One of the really wonderful things about being moved by a book is that you can start to see its existence everywhere, and this recognition suggests that the book somehow connects you to other people and their passions.

One day, when the forecast of foul weather portended that I should take the little girlies to school to set up my classroom, I grabbed Into the Wild out of our bookroom. But the computer models predicting rain must have hiccupped, so there we were, stuck in an empty school building on a hot August day, when I suggested to the girls that we head to the pool. This was one of those days when their friends were abundant, and I was thus irrelevant. Dispirited, I searched through our pool bag only to find that The Brothers Karamazov were resting at home and that all I had was Into the Wild and The Life of Pi, a book I still can’t bring myself to read.

I was planning to hate Into the Wild, preparing to figure out ways blunt and not so blunt to tell all future students who saw something admirable in Christopher McCandless that they were missing the problems with his ostensibly romantic isolationist journey. But John Krakauer’s introduction gave me a way of reading the book much the way Richard Brookhiser’s intro to Founding Father predisposed me to love George Washington as much as he did, or the way that Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare is written to advance what he wants to believe to be true.. Krakauer promises the reader that he is subjective, that as much as he perhaps shouldn’t, he sets out to correct misperceptions about his subject, for reasons both professional and personal. So I started reading the book even though I was in the middle of TBK, and I finished it in about a day and a half.

Well, I’m not going to make this entirely about Into the Wild, so let me say that all the rejecting I had perceived in the story before I read the book – rejection of family, of social bonds, of societal bonds, of government – is tempered by the love of nature, the love I’ve talked about in the Elder Zosima’s sermons. I think that the combination of Krakauer’s declaration of intent and the generous spirit I had felt through Dostoevsky made me a more open reader of Into the wild, more willing to embrace the adventure than to judge it, more willing to find something to connect with than something to reject. It’s a feeling I wish I felt more often.

So after I finished TBK, I went out in search of Aleksandar Hemon, an author whose newest book, The Lazarus Project, was praised to the heavens in The New Yorker. It’s not that I run out and buy every book praised there, but the fact that the very day after I read the review in The New Yorker, Hemon had a piece in The New York Times following up on the capture of Radovan Karadzic. I have learned in the last few years to recognize when the universe is trying to tell me something, so I scurried off to the White Plains Public Library and borrowed Nowhere Man, Hemon’s follow-up to his acclaimed The Question of Bruno.

And here too was Dostoevsky, manifest mostly through The Idiot, which will be on my list for one of these summers to come. Nowhere Man is a really, really enjoyable book, filled with great surprises of language, varying points of view and energetic narration (after the first chapter). If you were to ask me what it is about, though, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I mean, I would – it’s about the feeling of displacement that Maya Angelou makes her explicit theme in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – but I would have no way of explaining how the ending of the story relates to the journey of our protagonist, Josef Pronek. Nonetheless, there’s a very funny scene (which quickly turns to tragedy) when Josef is trying to kill a mouse he’s cornered in Rachel’s apartment. He’s all wound up, screaming at Rachel to give him something to kill it with, she’s in a frenzy, she hands him a book… Actually, Hemon does it better:

The mouse was in the corner shivering, huddled, a light-tentacle reaching its tail.
“Give me something,” Pronek said. The mouse was fat, a short evolutional step from a rat, its cheeks bulging as if it had been caught eating and was still chewing the food.
“What do you want?”
“Something.”
Rachel grabbed a book off the shelf: “Here.”
Pronek took the book, looked at the title page, and flipped through it – it was The Idiot.
“Not this one.”
“You gotta be kidding me! What difference does it make?”
“Not this.”
She put the book back on the shelf and stood, with her hands pressing against her back, choosing another one:
“Do you want history or biography?” she asked, irked.
The mouse dared to move, its back against the wall, but Pronek stomped his foot.
“Here is Death in Venice,” she said.

Nope, you can’t kill vermin with Dostoevsky. Only Thomas Mann will do. The Idiot has more of a role in the story than the scant mention in this scene, but still, the connection is there.

So now that my Dostoevskyan antennae have been activated, I get to the inexplicable ending, in which a character who may or may not use the name Josef Pronek, has in his soul a love of theater that is frequently subjugated to the planning and execution of various criminal enterprises. When he opens his theater in Shanghai, his first performance is Gogol’s Dead Souls, and his favorite part is that of Chichikoff singing of the mad Russian troika, rushing, rushing into the future. Yes, that’s right, this is the very same troika, the very same passage that Ippolit Kirillovich quotes in his closing argument in the trial of Dmitri Karamazov in TBK. You just can’t make these connections up, folks. They happen.

Well, that’s about all the time for me today. Thanks, you’ve been a great audience. Now get you hence and read Aleksandar Hemon and Gary Shteyngart.