A Scrappy Defense of the Novel

I wish I could remember what book was the very first novel I read. Alas, I can’t. I do know that among the first novels I read were Gulliver’s Travels, Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson), and a very early entry in the Hardy Boys series. (In my mind’s eye, I can see those books, even the look of the pages.) That Hardy Boys volume, soon to be followed by others, was the first book I bought with “my own money;” I purchased it—I was then nine years old—at Fraser’s Bookstore in Pomona, California (where my mom had worked for a short time some years earlier), the first of many bookshops to leave a lasting memory. Fairly early on, I plunged into paperback “mysteries,” and when I was about ten, I became entranced by science fiction, a phase that lasted roughly five years, then shut off suddenly, like a faucet, only to be resumed when I was thirty years old. (It was then, by the way, that I discovered Philip K. Dick, who became one of my personal favorites and has remained so to this day.) By age 15, thanks to the blessed Pomona Public Library, I was reading Notes from Underground, The Trial, Camus (at the peak of his influence then), and much more in that vein.