ustxtxb_obs_2002_11_22_50_00023-00000_000.pdf

wide skies of the San Fernando Valley where he grew up. Philip Levine pays tribute to Wilfred Owen, Walt Whitman, and Leo Tolstoy, but he claims that the earliest sources for his own poetic cadences were the Southern preachers he heard on the radio on Sunday mornings: “I was absolutely thrilled by the way they used language.” Though Osen conducted her business by telephone, the conversations must have been thoroughly redacted, since the texts shine with the lacquer of revised writing, rather than unscripted speech. Her authors range from middle-aged to elderly, and all are accomplished enough to have won the National Book Award \(profits from the volume are being donated to the National Book Foundation, which dignity if not total candor about canonical books that changed their lives, enhancing their own standing with fancy literary pedigrees. Diane Johnson does recall being excited about Swiss Family Robinson, The Bobbsey Twins, and something called Round the World with Bob and Betty. And Grace Paley remembers Heidi and Mother Goose, while Alice McDermott read avidly through the Hardy Boys series. But though books produce their most profound changes in younger readers, most of these respectable grownupsexcept for Katherine Paterson, who writes it herselfhave little to say about kiddie literature. Nor do they admit the role of the comic books, primers, pulps, porno, schmaltz, and kitsch that probably change more lives more completely than anything by Goethe, Proust, or Gibbon. For the most part, the book that changed the lives of these National Book Award laureates turns out to be the one they recently composed themselves. David Levering Lewis provides an elaborate account of how he came to write and be wrought by his twovolume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois. The most significant book in Barry Lopez’s life is his own Arctic Dreams, while in Charles Johnson’s it is Middle Passage. The Book That Changed My Life ends up being a set of conventional literary interviews, in which an admired author chats about origins, aims, and accomplishments. The memory of a powerful book is just the hook on which to hang comments about a career writing fiction, poetry, or history. The Book That Changed My Life is itself not likely to knock the socks off its readers, but Osen’s collection offers enough incidental pungency and insight to earn a tip of the hat. Here, for example, is the credo that motivates McCullough as popular historian: “I guess I want very much for others to experience the enlargement of one’s own life that comes with knowing about the lives and experiences and accomplishments and failings and voices of others who went before us.” Committed to storytelling as a kind of religious calling, McDermott marvels that “the almost breathless, passionate desire we have to tell and retell a story, says something to me about how we have been provided with the means of our own redemption.” Rejecting fiction that is polemical or prescriptive, Ozick proclaims her obligation “only to the comely shape of a sentence, and to the unfettered imagination, which sometimes leads to wild places via wild routes.” No less eloquent is Paley’s insistence on the artist’s social responsibility: “We all have to answer for our minute in history” Prize-winning authors might not be the most informative people to poll about how books change a life. Famous writers read and write too much, and the infamous anxiety of influence might well distort their memories and their answers. Might a younger set of respondents have revealed that movies and music, more than books, are now the primary agents of change? Instead of the fifteen winners of the National Book Award whom Osen has assembled, I could imagine another, motley group that would include Henry Aaron, George Soros, Susan Sarandon, Jim Jeffords, Helen Prejean, Ted Turner, Ingrid Newkirk, Daniel Barenboim, Maya Lin, Pete Seeger, Kofi Annan, Phil Jackson, Alice Waters, John Paul Stevens, and Oscar Arias. I suspect each could speak volumes about the effects of a book. What about polling the capital felons currently patronizing prison libraries while awaiting execution? The book must surely possess powers to change a life. Why else would we be throwing it at them? Steven G. Kellman teaches comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His most recent book, as co-editor, is UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld. But though books produce their most profound changes in younger readers, most of these respectable grownups have little to say about kiddie literature. Nor do they admit the role of the comic books, primers, pulps, porno, schmaltz, and kitsch that probably change more lives more completely than anything by Goethe, Proust, or Gibbon. For the most part, the book that changed the lives of these National Book Award laureates turns out to be the one they recently composed themselves. 11/22/02 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 23