Posts Tagged ‘book signing’

John Irving Meets His Readers

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

Many readers of fiction have an intense relationship with the authors they love. Eugenio Bolongaro describes this phenomenon as an “emotional closeness, a willingness to make oneself not only listen to the language of the author but also be hospitable to it.”  In his 1947 book-length essay, What is Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre observed how reading involves “a pact of generosity between author and reader.”

On Saturday I visited the 2009 National Book Festival.  This annual outdoor event is sponsored by the Library of Congress and is held on the grounds of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a space sometimes referred to as “America’s front lawn.” It is a grand public platform for the display of emotional bonds between readers and authors.

Among the seventy or so writers signing books at this year’s Festival was the novelist John Irving.  I brought with me a copy of the The World According to Garp — the very same copy I read in April, 1979, when the book first came out in paperback.  Reading Garp back then struck me like a punch to the solar plexus.  (My apologies to Irving acolytes for using a boxing simile when describing a book infused with the sport of wrestling.) Garp is one of the few novels I’ve read twice. John Irving is one of the few authors whose new books I eagerly await.

Hundreds of ardent readers were in line hoping for an audience, however brief, with the author.  Aside from Garp, the book I spied most often in people’s hands was A Prayer for Owen Meany. I was struck by how worn (meaning, well-read) most of these books were. People were not here to get a valuable signature added to a mint condition book — something they could then sell on eBay. No, these readers had come with purer desires: to place a cherished object into the hands of its begetter; to ask for that object to be recognized and certified by its creator; and to retrieve the now-blessed book for renewed cherishing.

Author and reader are typically separated by time and space, but on this day those forces collapsed into a moment of connection.

As I joined the bright-faced, well-behaved crowd, I recalled a political opinion (this is Washington, D.C., after all) expressed by William F. Buckley, Jr., who said, “I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” What I was thinking was this: if I were allowed to introduce a third choice, I select a government led by National Book Festival attendees. Yes, that might make me one of the governors. (No system is flawless.)

The hour from noon until 1:00 was given over to John Irving’s book signing event.  Time expired, leaving the back half of the line, me included, unrequited.  But a few minutes before Irving departed (he kept at his task an extra 15 minutes) I was able to maneuver my way to a vantage point close to where he was greeting the last lucky cohort of book-clutching readers.  Where I planted my feet turned out to be a charmed perspective from which to capture a remarkable sight.  I had come to the Festival this day expecting to leave with an inked name on a yellowing page.  What I brought back, instead, is a video record of the aftermath of those final moments of connection between author and reader.

Watch as each reader, spontaneously, in his or her own fashion, expresses joy: