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Elaine Showalter and Christopher Benfey

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from: Christopher Benfey

The Beach Reading Crisis

Posted Thursday, July 8, 1999, at 12:34 PM ET

Dear Elaine,

"Where are the summer's male beach novels?" That's the burning question addressed by Martin Arnold in today's "Making Books" column in the Times. In this "Clancyless summer," we might have expected a rich crop of competitors. But no. Were all the publishers of male action and adventure novels scared away by Hannibal Lecter, as one publisher suggested? Arnold settles for that old chestnut of an explanation, the end of the Cold War, which "meant the end of interesting bad men." I've never understood this explanation. The Civil War novel didn't die with the cessation of North-South hostilities. In fact, it took 30 years for the genre to get going, with Stephen Crane's fantasy of male hysteria on the battlefield, The Red Badge of Courage. My wife's beach reading is Cold Mountain, testimony that the genre is still going strong.

And now, thanks to you, I know what our 9-year-old's male beach reading will be, the new Harry Potter. (If you FedEx me a copy, I'll pay any suitable bounty you name. If my time-zone arithmetic is right, it has just gone on sale.) Yes, Tommy's a huge fan. We live in the Potter belt, and the English edition of Potter II was swept from the bookstores before we could get one. Scholastic blocked Internet sales of the book, for which they'd paid for the American rights. In a frenzied round of phone calls, spurred by Tommy's tears, we finally located a copy in the Book Chase in Middleburg, Virginia, where my in-laws live. I'm sure you're right about how old-fashioned the novels are, with their English boarding-school conventions. But Tommy loves that stuff--Roald Dahl's Boy is one of his favorites. I asked him over breakfast this morning why he likes the Potter books. "Because they're funny," he said.

The Greek gods turn up a couple of times in the Times, first in a report on a big dig in Turkey that may rival Tut's tomb, and then in a review of Sue Hubbell's Waiting for Aphrodite. The title is not an allusion to Willa Cather's "Coming, Aphrodite!" but rather refers to "an iridescent furry worm that grows to six inches in length" and lives in tidal pools. (Female beach reading?) Hubbell links the reproductive traits of the worm to Aphroditus of Cyprus, as described by Hesiod: "an androgynous, hairy, bearded Aphrodite," who is a deity "with the body and clothes of a woman but with the beard and sexual organs of a man." Might Hubbell's book be another example of the fin de siècle "sexual anarchy"--the 1990s mirroring the 1890s--that you describe in your book of that title?

Happy Harry Potter Day,
Chris

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112
from: Christopher Benfey

The Beach Reading Crisis

Posted Thursday, July 8, 1999, at 12:34 PM ET
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Elaine Showalter, chair of the English department at Princeton University, is the author of numerous works of literary criticism, including Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (click hereto buy the book). Christopher Benfey is a professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and the author of Degas in New Orleans (click hereto buy the book). He covered art for Slate for two years.
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