Reading and Classics

About a week ago I was reading an interesting blog post interviewing writer Jerry Rabushka about his latest novel. One tiny thing in the interview stuck out for me. He mentioned reading classic novels and learning from them, and said this:

Read, and read good stuff. Read good writers and, more importantly, read great writers. Read The House of the Seven Gables. Every sentence is like finely crafted furniture. Seriously, read it.

I love that sentence about  "finely crafted furniture," and actually commented to that effect. I'm very often drawn to classics, particularly the classics that have inspired genres that I love. Fairly recently, I read Brave New World for the first time.

I always thought that I should have read it, that I'd missed something by never quite getting to it. (Does anyone else have that feeling, hearing people talk about their favorite classics and thinking "Oh crap, I never read that one?") And when I did read it, not only did I enjoy it and like some of things it showed me about language and imagery, but I also felt like I learned something about creating worlds. And about, if you'll forgive me, being brave.

I was surprised by the very frank sexual content. Not because I was under the impression that writers  didn't talk about sex in bygone days – heck, I've read de Sade, which is about as explicit (and as  violent) as a writer could possibly get. But because it seemed quite bold to create a society where everyone has multiple partners back in that time period, and present it without apology.

Yes, the story itself actually critiques a world like that, and reminds readers of the importance of family and the purpose of monogamy (at least as the author seems to conceive of it!) So it's not taking the even bolder stance of arguing for a polyamorous society. But it is creating a rich world where characters who live in such a society are sympathetic and where mistreating them is wrong, even if their society is based on "bad" principles.

And that's a very important thing to remember when you sit down to write. When you're creating a world, even if you're creating a dystopia and you want your readers to clearly see what's wrong with it, you have to be careful to make your characters realistic members of that culture. Even if they  critique it from inside – even if they're revolutionaries and the story is all about how they change it! – they couldn't function at all if they hated everything about the society they lived in.

Which is the lesson I took from reading Brave New World. The brilliant thing (to me, anyway) about it was how realistic every character's relationship to the society was, from Bernard's half-hearted disillusionment, to Lenina's preference for one man but inability to understand or express it, to John's disgust and frantic need to flee. It all felt complex enough to be real.

I think sometimes people have a tendency to focus on what older writing did wrong. Where it got tropey, where it got simplistic, where it couldn't say some of the things we say routinely in books now.

But so much of it lasts because it's richer than we think it is, and so much of it can teach us how to enrich our very different styles now.