FAILED ADDICTION

Every now and again I get the urge to read a good mystery. This is despite the fact that I'm inevitably disappointed.

I'm always jealous of people who seem to find deep satisfaction in binge-reading a particular genre. It would be nice to have something like that in your life. I had an English professor in college who was addicted to sci-fi. His bread and butter was 18th century British literature, but his drug of choice was sci-fi pulp. He claimed to have a colleague in the department who spent every spare second reading ultra-trashy romance novels. I've never grasped the joy that someone who studies great literature (you know, the thoughtful stuff that requires time and effort and talent to make) would find in reading a pile of crap that took some hack with a dumb pseudonym about three days to type up. It doesn't make sense to me. But still I'm jealous. They're able to suspend a critical faculty in their brains and enjoy a thing on its own terms.

And it's not slumming. That I would sort of get. But it's nothing as self-conscious and cynical, and ultimately judgmental, as that. It's genuine pleasure without reference to a context of "value."

My ex-husband, a wise professional man, into his 30s (and probably still), would come home from the public library on weekends with an armful of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks. He would lie on the couch completely immersed in some idiotic-when-you-really-stop-and-think-about-it tale of robots or androids or asteroids. His sense of contentment appeared almost religious. There was literally NOTHING he would have been happier doing at that moment. Which, of course, made me crazy jealous. I wanted my own complete-waste-of-time to lose myself in.

So from time to time I've tried to get myself hooked on mysteries. The other genres — romance, sci-fi, fantasy, western, true crime, whatever — just aren't going to do it for me. But the mystery genre has potential. I can become deeply engrossed in a good mystery. Who couldn't, really? But if I start reading some mystery novel and I notice a bunch of cliches or poorly described scenes (like "when he arrived at the morgue, Oswald found the coroner eating a meatball sandwich"), then I get restless and start losing interest in who died or how it happened or who did it.

A few weeks ago I saw an ad in The New York Review of Books for a smart mystery by an "energetic and imaginative British author," so I bought the book, and then about 200 lackluster pages into it I had this epiphany that, because I work for a publication, I should have had at page 5: "Wait a minute! Anyone can put an ad in The New York Review of Books." And calling a mystery British doesn't make it better. I fall for that every single time.

So I give up. I just don't have the genre-reading gene. I will have to stick to my usual ways of wasting time. I just wish they were more absorbing.

•••

Another thing: How do books break out of the genre identity and become "literature"? Why is "Rebecca" in the general literature section at Borders instead of with the other mysteries? Ditto "The Name of the Rose"? Who decides? One would think the principle is "if it's a really, really good mystery that people who read literature but not mysteries per se would also want to read, then it goes in literature." But when I was trying to find Tolkien the other day I went straight to the literature section and found zilch. The friendly Borders clerk told me Tolkien was only in fantasy. Huh? I don't get it. I suspect a system of misclassification, coupled with a tradition of highly exaggerated blurbs of praise, is keeping me from discovering the books I really want to read.