Costumes

The books had encroached on the kitchen counter, occupied the chairs and covered the walls. Drastic measures had to be taken. Not the tepid New Year’s resolutions: “I will read at least one book from my tower of unread books every month.” “I will only buy one new book for every five books that I finish.” Experience has shown that rules with flexible requirements are always broken: it’s the ironclad extreme rules that are followed.

A moratorium was in order. No buying of books for the first quarter of 2009. It was initially a one-year ban, but the American publishing industry has been in grave distress even before the recession, and publishers need all the help they can get.

The ban on acquisitions meant that reading would be limited to books already in my possession. So far — two months and three days into the ban — the resolution has been effective. It has survived temptation in the form of regular visits to bookstores. Not only has it prevented the tower of unread books from taking over the entire house, it has actually increased reading frequency. The sooner the unread books are finished, the more books one may buy when the moratorium ends. (What to do with books you have finished and will probably never read again: Put them in boxes and donate them to public schools and municipal libraries.)

Of the books read during the moratorium, the most astounding literary experiences have been Persuasion by Jane Austen and the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The first is an 18th-century romance by the most popular of the great novelists. The second is an apocalyptic superhero murder mystery by one of the writers who redefined comic books.

I must warn you against opening Persuasion when you are about to go to bed. It is not a sleeping aid. By chapter three I was literally on the edge of my mattress, scanning the pages for every look and every word that passed between the heroine Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, the man she had rejected eight years ago because her godmother said he wasn’t good enough for her. Anne is the sensible girl in a family of terrible snobs with financial problems. She’s resigned to spinsterhood when Wentworth returns — dashing, rich, and still single. Before long every female in the area is hurling herself at the captain, and he barely acknowledges that Anne is alive.

The fact that you already know the ending — it’s a Jane Austen

Novel, after all — does not diminish the thrill of the novel. You root so avidly for these two lovely people to get together that if he so much as coughs in her direction you are overjoyed.

There’s something to be said for these repressed Regency romances in which nothing happens below the waist. The ephemera of daily life are charged with significance, subjected to intense scrutiny, and over-interpreted. A casual glance, the slightest movement, the wording of a question, the order in which the beloved greets the guests at a ball — everything has meaning. But we know that in real life things happen for no reason whatsoever, and that’s where the trouble begins.

That’s how erotomania — the Fatal Attraction syndrome — begins.

What is it about Persuasion that makes it such a satisfying read? The critic Harold Bloom notes that there is a somberness about it. Anne Elliot seems almost too good for us. Another critic, Stuart Tave, notes that “Nobody hears Anne, nobody sees her, but it is she who is ever at the center. It is through her ears, eyes and mind that we are made to care for what is happening. If nobody is much aware of her, she is very much aware of everyone else and she perceives what is happening to them when they are ignorant of themselves… she reads Wentworth’s mind, with the coming troubles he is causing for others and himself, before those consequences bring the information to him.”

In How Fiction Works, James Wood cites this scene in Persuasion as a moment of perfection. Anne is kneeling on the floor, trying to get her two-year-old nephew off her back when...

Someone was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.

Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with most disordered feelings.

Austen is all irony and subtlety — two qualities not associated with Watchmen. Watchmen is an all-out assault upon the reader: a comic book that refuses to be found by the limits of ink in square panels. There is no hand-holding with the reader, no polite introduction or helpful historical background.

You are immediately plunged into a sordid police investigation. Masses of information leap off the paper and attack your eyeballs. After a few pages of flicking from panel to panel, your brain begins to make sense of the overload.

It’s 1985 in a universe that resembles ours but is not. In this alternate universe the US won the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon is still president, and nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union appears imminent. The city is a cesspool, crime is rampant, and police cannot maintain peace and order. Enter costumed vigilantes, self-invented superheroes who fight crime. Except that only one of them has superpowers, and everyone has issues.

But I mustn’t give away the whole plot. The film adaptation opens today; we’ll have much to talk about.

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