Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (15 page)

For one disbelieving moment there was an astonished silence. Rushdie had been in hiding for three years, with a price upon his head. Then, as Peter Florence's words sank in, a torrent of applause erupted. Rushdie and Amis walked
onto the stage, clad — by bizarre coincidence — in identical khaki suits, intellectuals dressed for war. The audience gave them a standing ovation.

The conversation that followed was enthralling for Rushdie's fans, though those who had kept close track of the Rushdie affair over the three years since a fatwa had taken his freedom away from him had heard or read much along the same lines. But there were still three things Rushdie said that were news to much of the audience, including me. First, he mentioned that a pirated Farsi translation of
Shame
had won a literary prize in Iran the year before Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on
The Satanic Verses.
Second, Rushdie publicly recanted his Christmas 1990 reconversion to Islam in terms more explicit than I had heard before, saying it was his only regret, an insincere attempt to save his skin. Third, he moved away from the “I can't understand what the fuss is all about — this is only a novel” line that many Indians had seen as evidence of either disingenuousness or deracination. Instead, he admitted he had expected
The Satanic Verses
to provoke Muslims, to stimulate debate, even controversy; what he had not expected was the ultimate attempt to silence his apostasy, a sentence of death.

This was a more credible line of defense than he has used in the past. “Shashi Tharoor knows,” he told his British audience, “that there are a couple of Muslim critics in India who'll attack me whatever I write. I expected that, and I expected to be able to respond to them, to engage in a public debate on their criticisms. I did not expect this.”

Later, I asked Salman Rushdie whether the time had not come for Indians of his background — Indians, I dare
say, like myself — to reclaim him for ourselves, to stop allowing him to be defined by his Western supporters. After all, he was preeminently the writer who had given voice to the sensibility of the secular urban subcontinental. What he stands for as the author of
Midnight's Children
alone should mean far more to us Indians than a couple of pages torn out of context from
The Satanic Verses.
How did he feel about the terms in which his supporters in the West have cast him — including as an excuse for bigoted attacks on Islam that, in happier times, he might have rejected? Had his feelings changed about his connection to the Indian constituency from which he had emerged?

Rushdie answered the second question with a moving evocation of how much India, and Bombay in particular, meant to him and how much it hurt that he could not walk its streets again without fear of being lynched. In the process, he deftly sidestepped the first question. I thought it ungracious to insist upon an answer. A man in his position is grateful for his defenders; he cannot afford to be choosy about the terms of their defense.

And so Salman Rushdie was whisked away by his police escort, a haunted symbol of Western literary freedom under assault from Oriental despotism, rather than the voice of the Muslim immigrant in the West that he had sought to be. Before he left, I shook his hand and wished him well. He thanked me for a letter of support I had sent him. I wanted to say I wished he would one day no longer need such support. But the words did not come. I hoped the day soon would.

A
MERICANS, THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM HAS IT
, don't read. At least not as much as they used to. Television, movies, computer games, the Internet — all have driven people away from books. And when they do read, it seems it's not literature they want. The best-seller lists are overflowing with diet books, books on self-improvement, books on how to play the dating game. The fiction lists seem to consist of nothing but steamy romances and formulaic thrillers. “Americans,” a British academic once growled to me, “don't know the difference between wanting to read a book and wanting a book to read.”

So it was with decidedly mixed feelings that I found myself at what is billed as America's largest literary gathering, the
Los Angeles Times
Festival of Books, an annual event that overwhelms the University of California's UCLA campus on the last weekend in April. Could the home of Hollywood and Burbank, capital of the mass entertainment industry, better known for its trivial game shows and glittering but
insubstantial soirées, truly celebrate something as solitary and unglamorous as reading?

Apparently 400 authors and 250 exhibitors thought so. So did an astonishing 125,000 people who thronged the festival over the weekend to hear authors ranging from Salman Rushdie to Sharon Roan, author of
Our Daughters’ Health.
There were the usual readings and signings, including one tracing “The Evolution of a Book: From Inspiration to Publication.” There were discussions on topics from “Is Geography Fate? Reflections on the East,” featuring two British writers and your faithful correspondent, to “Do Books Have a Future?” (The answer was apparently a qualified yes.)

But this being L.A., the truly Big Moment was an awards ceremony: the year's
Los Angeles Times
Book Prizes, from poetry to fiction. Entering from Sunset Boulevard, I couldn't help thinking of that other L.A. awards ceremony — the Oscars. But the invitation prosaically required “business attire,” and there wasn't a shimmering blond in sight. Instead of the collagen-enhanced, serenely Botoxed faces and figures that would be on hand to celebrate the silver screen, here we floated on a sea of wrinkles, furrowed brows, eyes narrowed from squinting at the page — or the computer monitor. Last year, author Frank McCourt had taken the mike to clamor for more cleavage at the event. It did not seem that he had got his way. Books and Botox, it seems, don't go together.

Hollywood casts a long shadow, however: the director of the Book Prize turned out to be a film critic. A giant fake bookcase dominated the stage, framing a high-resolution television screen featuring the photos and book covers of
short-listed nominees. As the prizes were announced, there was the inevitable fumbling with the envelope as tension mounted — then the sweet high of triumph. Gasps and shrieks rose from the audience, or at least that portion loyal to the winner, none louder than those greeting the winner of “Best Mystery / Thriller.” A spotlight plucked her from the applauding masses as she accepted embraces from family and friends, then strode briskly to the stage — our thrilled and mysterious laureate, a matronly figure in an unpretentious pantsuit.

If that showed the limits of the Oscar parallel, the acceptance speeches were all too familiar. Fervent gratitude to editors, publishers, and publicists is, alas, no more exciting to hear than teary lists of thanks to producers, directors, and publicists. All hail the biography prizewinner whose entire remarks consisted of the sentence, “I will not start thanking people because I couldn't stop.” But then his book has a long list of acknowledgments.

The book fair brought home a fact I'd long known but never fully appreciated. Americans are great at making occasions out of next to nothing; in literature as in life, presentation is as important as substance, and there's nothing worthwhile that couldn't be improved by better packaging. The great American tautology is probably, “You can't succeed if you're not promoted.” No writer is too eminent to need marketing, and no publicity is beneath a successful American writer. Serious novelists appear on the
Today
show to be quizzed about their lifestyles by interviewers who haven't cracked the covers of their books. The talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey can catapult an unknown into best-sellerdom
with five minutes of breathless airtime. When the writer Jonathan Franzen was careless enough to express disdain for her taste, Oprah's decision to disinvite him became the major literary story of the month, eclipsing any headlines his actual appearance might have garnered.

Perhaps that's the only way literature will survive in America. Amid the general atmosphere of celebration at the awards ceremony, Steve Wasserman of the
Los Angeles Times,
editor of what is perhaps the country's most cerebral book section, sounded a grim warning. The next day the
San Francisco Chronicle
was to close its separate book review section, collapsing it into its entertainment section. The
Boston Globe,
despite appearing in a city famed for its fifty institutions of higher learning, was about to do the same. The
San Jose Mercury,
publishing in the heart of America's most prosperous area, Silicon Valley, had cut its book-review pages by a third. Even the venerable
New York Times
was to reduce the country's grandest and most widely read book review from thirty-six pages to thirty-two. And there was talk of making the
New York Times Book Review
more appealing to a general readership by requiring its editors to deign to notice popular fiction — the sort of books that regularly dominated the
Book Review
’s best-seller lists but rarely commanded review space in its columns.

Ironically, many publishers quietly welcomed the
San Francisco Chronicle
’s action. Entertainment sections of newspapers always have attracted more readers than book review sections, and advertisements for books would therefore reach a larger readership if they appeared under the entertainment rubric. It's an odd way to look at it, but I could see the
point. It's a reminder that in America, literature, too, is a business. I noticed that the actress who provides the voice of Bart Simpson on the animated TV show
The Simpsons
was a major draw at the festival, helping sell a number of volumes based on the popular cartoon series. Those are the kinds of things that help sustain publishers’ profits — and the reading habit. If there were a Best Supporting Author award, I'd have been glad to give it to her.

T
HE YOUNG BLACK MAN THRUST A PAPER AT ME
, squinting into the sun. “Hey, man, can you tell me where this is?” he asked.

I was a visitor to Detroit myself, but one glance at the scribbled address told me the answer to his question. I pointed at the street sign barely fifteen feet away, which he couldn't possibly have missed. “It's right there,” I said, adding with unnecessary cruelty: “Can't you see the street sign?”

He looked sheepishly at me, pulled the paper back, and shuffled toward the corner. And then it hit me. The reason he had had to ask me, a stranger standing on the sidewalk, was not because he hadn't seen the sign. It was because he couldn't read it.

He was not alone. An astonishing 47 percent of Detroiters, nearly one out of two adults in this predominantly black city, are functionally illiterate. (By way of comparison, the figure for Vietnam is 6.7 percent.) Functional illiteracy relates to the inability of an individual to use reading, writing, and
computational skills in everyday life situations: filling out a job application, reading traffic signs, figuring out an election ballot, reading a newspaper, understanding a bus schedule or a product label — or an address on a sheet of paper. In the richest country on earth, 23 percent of adult Americans — forty-four million men and women — cannot do these things. Detroit is the worst case, but it's only twice as bad as the rest of the country.

The situation is in fact even worse than that suggests, because another 50 million Americans cannot read or comprehend above the eighth-grade level. To understand what that means: you need ninth-grade-level comprehension to understand the instructions for an antidote on an ordinary can of cockroach poison in your kitchen, tenth-grade level to follow a federal income tax return, twelfth-grade competence to read a life insurance form. Nearly half of America's adults cannot do these things. They are, in effect, un-equipped for life in a modern society.

If it's startling enough for foreigners to realize there is such a thing as American illiteracy, what's poignant is that, unlike in the developing world, where illiteracy is predominantly a rural problem, in the United States it occurs overwhelmingly in the inner cities, with a heavy concentration among the poor and those dependent on welfare. I was in Detroit to address a conference on the crisis in America's cities, and I had stepped out onto the street to get some fresh air and use my cell phone while awaiting my turn to speak. In the young man in front of me I saw the problem there at its worst. Nearly half of Detroit's citizens between the ages of sixteen and sixty, I was told, are jobless and not
seeking work. Why? It's a fair guess that most of them do not have the required literacy skills to apply for the available jobs, or even to be trained for them.

An outspoken civic worker I met told me that illiteracy and unemployment go hand-in-hand: 70 percent of functionally illiterate adults have no job or only a part-time job. Those who are employed have it tough. Illiterate adults work an average of nineteen weeks a year, compared to forty-four weeks a year for literates. Workers without a high school degree earn four times less than those with a college degree. And they often can't cope at work. Business losses attributable to literacy deficiencies in America cost the country tens of billions of dollars every year in low productivity, errors by workers who can't read properly, industrial accidents, lawsuits, and poor product quality.

What's worse, the standards and requirements for literacy have increased in recent years, as computerization has taken over the world. “You've got mail” may be the defining slogan of our age, but it excludes those who can't decipher their mail, electronic or otherwise. In a world where you can tell the rich from the poor by their Internet connections, the poverty line trips over the high-speed digital line. The key to the computer age is the keyboard, but too many Americans literally cannot read the keys. No wonder 70 percent of mothers on welfare have low literacy skills. Since they are unable to help their children to read or write, illiterate parents have children who struggle to read and drop out of school, perpetuating the problem down the generations. The cost in terms of the loss of human potential is devastating. But there's an impact on crime too: 60 percent of all juvenile
offenders have illiteracy problems. Adults are no better — seven out of ten prisoners have low literacy levels, and the current prison population of two million represents a dramatic concentration of illiterate Americans. They know how to fire a gun but not how to read the Bible. Even the NRA couldn't be entirely happy with that.