American Book Review // "On Putting First Things First"

The Jan/Feb issue of American Book Review features a long section on the "100 Best First Lines from Novels," to which I contributed a small piece titled "Andrew Ervin on Putting First Things First."

First off, a confession. I don’t know what constitutes the first line of a novel. In compiling the section now spread out before you a number of scholars and critics far brighter than me contended, in a behind-the-scenes email flurry, that we should think of “Call me Ishmael” as the beginning of Moby-Dick, but by my reading “Etymology” appears first. Melville knew what he was doing. Similarly, before “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane” we get the sentence, perfect in its ungainliness, “Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A.”

But, then again, “To Véra” appears even before that. What to do?

Personally, I’m forced to obey the instinct in me that says to disregard the Kinbote’s—or is that Nabokov’s?—Forward to Pale Fire would be like putting down Nineteen Eighty-Four before getting to that Appendix on the “principles of newspeak”—a text that causes us to completely rethink everything we have just read. It’s a purposeful and essential element of the novel. So I’m willing to be the voice of dissent here, the problem child, and I certainly mean no disrespect whatsoever to those who will tell you otherwise, but when it comes to reading a book please do consider putting first things first.