Great Expectations
And how they can undermine your reading
Every time we open a book, we expect something.
The cover and the title give us clues about what we’ll find inside. Other people have told us what they think of the novel, or we’ve read reviews. Expectations are probably strongest around classics that have a reputation in our culture—think Dracula or Moby Dick or War and Peace—because we may feel we “know” them even if we’ve never read them.
Sometimes our expectations are met. We expect a rom-com, and we get one. We expect a dense and intellectual text, and that’s what we get. But sometimes, they’re not. Over two decades of teaching high school and college students, I’ve learned that unmet expectations cause more difficulty than perhaps any other stumbling block readers confront.
When I was teaching college writing, we did a lot of difficult readings, mostly non-fiction essays that were really more appropriate to a graduate level. Reading something that’s “too” difficult disrupts all your fallback habits, and you really have to think about how to read again and come up with some specific strategies. This was a powerful experience for many students, and one of the most helpful pieces of guidance I could give them was to check their expectations on page one. If you can identify what you thought the book was going to be about, you can determine whether what you’re really struggling with is trying to fit the round peg of your expectations into the square hole of the actual book before you.
I’ll give you an example. I struggled at first with Hernan Diaz’s Trust because I had expected a traditional novel. The first section moved along too fast, almost like a dump of backstory. It didn’t seem very skilled. But the section was short, so I kept going. The same was true of the second section, and then the third, and I began to lose my confidence in the writer. But the novel had won a Pulitzer, which gave me an expectation—in this case, one that kept me going. If it had won that prize, something extraordinary must be happening.
This struggle between my expectation that the storytelling should be more fully fleshed out, more evenly paced, went on for quite some time—124 pages, to be exact, even though Diaz had essentially told me on page 3 that someone else, a character named Harold Vanner, was the author of this first quarter of the novel. Then something weird happened. The novel behaved as if it were beginning again—or, a new novel was beginning. What was going on? Whatever it was, it was totally unexpected, and not (yet) in a good way because I didn’t know what to do with it. All I knew was that I had to start paying more attention. This book was going to undermine my conventional expectations much farther than it already had, and I was going to have to figure out how to read it.
At that point, I might have given up if I hadn’t been able to mentally articulate what was happening: my expectations were being challenged. And I knew that, ultimately, when that happens, the reading almost always turns out to be better than what you thought you were getting. That was true of Trust.
Sometimes, unfortunately, expectations prevent you from even opening a book. I put off reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for a long time. I expected it to be dull and impenetrable, but when I finally read it with some friends a few years ago, I found it was actually clever and funny and very, very quirky—and, yes, at times impenetrable, but not in the way I’d expected. (If you’re interested in Infinite Jest, check out the series of videos we made as we were reading it.)
Unmet expectations can even turn out to be the best part of a story because they can morph into surprise and delight. I’m thinking of “Viola in Midwinter,” which I wrote about earlier this week. I began my post, “This story was not what I expected it to be.” I meant it as a compliment.
The next time you’re struggling with something you’re reading, try stepping back for a moment and asking yourself what you expected the piece to be. If it’s not doing what it’s “supposed” to, try taking the stance of an impartial observer rather than a micromanager. Just watch the book for awhile as you read. Try to listen to it, allow it to take the lead. More often than not, this strategy will help you find your way and lead you to a satisfying read—partly because of the unexpected.