Second Chances
Dear Reader,
It seemed prudent to place this piece in near proximity to “The Retry,” as there is a deep affinity between the two. For a second-chance read, it is about the author, not the individual work.
For the category-averse, or simply the philosophical quibblers, it’s worth acknowledging that the deep affinity could almost be considered to be the same. And yet I find there’s a difference between retrying an individual work and giving an author a second chance. Among other differences, when I’m giving authors a second chance, I’m considering them as humans, ones capable of hits and mishits. When I’m giving an individual work a retry, I’m usually focused on that specific work, not its author’s oeuvre.
And so the second-chance read is worth exploring on its own, even if some people might wish to lump it together with the retry. (They are welcome to do so; I am not entertaining deep-rooted categories here.)
Perhaps of some amusement, if I’d read Mark Edmundson’s material in reverse order, he’d have been a prime example of a second-chance read. While his “Three Ideal Dinners” and “Pay Attention!” are among the most pleasant essays in my acquaintance, his book Why Write? is between an ambivalent read and a pure disappointment. I didn’t finish it. I likely won’t finish it. It’s just bland. And if I’d read that book before his two excellent essays, I’d have been hard pressed to even attempt them, much to my own impoverishment.
I don’t, however, require hypothetical second-chance authors. Becca Rothfeld is a keen, recent example of one for me. A few years ago, she wrote a widely-celebrated piece in a publication I enjoy myself. But I did not enjoy her piece. My reaction fell somewhere between ambivalence and annoyance. To some degree, I just shrugged my shoulders thinking that the read was simply not for me, a bit of a whatever. The annoyance kept flicking in because everyone else seemed to get its magic and I did not. Some forms of literary brilliance are completely lost on me, apparently. (Given what I wrote in “The Retry,” this should not surprise anyone.)
And so I’d mostly resigned myself to classifying Becca Rothfeld as a writer who just wasn’t for me. Didn’t mean she was a bad writer; probably didn’t mean I was a bad reader. Just a mismatch.
I ran into a difficulty, though. I subscribed to The Point. And part of evaluating a new magazine is reading everything within its pages. And there sat an essay by Becca Rothfeld. At this point, I’d already read a story and a couple of pieces that I really didn’t enjoy. I’d also, of course, read a story and several pieces that delighted me. That’s a pretty fair ratio from a literary or intellectual journal—you really can’t expect more than that. If anything, that’s to the publication’s credit: I’ve read entire journals that were not edifying or interesting or anything but some form of content desiccated in extremis.
Here sat Becca Rothfeld’s piece. What to make of it? To be consistent with my goal of evaluating this new magazine subscription that I’d paid for, I needed to dive in. (Yes, I’m well aware of the so-called sunk-cost fallacy. And as with all fallacies, it’s a defeasible generalization. Consider this case one of the exceptions, even if many economists can’t comprehend such possibility. Their limits are not mine.) In I dove. What I experienced, well, I already wrote about in “Reading Serially.”
I’ll say this: Rothfeld hasn’t become a must-read writer for me, but I’m now stuck giving her writing a chance when I see it (which is good because she’s got a piece in my most recent issue of The Hedgehog Review and I’m not torn about whether to try it).
I’ve got a mental catalogue of possible second-chance writers. (That list often doubles as writers-whose-writing-left-me-deeply-disgruntled.) Whether I give them that chance is still an open question. Most of them, I won’t. I’d rather give a new writer a try.
Then again, Shakespeare himself was once a quasi-second-chance writer for me. That’s because when I was growing up, I read one of those children’s Shakespeare books, and I found all of it dumb. Shakespeare is about many things, but the beauty of his language is chief among them—this is why no-fear Shakespeare is a largely unproductive classroom aid. And young me thought Shakespeare was lame. It wasn’t until high school, when I read Shakespeare in truth, that I was disabused of this notion.
Giving a writer a second chance is risky. There isn’t typically a great reason to wonder if a writer deserves another chance. This is particularly the case because, unlike with a retry, a second-chance read is so frequently a completely different work than the one that previously disappointed you, meaning there’s little background to help you think that maybe you missed something.
And yet sometimes writers seem to deserve a second chance. Or sometimes you just get motivated by some strange desire to see if there’s more to be found in this writer, why they keep getting published.
Whatever the reason, second-chance reads seem to be a phenomenon. Not a common one, by any stretch, but an existing one. And a most strange one. Here’s to the good ones.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh
P.S. For those of you suffering from wanderlust, this piece may provide a brief outlet. Who doesn’t love a good city exploration?