I recently realized that the only times I find true relief from my worries are when I am sleeping and when I am reading a novel.
Although this sounds…maybe not so good…I am also aware it is an indicator that I am not being eaten alive by anxiety. Simply because I am able to focus on reading at all, which stops when I’m under the worst duress. (Ditto the ability to sleep.)
But my escapist* desire is strong right now — I just tore through novels all summer and don’t seem to be slowing down. On the balance it isn’t the greatest sign for my mental wellbeing.
The thing about fiction (or truly any art) is that it is composed and deliberate. I have been reading a lot of mysteries in this season, and when they are good they are so carefully constructed, like an elegant little machine. Nothing extraneous.
One of my reads was Everyone in my Family Has Killed Someone. by Benjamin Stevenson. The conceit here is that the main character is a writer — not one who writes mysteries, but one who writes books about how to write mysteries. So it gets very meta. It’s clever and cheeky— and also very aware of its cleverness, and then aware of being aware of its cleverness. I wasn’t sure I would dig it, but I did.
One of the points Stevenson made that I hadn’t thought about specifically — although it’s so plainly obvious —is that in a mystery the killer has to be a character that’s already been introduced. Although in real life things happen haphazardly and it turns out the thing that finally gets you is something that’s essentially random, a weird collision of circumstances, genetics, location — , a good mystery has a sense of inevitability about it. Maybe it ends without everything resolved, but the most important questions are at least resolved, even if unsatisfactory.
The possibility of this happening in my actual life is remote — but it’s nice to spend some time in worlds where it happens with some regularity.
*I’ve also realized that I can only tolerate books that are set in places that I’m not extremely familar with — Ireland, Sweden, Australia. (I’ve been to each of these countries, but not repeatedly.) The one novel I started and didn’t finished was set in the Adirondacks, a place I’ve been to many times. And I just could not sink in.