I used to think a map was something you inherited once and then just consulted. Home is here, away is there, the good schools are in this direction, the interesting people moved to that one. Three books took that map away from me, one border at a time, and I don’t think I got it back in any usable form, which I’ve decided is the whole value of reading them.
The first was a slim travel memoir, out of print now, written by a woman who spent a year in a fishing town she couldn’t pronounce the name of when she arrived. Nothing happens in it, technically. She learns to gut fish. She has an argument with a landlord about a space heater. But somewhere around the middle she writes a line about how she’d spent thirty years assuming that “interesting” was a place you traveled toward, when it was actually a way of paying attention you could practice anywhere, including the fish market two blocks from where she used to live and never once visited. I read that on a train and missed my stop, which felt appropriately literal.
The second book moved a border I was more attached to, which was the one between people who “figure things out” and people who don’t. It’s a novel, told from the perspective of a man who has clearly, by every metric the book gives you, made a mess of his life — three jobs lost, a marriage he can’t account for the ending of — and yet the book refuses to let you file him under failure. It keeps showing you the specific, defensible reasoning behind each bad decision, one after another, until you realize the border between “a life that worked out” and “a life that didn’t” was never where you thought it was drawn. I finished it uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t name for about a week, and then named: I’d been sorting people into those two piles my whole life, quietly, and I was going to have to stop.
The third is the one I recommend least often, because it’s dense and slightly ashamed of being readable, but it did the most damage. It’s an essay collection about the history of an ordinary object — I won’t say which one, because the specific object isn’t the point — that traces, over three hundred pages, how something you’d assumed was simply a fact of the physical world was actually a series of decisions made by people with names, dates, and motives, most of them boring, some of them venal. After that book I couldn’t look at a sidewalk, a fence line, a school district boundary, without the small, slightly exhausting thought: someone decided this, on a Tuesday, for a reason that seemed sufficient at the time.
None of these books told me what to believe instead. That’s the part that took me longest to accept as a feature rather than a flaw. I wanted the moved border replaced with a better one, clearly marked, and none of the three obliged. What they gave me instead was the much less comfortable knowledge that most of my borders were provisional, drawn by someone, including me, under conditions that no longer apply.
I still have a map. I use it every day. I just hold it differently now — the way you’d hold a document you know is a first draft, useful enough to travel by, but not something to defend at a dinner party. That’s the whole review, really. Not: these books are good, although they are. But: bring a pencil. You’re going to want to redraw something before you’re finished.