the stuff you remember
A bit late to the party, I finally caught up with Maureen Dowd’s column on how men who read fiction are sexy -- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/opinion/reading-men-fiction-sexy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ck8.hbCP.fKm-POMnoHnM&smid=url-share -- and wrote a kind-of response:
I write nonfiction but I read fiction. Why? Because fiction is the stuff you remember. And the stuff you remember from what you read is surely part of you as much as your own experience is.
Here’s an example: thirty years ago, I read Red the Fiend, a novel by the 20th century American maverick modernist Gilbert Sorrentino. Nothing really happens in the book. That is, a lot happens, but it’s the same thing over and over. The main character – Red, an unobjectionable pre-teen who lives with his mother’s mother because his drunken father has deserted the family and his mother, who is working and trying to date new guys, has returned home so her mother can help care for him – is brutalized over and over by his grandmother. It’s not that he does anything in particular to deserve this. He’s just a normal annoying kid. She beats him because, to her, he is the living embodiment of all the failings of her life. Day after day, page after page, the abuses pile up. Grandma verbally abuses his mother, too, and Red, who wishes to somehow protect his mother, does nothing. Nor does his mother protect him. Staying with the novel till the end is a relentless slog of ugliness as Red is forced to eat rancid food and kill trapped mice with his hands. It is only in the final moment – in the last paragraph, in fact -- that we get Red’s catharsis: his grandmother is out and Red’s at home, where she has demanded he stay in his room. A few minutes before she is due back, he walks into the living room, picks up a photo of his grandmother as a young woman that she keeps on display, and writes on it, in giant capitals, “DIRTY OLD CUNT.” (In my memory, it is “DIRTY OLD COW” and Red uses his grandmother’s pink lipstick as a pen, though, when I checked the book just now, I see that Sorrentino says nothing about lipstick.) And, feeling suddenly elated, Red leans the defaced photo against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table, sits primly on the living room couch, and waits for the sound of his grandmother’s key in the front door lock.
Red the Fiend is not a great novel. I can’t even say it’s a good novel. It is certainly not a pleasant read. It is, like much of Sorrentino’s work, obsessive and misogynist. I would never claim that reading it or being seen reading it makes anyone sexy. But the image of that snotnosed 12-year-old waiting for the beating he knows he has provoked and maybe even wants because being beaten has perhaps become a sustaining and heartening reality of his life has stayed with me for 3 decades now. It is as real to me as any experience. It is home.