them. And perhaps it’s what underlies my anxiety about judging: not that you might dispute my judgment, but that you might share it. An even odder admission in an editor, I think you’ll agree, though perhaps an apposite one given that the word share has an etymological root in common with the word shear, as this very journal’s name reminds us. To share something is first to shear it; it must be cut and divided before it can be parceled out. To share is thus at once to keep and to give.