Shoot the Refrigerator

  

Describe your ideal bookshop.

Writers such as Ann Patchett, Gabrielle Zevin, and Louise Erdrich have written about the ideal bookshop. Their visions tend toward the utopian: community, discovery, celebration, the warm glow of books bringing people together.

 

Lovely [sarcasm mode ON].

 

I’m looking for something with a little more adrenaline.

 

My ideal bookshop would remind me of the scene in Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress—which, if you haven’t read it, you should. Henry Holyoak Lightcap is a boozer, a misanthrope, and a man on his third marriage. When his wife finally has had enough of him and leaves, he takes a .357 to the refrigerator.

 

Yes, the refrigerator is symbolic: defiance against modern progress, matrimony, and possibly refrigeration itself.

 

But that’s not why I love the scene.

 

I love the sudden, glorious act of Enough.

 

Books are in bookstores to be sold. Bookstores, like the rest of us, have bills to pay, so shelves are inevitably influenced by what sells.

 

But what sells is not necessarily what changes us. Sometimes what sells is the safe thing. Sometimes it’s the thing that has acquired so much momentum that refusing to stock it would be commercially insane.

 

Fifty Shades of Grey is an obvious example: a phenomenon that began as online serial fiction, gathered an enormous audience, and was subsequently revised and repackaged for a much larger market. The early print edition was infamous for howlers in copy editing and printing errors. “She liked caning” is a rather different proposition from “She liked canning.”

 

Then there’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

 

John Kennedy Toole couldn’t get his novel published. He committed suicide. His mother persisted in trying to get the manuscript published, eventually putting it in the hands of Walker Percy. The book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

 

One book was practically impossible to sell until everyone wanted it. The other became a publishing sensation.

 

That’s the problem with letting the market decide too much: the market is very good at recognizing what it already recognizes.

 

My ideal bookstore would therefore be slightly unruly. I want books that might and will offend me. Books that make me uncomfortable. Books that make me think the unthinkable because I never experienced life the way the characters experience it. 

 

I want the book I didn’t know I needed because I didn’t know it existed.

 

Reading as escapism has its place. I enjoy it myself. Sometimes a reader needs a beach, a detective, a dragon, or a very attractive vampire. Fine.

 

But the books that matter—the books that alter a life, a conversation, culture—often make us think, feel, argue, or get genuinely pissed off.

 

There are already more books than there is shelf space. We can’t read everything, so someone has to decide what gets the real estate.

 

I’d rather that decision be made with some faith in readers because if how we spend money influences what the media corporations publish, and what corporations publish influences what we see, then the choice of what reaches the shelf is already shaping the field before we ever walk into the store.

 

And who knows what books we never discover because nobody decided they were worth the gamble?

 

Give me a bookstore full of bad bets.

 

Give me books that are weird, dangerous, inconvenient, brilliant, offensive, overlooked, or just plain difficult.

 

Give me something that makes me want to shoot the refrigerator.