Reading For Pleasure

Of course I read for pleasure. It's not as if I have a paper to write or test to take. And thanks to the Kindle “Try a Sample” option, I can easily start reading and then reject a book without even buying it. But that doesn't mean that all books are equally pleasurable to read. Sometimes reading a book can be hard work, but the rewards are well worth the effort (I'm looking at you, Karl Ove Knausgård). At other times a book can be just good enough to keep me going, but in the end leaves me feeling as I sometimes do in a restaurant – the meal tasted fine but I expected something a little more satisfying (Sorry, Rachel Kushner). And then sometimes a book hits me just right, Whether it's because of my state of mind, or the weather, or the phase of the moon, I'll never know, but reading Willa Cather's The Professor's House was an effortless pleasure. 

Unlike many of Cather's works, this book is not about frontier life but university life. Professor Godfrey St. Peter teaches history at a mid-western college in the 1920's and is a successful academic author. But when his family moves to a new home, he finds himself unable to abandon the shabby attic study in his old house, where he does his writing. His reluctance mirrors his unwillingness to accept the more modern and materialistic life which his wife and married daughters have embraced. He reminisces about his favorite student, Tom Outland, a brilliant scientist who was engaged to his daughter and was killed in World War I.

In middle section of the book, titled “Tom Outland's Story”, Cather leaves the professor and his comfortable life behind to let Tom tell the first person story of his life before his arrival at the college. Most memorable is his description of his discovery of an ancient abandoned city of cliff-dwellers on a mesa in New Mexico. Here Cather's love of natural beauty is reflected in the beautiful prose she uses to describe the colors, smells, textures of this idlyllic spot.

In the final section Cather returns to the professor and his struggle to come to terms with the modern world, so far removed from the natural world of the desert that Tom revered, and with a family to whom he no longer feels connected. He finds no easy answers. I expected this story to feel somewhat dated, but Cather has created a universal depiction of a man out of step with the times. Thanks, Willa – it was a pleasure.