The Sweet Sorrow of Rereading

“If I once read for adventure, I now read for security. How nice to be able to return to what won’t change.”

If you’re a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, or friend of the family, you’ve perhaps endured the fury of a toddler compelled to listen to her favorite book with a word missed or a picture skipped. The point of the favorite book, for the listener, is that it remains the same. The more often the three-year-old hears the familiar sentences, the more content she appears. When a word changes, pleasure recedes: A beloved book has lost its identity.

Trying to account for this passion for sameness, we may say that it reveals the toddler’s need for security. In a world crammed with new experiences, exciting yet unpredictable, the child treasures what she can hold on to. If even the book turns unpredictable, she loses what she has depended on. A friend’s personality has changed. We smile grown-up smiles at the child’s demand for perfect reiteration even if we retain that childish need in more acceptable form, addicted to our own rereadings.

Diverse impulses motivate us rereaders, desire for security among them. Consider Larry McMurtry, writing in his early seventies: “If I once read for adventure, I now read for security. How nice to be able to return to what won’t change.” McMurtry reports that publishers keep sending him new books to comment on. He sends them back, preferring the books he already knows. “When I sit down at dinner with a given book,” McMurtry writes, “I want to know what I’m going to find.”

We always find frustration: Early in life, the adults we depend on won’t read the book to us exactly as it should be each time; later, we realize the impossibility of rereading, re-encountering, regrasping, everything we have already perused. But we may discover, also, the special, increasingly complicated pleasure of literary re-encounters. Rereading: a treat, a form of escape, a device for getting to sleep or for distracting oneself, a way to evoke memories (not only of the text but of one’s life and of past selves), a reminder of half-forgotten truths, an inlet to new insight. It rouses or soothes, provokes or reassures. And, as McMurtry reminds us, it can provide security.

What kind of security, exactly? McMurtry suggests that a book reread offers what will not change—but for most readers, rereading provides, in contrast, an experience of repeated unexpected change. We remember Hansel and Gretel making their trail of bread crumbs, but it may come as a surprise to reread the Grimm brothers’ version of the story and find the witch licking her lips over the prospect of eating the children on toast. Only a tiny detail, that, but one that complicates the story’s flavor and makes it memorable in a new way. That allusion to toast makes the reader suddenly aware that the witch really is planning to eat those children.

She’s thinking about the meal to come. I read the tale anew in the battered copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that survives from my childhood and come upon this unexpected moment. Did I fail to remember it because once it scared me by its specificity? Who knows?

Change occurs not only as a result of noticing new details but also because interpretations alter. In a youthful reading of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov seems a daring young man, exciting in his willingness to defy convention. As a grown-up rereader, I think him a fool, or a monster. I read the novel again: He has become an object of sympathetic pity tinged with horror. I find myself enthralled for new reasons.

Sometimes a book changes for the worse. Vivian Gornick: “When I read Colette in my twenties, I said to myself, That is exactly the way it is. Now I read her and I find myself thinking, How much smaller this all seems than it once did—cold, brilliant, limited—and silently I am saying to her, Why aren’t you making more sense of things?” We read to recapture the thrill of a book first encountered 20 years earlier, and the thrill has mysteriously vanished. We remember a wonderful story, and the story has turned into a cliché. The change may attest to our maturity, but it feels like loss.

Or, perhaps, provocation. As Verlyn Klinkenborg puts it, writing in The New York Times, “The real secret of rereading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard—always a stranger” (“Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader,” May 30, 2009). Klinkenborg claims that the books he repeatedly rereads provide not a canon but a refuge. In other words, this special group matters to him not because he judges its members to be of particular merit but because its books supply a certain kind of emotional satisfaction. His manifest excitement at the role of the reader—always a stranger—suggests, however, that his satisfaction involves more than refuge.

The question of what kind of security rereading offers gives way to another: How can rereading provide security at all? How can a rereader who remains “always a stranger” expect reassurance?

If books keep changing along with their readers, they possess no stability and would seem to offer no security. Seeing former classmates at a twenty-fifth high school reunion can come as a shock; so can reseeing a once beloved book. Yet the claim of security carries conviction. It reminds us that in every book, though much may change, much stays the same. The plot no longer thrills, but it remains the plot that thrilled us once. The characters appear more or less reprehensible than they did before, but like those high school classmates, they continue to possess traits we recognize.

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Artworks from series Chicago, 1988.