Perfect

"...nothing in life has any business being perfect."

-- Henry, in James Goldman's The Lion in Winter

--

I've always been leery of the act of praising an already-praised work. When someone tells me their favorite book is Huck Finn or their favorite play is Hamlet, I say to myself: Oh, sure. Who's going to argue with that? Not that I think either of them are poor choices. I guess I just wonder how truthful the opinion really is, whether it just happens to be a choice no one can shoot down.

The way I see it, a person with weak guts and a small stack of books in the "read" section finds it easiest to defer to history and popular opinion.

My favorite book is Hearts in Atlantis, by Stephen King. I won't sing the books praises (as they are few, anyway) or my own because I like something obscure and hidden. It's a book I strangely relate to, a book I seem to understand on some intangible scale. It seems honest to me, unfeigned, a departure from King's usual thrill-'em-dead tactics. It's a story told from five perspectives and epochs, a sort of sketch of the Baby Boomer generation, about books and youth and magic, a story about stories. Comparable books include Knowles' A Separate Peace, Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, and, well, Twain's Huck.

But that's neither here nor there. Once again, I have turned to the CD recording, read by Oscar-winning actor William Hurt and the author. I think it's terrific. Hurt has a famous voice, a sonorous, deep, enveloping voice, and the sections King reads are pretty good, too. But it's the story, not the speech, that keeps me coming back to the recording, twenty CDs long, during road trips or long stretches of summer where my only task is "cleaning my room."

It's a touchstone, I suppose, a kind of base I keep running back to touch in the great relay of life, to boost, recharge. It's like the books I own whose binding splits from all my years of cracking open the pages, so much that you sometimes can't decipher what the spine is trying to tell you because the hairy white lines like VCR tracking--or oddly straight bolts of lighting--have eroded away the letters. For example, the pages are falling out of Jurassic Park, especially the part where Dennis Nedry gets eaten in the middle of the hurricane, and the cover has been reattached with scotch tape probably five times. Now, Jurassic Park isn't the best book ever, but it's a pretty good one. I think I learned more about genetics and dinosaurs in its 300-something pages than I did in two years of high-school biology. My copy of The Catcher in the Rye has seen better days, too.

I used to go to yard sales all the time in high school. Every Saturday, I'd get up at 7am, tag along in the family van, and only get out if I saw books, in cardboard boxes, on card tables, blankets. Most of my Clancys and Grishams (I admit ruefully) came to me for a quarter or less. My anthology of Frost's poems and Little Big Man have been worth the buck each I dropped for them.

Which brings me back to Hearts in Atlantis. It was free. My sister nabbed the CD case when a local library was chucking old and unread material to make room for newer, more readable books. There's something cheaply romatic about taking the scraps, like dogs that hang around the back door of a restaurant. I had read the book the summer before, had enjoyed it, and had returned it to the library where my sister found it for grabs.

Nothing in life has any business being perfect.