Just One Damn Book after Another

26 Jan, 2025

I went to bed last night in not-unpleasant exhaustion after reaching the end of the first of seven books in Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume.¹ You’d think “exhaustion” would be overdoing it; my slim paperback version comes in at 135 pages, and on top of there being nothing difficult about the concepts or the language involved, Balle’s straightforward prose and unflashy approach are real pleasures. But following the narrator through a year’s worth of the same day, and her attempts to figure out how to get back to the usual flow of time, left me drained. Having lived with her through one volume of this endlessness, I closed the book thinking I’m not sure I could handle another, much less six more.

My guess is that after a sufficient rest period, I’ll get to at least the second volume at some point. But the experience also got me thinking about my ambivalent relationship to series in general—and even how that topic or concept, of a multivolume story or account that isn’t contained between the same two covers, is too broad a prospect to address in a brief consideration. Are we talking, after all, about serialized novels made available only in the order and at the usually quick pace at which they’re released, as in so much of Dickens’s original work, where you’re left hanging and eager for more at the end of every installment? Or is it the slow burn of, say, Jonathan Franzen’s Key to All Mythologies series, in which only the first of a projected three volumes has been published, and if you liked that initial offering (Crossroads), you’ll just have to wait, and will maybe have to go back and reread it again once volume two is out in order to retrieve your bearings?² Or then is it the case, as it usually is with me, that you’re late to the game, and only become aware of big series like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle after the whole stack has been made available, and you’re free to devour it all without interruption?

I’ve found that it’s far easier for me to stick with the entire series if they’ve been fit into a single volume. For instance, even if Robertson Davies’s spectacular Deptford Trilogy had only been available one book at a time, I’m not sure I would have gotten as much enjoyment out of it had I not been able to forget everything and just inhale it all at once. But every portion of that trilogy was delicious, and there was no question I was going to let any of it go. With less standout offerings, though—I won’t be all that sad if I miss the release of the next book in Franzen’s series, and I may be the only person on the planet with zero interest in continuing with Elsa Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels—if the first one doesn’t hit me, I probably won’t keep up with it. That’s not any sort of surprising response, but OCD reader that I am, if everything’s been collected into one volume, I feel compelled to get to the end. Although I’ve gotten better about just dropping a book if it’s not doing anything for me, it’s still a colossal struggle to allow myself to part ways with something on which an individual has probably toiled long and hard; there’s an odd and probably ridiculous part of me that feels I owe this person—living or dead, in either case whom I’ll never meet and who will never know whether I even opened their book—the respect of seeing their creation through to the end they’ve determined was the right one.

And here’s where I get an inkling about my discomfort or dissatisfaction or whatever unnamed ambivalence it is with series: even though whatever an author’s written is in some sense a (not nefarious) manipulation of the reader—you’re being guided through a world, after all, and encouraged to understand it in a particular way and feel a certain way about it—the planned stops and starts feel a little more like ringing the behaviorist bell to get you salivating and holding eagerly in position for the next treat. Well, duh: of course. That’s how these things are supposed to work, and maybe there’s even readerly pleasure in using that empty time to speculate with self and/or others about what’s going to happen, to go over what has happened and increase your thrill the second or third time around by simple review with others. (Although I’m not much of a TV/streaming viewer, I’m guessing this is exactly what occurs with the latest hit series, whether over social media or elsewhere.) The spaces between one volume and the next might, in fact, provide time and room for a deeper overall appreciation of your experiences with the text—or, as in the case of Balle’s work, time to rest up and freshen up to meet the next round.

Maybe this is where I really appreciated Knausgaard’s My Struggle series: it didn’t involve a chronological progression from, say, childhood to adulthood and on to the next step along the author’s path of aging and development. Starting the next book, you didn’t know at what point you were going to land in Knausgaard’s life, and the previous volume provided no cliffhangers to give you a clue. If I’m remembering correctly, most just ended without the writer having led you to expect that things were even about to come to a final stop. Had only the first of these six volumes been written, it could have stood brilliantly alone.

But you have to consider, too, the possibility that there’s a different sort of satisfaction in completing a whole series; as long as the author refrains from the usually inadvisable move of reviving a good thing that’s come to a needed end, once you’re done, you’re definitively done. The temptation, though, on the author’s part, is to go back to something that worked, and in trying to recapture that world, it ends up being watered down or beat sadly into the ground. I’ve not paid attention to any of the Harry Potter spin-offs, and where my lone televised devotion was concerned, couldn’t bear to return to Twin Peaks. Plenty of devotees probably have to deal with a bit of a void when a world they’ve come to feel is part of their own is gone (witness the über-fan you wouldn’t wish on even the most down-on-their-luck author in Stephen King’s Misery). And that may be why I can’t help but see these grand series endings as a sort of developmental challenge for both writer and reader: to put it simplistically, a summons to acknowledge the generally Buddhist insight that you can’t stop change, and need to roll with its flow.

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