Why You Shouldn’t Rely on First Reactions While Reading

Yesterday we finished reading Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Working on the article now. I read through some reviews and, once again, caught myself thinking that certain people rate books purely by reflex. (light goes on — saliva starts flowing.) Reflexes are a fine thing in themselves — it’s good that a book provokes some kind of response — without that first reaction there’d be no point reading at all; you might as well be pulling the wings off butterflies. Reactions are proof that we’re alive, that we’re not psychopaths, that we feel and we respond.

And these reflexes, these reactions, come in every possible flavor — it all depends on what your signaling system is wired to in the first place. A reader can be instantly put off by the way the narrator carries a first-person story (”god, she’s so unpleasant, I can’t relate to her at all”), or by the social message (”why does the woman end up punished for becoming a monster she only became because of the patriarchal system?”), and by plenty of other things that, as I said, aren’t bad in themselves — action, reaction, that’s just how it works. When someone taps your knee with a little hammer, you’d hope it twitches at least a bit — that’s a good sign.

But here’s the thought: going by reflex alone in texts like these is what you’d call the first level. Magnets that strong end up dragging us into chewing over the obvious, boring stuff in our reviews. Maybe that’s exactly what some people want, and I’ve no wish to trespass on anyone’s comfort — let things stay the way you’d like to see them.

But once you’ve heard out your first reactions, you can treat yourself to a little extra work and think: “okay, fair enough — now let’s calmly figure this out.” There’s always something hiding. Especially behind unpleasant characters and their stories.

By way of example (though this time the character’s a likeable one). We rewatched The Devil’s Advocate for the umpteenth time. Masha wasn’t keen — “I don’t like Satan,” she said, with her usual bluntness, and we had a laugh. But now that books and stories have become the job, looking at something familiar is twice as interesting. So: if you watched this film purely for the plot, you probably reacted to Charlize Theron losing her mind with something like “makes no sense, what more does she even want?” — that is, you might have hurled a full-throated tradwife take straight at the screen: “she should just sit tight in that huge apartment of hers and pick out furniture while the man does the work.”

But if that’s how you watched it, you most likely missed that Kevin’s wife is his soul — and the higher he climbs, the deeper she sinks. The church scene, right after Kevin defends the murderer, is the moment the devil takes his soul and defiles it — and that’s the state we see her in here. And later, in the hospital, when she looks in the mirror — she can’t bear what she sees. The soul has come face to face with what it’s turned into. Her suicide is the death of the soul.

Anyway — and it’s just fascinating, man — you could arrive at the conclusion that Mary Ann, in the literary sense, never existed at all. Just think about it: here’s a character whose actions and choices we react to the way we react — and yet the character isn’t there. She’s a metaphorical construct.

It doesn’t always work like this, and there are plenty of books with no second layer, books that simply inform you that “not sorting your trash is bad.” And they read perfectly well too. I just wanted to flag, one more time, that you shouldn’t rely on first reactions alone.