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Reviewed by:
  • On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks
  • Shawna Rushford-Spence
On Rereading. By Patricia Meyer Spacks. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2011. 280 pp.

What begins as an experiment in rereading, results in a meaningful exploration of a range of novels from childhood favorites to canonical classics to guilty pleasures. In On Rereading, Patricia Meyer Spacks brilliantly illuminates the process and pleasure of rereading so as to entice avid readers to look and look again at the novels they most treasured. In her opening chapter, Spacks explains that the act of rereading is primarily for pleasure but may provide a means to “measure personal change” (4). She argues throughout the book that the while the reasons for rereading may vary, the rewards of reading a novel for the second, third, or even tenth time “generally cluster around the promise of change or stability” (6). While novels offer stability of character, language, and plot, the way a story is interpreted changes depending on when and where the novel is read and the life experience of the reader. A contribution to reader-response criticism, On Rereading illustrates the dynamic interactions between a reader and her many beloved texts.

Spacks characterizes her book as autobiography as it relies on memory and focuses on a range of her most valued (and sometimes undervalued) novels. It is not, in other words, a volume of literary criticism—though there is a substantial amount of literary analysis embedded within the discussions of each novel. One of the overriding questions Spacks asks of all the novels she rereads is: What makes a novel valuable? In many instances, Spacks assigns value based on the pleasure she derives in rereading the novel years and often decades after a first reading. But, value is also assigned on the basis of whether a novel can “stand the test of time,” that is, speak to the reader (in a new way) in the decades after its publication. Some novels, such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Saul Bellow’s Herzog, continue to provide both pleasure and insight whereas other novels, including J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Dorris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, fail to re-captivate the reader.

Even though Spacks’s intellectual “hobby horse,” as she calls it, is eighteenth-century English literature, she discusses a range of [End Page 153] British and American novels produced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (21). She highlights the process and intricacies of rereading, including the selection of texts, the texts themselves, with their worn and yellowed pages, at times, too tattered to be reread, as well as the thoughts and feelings she experiences while rereading and the new conclusions she derives as a result of returning to texts she either would have returned to anyway or returns to for the sake of her experiment in rereading.

Spacks employs a similar format for illuminating all the novels she rereads: a brief reflection on the first reading or previous readings, a summary with a critical analysis of characters, plot, and style, and a discussion of the implications of rereading a given novel. In chapter 2, aptly titled “Once Upon a Time,” Spacks discusses the experience of rereading some of her childhood favorites. While Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland retains its literary value for its “propensity to provoke thought,” (33) C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series proves more predictable than imagined and provides “only a stodgy sort of comfort—no fresh insight” (52). According to Spacks, the mostly thrilling aspect of rereading a novel, in particular a novel read for the first time in childhood, is that it can help a reader in “rediscovering a past self, a self that we may have thought lost” (53).

Chapter 3 is devoted to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Emma. Unlike other novels discussed in this volume, Spacks had already reread these novels many times before embarking on this experiment. In this chapter, Spacks provides an interesting and useful discussion of how these novels work to represent and thereby construct civilization. However, she admits she has forgotten her first reading of Emma and much of her...

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