Running with Scissors: A Nice Break

So. I haven't given up completely on Against the Day. Once I announced that I wanted to drop the book like a hot rock, the plot came back into action. I like the sections where the Chums (boys in a balloon) fight with each other over ridiculous adolescent shit, faux spy intrigue, and I like the out-West portions with lost sons and fathers. I also like the sections of the novel devoted to the noirish detective, Lew. So I've forged ahead. I'll just speed read the parts that confuse me (a habit created and honed in graduate school) and sink my mental teeth into the parts where I get gription.

In the meantime, I've started to read Augusten Burrough's Running with Scissors as comic relief. (Thanks, Kyle, for the great Christmas present!) It's fun, intellectually nonconfrontational, and vaguely reminiscient of one of my faves (who I recently misnamed, whoops, in a previous post), David Sedaris. Both B and S are borderline obsessive compulsives, gay from the cradle, with crazy family situations, notably the mothers. Both B and S seem to cure themselves, partially, with cigarettes. Both have very tenuous relationships to established authorities (schools). Both write wryly and yet fondly of their childhood "abuse."

I have to confess that I like S about 25% more than I like B. Why? B is not as anally obsessed as S. I like a good anal obsession.

When Is It Okay to Throw in the Towel?

I have a friend who gives every book 50 pages. If she's not hooked within 50 pages, the book goes back to the library, or is left on the airplane seat for the next potential reader, or into the trash. "Life's too short," she says.

I'm trying like Hell to read Pychon's Against the Day. But every page makes me more confused. I think there's a story underneath the verbiage, but I'm not sure. Whole fat paragraphs float past my eyes. I catch a word here or there, grasp at a setting, think I can discern characters, but for the most part I find myself confused, frustrated, clueless.

I felt the same way when we first moved to Mexico and I knew enough Spanish to flesh out a dialogue: Esta Susana en casa? Si. Esta en la sala? No, esta en la cocina. Trying to understand the world around me, a world that rarely contained Susana, her house, the living room or the kitchen, was like trying to read Pynchon's frustrating novel. I knew there was some important shit going down, but I wasn't part of it. I was standing on the outside of it, panicked, frantic to get in, while men and women and children danced (at least that's how it seemed) around me, pointing and laughing. For all I knew, a bus was aimed right at me.

According to my friend's apt formula, I should bail on the book. I'm around page 180, 10 or so characters and ... 7? 56? ... settings and at least 30 subplots (some of them dead ends, as far as I can tell) in. I've given P's nightmare world 3x the amount of attention my short life can afford.

And it's making me feel stupid, as well. I should just jettison it, right?

But here's the deal. I've spent 26.00 on the book. I did NOT check it out of the library.
It's fat -- heavier than a bread basket filled with pumpernickel.

I'm an English professor. Can English professors admit defeat? Or, if they can, when is appropriate? And should they just keep that information to themselves, so as not to dispel the illusion of literary mastery?

Further, the New York Times gave the novel a great review. (Well, a mostly great review.) This adds to my feeling of failure. What's wrong with me? Have I been spoiled by Chick Lit, mysteries, thrillers, and other tawdry pleasures?