“The Sudden Sharp Memory”

From the Parkhives #34

I did a double-take yesterday upon seeing this photo on the Barnes & Noble account, noting that the great Namwali Serpell would be on the Poured Over podcast to speak about her new book, On Morrison. To the left of Serpell’s study are Morrison’s seven novels and two volumes of nonfiction. The second title from the left is something of a rarity—Burn This Book, a collection of essays subtitled PEN Authors Speak Out on the Power of the Word. Harper Studio (now defunct) put it out in 2009. If this image were somehow 3-D, and I could reach in and pull that spine out just enough to read the left-most third of the cover, you’d see a list of 11 authors, each in its own black, white, or gray square. Most are so famous (both circa 2009 and today) they can be identified by last name alone:

Auster, Banks, Gordimer.

Morrison, Iyer (pre–Marty Supreme), Rushdie.

Updike, Prose, Pamuk.

The penultimate name, Grossman, you might not get—it’s David, not Lev or Edith.

And the final author listed on the cover is . . . well, is me.

****

I first read Toni Morrison in high school—a contemporary fiction class that I found tremendously exciting. We read Sula (which I liked) and Song of Solomon (which I loved). This was pre-Beloved, and for a little while at least, for a high-schooler, this felt like semi-secret knowledge.¹

Anyway—fast forward to 2008. My editor, Julia, moved to Harper shortly after Personal Days came out. An early project was putting together Burn This Book, and she asked if I wanted to contribute, and that’s how it happened. All of the other pieces, I believe, were op-eds or talks, already in the can; I had nothing teed up along those lines, so I searched my brain for a good banned book—a favorite banned book. I came up with I Am the Cheese, Robert Cormier’s dark, thrilling, undersung 1977 novel.

****

As was the case with my memoir Three Tenses, which I wrote in 1998 and unearthed in 2020, I found myself without an easily accessible digital copy of “The Sudden Sharp Memory,” my contribution to Burn This Book.² 2009 is much closer to the present than 1998, though; surely there must be some email with Julia containing the text. Yet I was coming up empty. I finally located a PDF galley in my correspondence with a different editor (Katie, now an acclaimed biographer).³

This is the first of several essays from that time for which I devised a frenetic, semi-fictional frame. I was hesitant to read this, 17 years later, and wondered if I needed to tweak it, calm it down. But in keeping with the spirit of the Parkhives, I have left it intact.

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T: Do you feel well?

A: I’m not sure. I feel—dizzy.

T: An anxiety reaction, nothing more. Oh, the dizziness

is real, I grant you. But the cause is anxiety,

the sudden sharp memory.

A: May I rest? I’m tired now.

T: Are you retreating?

A: No. Really. But I’m dizzy and tired and my stomach feels queasy. I feel as though I’ve been here, in this room, forever.

—Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese (1977). Banned by Leonard Hall, Bay County, Florida, Schools Superintendent, 1985–1987

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TAPE AE001 date deleted ______

A: Subject is a 38-year-old Asian male. He’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt, jeans. He clutches a thin paperback, the edges of the pages blued, like they used to do. The title is I Am the Cheese.

(5-second interval)

All caps, letters the color of cheddar.

(8-second interval)

The cover shows a teenager on a bike. Knit cap, ragged military-style jacket. He looks like a cross between Edward Norton and Ryan from The O.C.⁴ On the front of his bike is a basket with something in it. The whole scene is washed out, nearly sepia. There’s a man in the distance, looking at us, or him, but you can’t make out the expression on his face. There’s a thin line of shadow on the right of the tableau, like this is a photo or a print placed atop a white surface.

(5-second interval)

A ring of real iron keys interrupts the lower-righthand corner. I mean, the keys lie on top of the picture just described. Already this book is playing with representation and reality.

E: You know I can hear every word you’re saying, right? I’m sitting about two feet away.

A: I wondered when you were going to talk. You said nothing when I sat down.

E: I was reading.

(5-second interval)

Thinking.

(5-second interval)

I didn’t know who to expect, what you would look like.

(3-second interval)

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.

(10-second interval)

We’re here. We’re in this room. We might as well talk.

(5-second interval)

I assume this is being recorded?

A: You’ve brought a book. Why did you choose I Am the Cheese?

E: You make it sound like I had a choice. As soon as I knew that you wanted to talk about banned books, this was the one that came swimming out of the depths of my memory.

(5-second interval)

The other day I was thinking how memory itself is like a censor, as capricious and strict as any morality squad.

(5-second interval)

I’m just riffin’.

(3-second interval)

Why do I remember certain things, forget others? The ratio of remembered to forgotten must be like 1:5,000,000.

(5-second interval)

I didn’t have a choice, really. It’s all predestined. Like the nursery song the book takes its title from.

The natural order. There’s no escape.

(Sings softly)

“The farmer takes a wife, the farmer takes a wife . . .”

(3-second interval)

Then the wife takes the child, the child takes the cat, the cat takes the rat, the rat takes the cheese, and the cheese stands alone, which is also a lie. Because no, the cheese doesn’t stand alone—it gets devoured.

Annihilated.

(5-second interval)

Nice conflation of the food chain with family planning. And “takes” has all sorts of meanings. Proprietary. Sexual. Violent.

(5-second interval)

Great fucking title.

(6-second interval)

A: Why don’t you tell me about the book? Then we’ll talk about—

(12-second interval)

Are you feeling OK?

(5-second interval)

Do you wish to suspend?

(5-second interval)

Let us suspend then.

END TAPE AE001

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TAPE AE002 date deleted ______

A: Is this the copy that you read as a kid?

E: Yes. Look at the edges—that turquoise color. It’s lighter along the top, from where the sun hit it.

Now look at this gorgeous color here, the long edge. Beautiful. Makes me nostalgic.

A: For what?

E: I don’t know. Turquoise page edges? The age of the turquoise page edges. Somewhere there’s a grad student doing her dissertation on the inks used in twentieth-century mass-market paperbacks.

(6-second interval)

This edition is copyright 1981. The novel was first published in 1977. I’d say I read it in ’82 or ’83, when I was twelve, maybe thirteen. I forget exactly. No later than fourteen. I didn’t keep a journal then. I should have written all this stuff down.

(3-second interval)

It’s crazy how much you forget.

(8-second interval)

These blurbs are great. “A bike-ride through a Twilight Zone.” Kirkus. “Simply one of the best novels, dot dot dot, this year.” Newsweek.

(6-second interval)

Dot dot dot.

(6-second interval)

That’s what I Am the Cheese is all about, really. Dot dot dot. Gaps. Lacunae. It’s a kid trying to fill in the blanks of his life. Do you know the story? Can I tell you the story? I won’t tell you what happens at the very end.

A: I don’t mind spoilers.

E: Trust me, you don’t want me to tell you. You need to read it yourself.

(3-second interval)

I was rereading the book last month, and I remembered it had a doozy of an ending, a huge twist, but I’d forgotten exactly what it was. I should have figured it out, of course, this time around, but I didn’t.

Then I got to the end and it blindsided me.

(6-second interval)

Some people don’t like twists. I love twists.

(3-second interval)

So I’m not going to tell you about the end but I’ll tell you the highlights. And then I guess we should talk about what it means that this book got banned.

(4-second interval)

So in I Am the Cheese, the protagonist, who is also the narrator of parts of the book—actually, I’ll get to that in a sec—is a kid named Adam Farmer. He lives in Monument, Massachusetts, with his insurance agent father and vaguely sad mother. He’s bookish, shy, enjoys old things, wants to be a writer someday like Thomas Wolfe—not the “hip writer” Tom Wolfe.

(3-second interval)

I had no idea what that meant when I read it. I mean, I didn’t know who Tom Wolfe was. And when I eventually encountered his writing, I couldn’t get that “hip writer” out of my mind!

(3-second interval)

Anyway, Adam meets a girl named Amy Hertz, who’s extroverted and mischievous. Somehow she takes a shine to him. One day her father has a visitor from another town—the small town where Adam was born. She asks the visitor if he’d ever heard of Adam’s folks, and he says he hasn’t. Which is strange, for someone who’s lived in such a small town all his life.

(6-second interval)

I am the keys: One of the great YA book covers of…that year.

Things unravel from there—in a nutshell, Adam’s real last name isn’t Farmer. His father used to be a newspaper reporter, who uncovered links between organized crime and the state government. The mob forced him to enter the witness protection program, change his name and profession, move his family. He had to cut off all ties to his past life.

(3-second interval)

It’s probably inevitable that Adam would learn all this, but the way Cormier structures the book, his eureka breaks over him slowly, coming as a series of smaller discoveries—of incongruities, deceptions. And of course he’s deceiving his parents, sneaking around to puzzle together his real life.

(15-second interval)

Isn’t that what all kids do, when they hit adolescence? Try to tease out the truth about their parents, about themselves? Cormier took this impulse and turned it paranoid.

(6-second interval)

It’s one of the most paranoid books I’ve ever read.

(3-second interval)

It should be banned! (Laughs.)

(3-second interval)

Wait. Look at this blurb, from Booklist: “Cormier’s theme of one person against overwhelming organizational odds is developed here with stunning force.”

That word: “organizational.” I want to riff on that. Can I riff? Do I have permission for riffage?

(3-second interval)

OK. So think about the organization of a book. Most books we read are pretty straightforward in this regard. A voice, a tone, is established, a simple time frame adhered to, and if the author’s any good she can push this narrative strategy through to the end, keeping the reader under her spell.

(4-second interval)

The radical thing about I Am the Cheese, for a twelve-year-old reader, is that though the language can be intense—not in terms of curse words but in terms of emotional drama—Cormier’s actually getting much of his effect from his organization of the material. For “organizational odds,” read “odd organization.”

The book kicks off with a present-tense, first-person voice—Adam’s—recounting our hero’s quest to find his father. He’s biking from Monument to Rutterburg, Vermont, with a package, a gift, for his father. He’s running away—but from where?

(3-second interval)

After a couple of pages, Cormier breaks the spell. Now we are reading the transcript of an interview between Adam and someone—a doctor perhaps, a psychiatrist—named Brint. Gaps of assorted duration—“5-second interval,” “12-second interval”— punctuate the exchange, and it’s in these silences that the mystery breathes. It’s breathtakingly creepy and effective.

(5-second interval)

What does Brint want? Why does Adam keep having headaches, withholding information?

(3-second interval)

There’s yet a third element to the organization of I Am the Cheese, and that’s the swaths of third person, past-tense narrative that often interrupt the transcripts, as if a flashback is playing in Adam’s head while he zones out in front of the interviewer. Cormier swings freely between these three narrative conceits, and what’s cool is how the story falls into place in three different time frames, which then overlap, snap into focus. But it’s not just “what happens” that works so well. It’s the gaps, see. You experience the story the way Adam learns about his life—confronting these blanks, the disjunctures between narratives, that your mind works to fill in.

(6-second interval)

Not only that, but the very strategy of toggling among three different narratives—three different states of mind—keeps you on your toes, the way Adam becomes alert to every change in his daily life. The rug keeps getting pulled out from under you. You can’t settle into one groove, one way of thinking.

(5-second interval)

I’m getting really excited talking about this.

(6-second interval)

I’d like to stop for today.

A: Would you like some water? We can break for a few minutes.

(5-second interval)

I’d really like to keep going.

(15-second interval)

This is great stuff.

(8-second interval)

I’d really like for you to continue, Ed.

(5-second interval)

Let us suspend.

END TAPE AE002

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TAPE AE003 date deleted ______

A: This was a banned book when you were growing up?

E: The whole Cheese controversy happened a few years later, down in Florida. In 1985 a grandmother in Bay County sent a letter to the school superintendent. Something Hall—Leonard Hall. She said she found the book immoral—for bad language, and because it advanced “humanism and behaviorism.”

(5-second interval)

Isn’t “humanism” a good thing?

(4-second interval)

I’m not even sure what she means by “behaviorism.”

(3-second interval)

Hall had the book banned, even though nearly all the students had received parental permission to read it for their English class. It was something of a progressive school, from what I understand.

(3-second interval)

This is all in a book called What Johnny Shouldn’t Read. Chapter seven.

(3-second interval)

I have it right here, actually.

(3-second interval)

Another adult, I guess the actual parent of the girl with the offended grandmother, filled out a form—a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials”—calling I Am the Cheese “morbid and depressing,” and objecting to its “crude and vulgar” language. The father of this adult—Collins—also joined the fray. This is what’s in the book:

[Collins’s] letter, dated May 22, 1986, charged that novels used in the program contain “obscene language and sexual explicities [sic].” He amplified his views in a newspaper interview: ‘ “There’s no respect in this county any more,’ Collins said. ‘You cannot go down the halls of the high schools and junior highs without hearing the dirtiest language you ever heard in your life. I believe these filthy little books are the cause.’ ”

(10-second interval)

A committee consisting of teachers and the parents of Mowat students voted to reinstate the book, but Hall rejected this. It stayed banned, things snowballed.

(3-second interval)

I kind of don’t want to go through the whole thing now. It’s too depressing.

(3-second interval)

But basically it’s a minority of adults trying to place restrictions on student reading, based on whether the books fit into their particular form of morality.

(3-second interval)

I mean it’s stupid, right? Of course it is. But it’s interesting how the book they chose to ban, I Am the Cheese, is about forbidden knowledge. What gets covered up, distorted. What we pretend does not exist.

Today I read that absence into those gaps between the different narrative sections, and into those silences that blossom in the interview transcripts. It’s like the censors had unconsciously found the perfect mirror to their censorship.

(17-second interval)

I like what Nietzsche said about the writings of antiquity: They’re the only ones that modern man reads with exactness.

(6-second interval)

The same could be said of banned books.

(3-second interval)

Also I was thinking that maybe the gaps in the interview tapes are residue from Watergate? And the plot as a whole, too—about how you can’t trust the government. Remember, this is ’77, so all that stuff is fresh in Cormier’s mind.

(3-second interval)

I’m just riffin’.

(3-second interval)

Maybe we’ll talk about it later.

END TAPE AE003

1. Other entries on this syllabus that I recall: Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, and Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters.

2. I retyped Three Tenses, which will be published this August.

3. A postscript: I actually wound up meeting Morrison, on an unrelated thing, when she was awarded the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from the English-Speaking Union. (I had been on the judging committee that year.) I shook her hand! I was starstruck, as you can imagine! I mentioned Burn this Book but it was not clear she registered that I was in that book! Maybe she did! (Also, John Ashbery got a different award that night—I said hello!)

4. I contemplated cutting this line but—oh well.