Book Ends

When I finish a good book, I get separation anxiety. It's that disorienting feeling you get when you move to a new town. Only this feels more like the town moved and you stayed behind.

Where'd all the people go? I can still hear their voices in my head. I get them. I know how they feel, what they think, whom they love, what they hope for. But now they're gone! All of them! I clutch the physical book, stare at the cover art, look for any hidden extras in the back like book club discussion questions or bonus biographical information about the author. I want anything that will help me linger a bit longer in the world that just ended when I flipped the last page.

In the real world, we don't get to see into other people's minds. But when we read, we get an invitation into the narrator's head. And if the book switches around to multiple narrators, as in the last two books I read (Bel Canto and The Luminaries) then the reader gets to travel into so many minds, seeing all the flaws and struggles that most real people cover up in the course of their real lives: the honest devastation, the elation, the fears. We become closer to these imaginary people than people in real life, because there is no way to see real people this intimately. Even memoirs that attempt to be fully open and honest are blocked in some way by the writer's own delusions of self. But there's no one more fully self-aware than a well-written character in a novel by a gifted writer.

So what is there to do? I mope around for a couple of days in order to recover from the book's end, and then I look at the unread pile on my nightstand, pick one up, and meet some new people.