I Reread a Book I Loved at Nineteen and It Went Badly

There is a novel I have recommended to people for twenty years on the strength of how it made me feel in a dorm room. I finally reread it last month. It is not a good book. It might not even be an okay book.

The prose I remembered as spare is mostly just thin. The narrator I found bracingly honest is a self-pitying twenty-two-year-old who is never once challenged by the text. I kept waiting for the turn where the author reveals he knows what he has written. It does not come.

The uncomfortable part

I do not think the book changed. I think it was doing something for me at nineteen that it cannot do now, and I mistook that for quality. Which raises the obvious question about everything else on my shelf that I have not revisited.

I have decided not to answer that question. Some of those books are load-bearing.

But I am not sorry I reread it

It told me something true about who I was at nineteen — what I needed to hear, what I was flattered by. That is worth more than another year of recommending it to strangers on the basis of a feeling I had in 2006.

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