cover image On Rereading

On Rereading

Patricia Meyer Spacks. Harvard/Belknap, $26.95 (292p) ISBN 978-0-674-06222-1

In this accessible, sometimes engaging, but often repetitive and predictable "autobiography of thoughts and feelings elicited by novels," Spacks, an emeritus University of Virginia literature professor, revisits an array of formative texts from her childhood, adolescence, and academic career. To investigate rereading's "continuum between stability and change," Spacks first focuses on the unexpected rewards and occasional disappointments of reexamining children's literature from an adult perspective. This establishes a pattern that generally holds for the rest of the book: lively close readings of texts, which may or may not explicitly pertain to rereading, followed by bland reiterations of her conclusions about the value of revisiting texts. The three chapters on rereading novels emblematic of certain eras (the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s) seem little more than extended musings on the fact that culture, family, and friends affect our reading experiences. Spacks's insistent focus on her personal history and experiences, while inherent to her project, is especially wearisome here. A later chapter on "professional rereading." which deals with the work of literary scholarship and larger concerns regarding the canon, proves much stronger. However, the book's often obvious conclusions and absorption with the author's own experiences leave it unable to overcome the question it poses about Saul Bellow's Herzog: "And why should a reader care?" (Nov.)