A feature by Greg Gerke

I don’t know when I developed the habit of veering in and out of multiple books at the same time, but for at least as long, I’ve been inclined to deride the practice. I’d just come down from Swann’s Way and a long season given over mostly to poetry and essays when I slapped down an injunction—I should really get back to Patrick White, maybe the most under-read and underrated English-language novelist of our time. So I began his 1973 novel, The Eye of the Storm. Yet, I read slowly—more than just a “page-hugger,” as Gary Lutz would say, I grasp the page for an uncomfortably long time, checking the texture of the paper and the number of sailboaty y’s per line, hovering over the author’s punctuation and other foibles before proceeding. . .