Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley

I stumbled on Christopher Morley's Parnassus on Wheels in a used bookshop (The Bookshop in Chico). I am a sucker for books about books -- I write them, as well as reading them, as do a great many authors. (There have been several others reviewed on this blog, like Fahrenheit 451 and Zafón's Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game.)

Parnassus, though, is something altogether different. Published in 1917, it is the tale of a man fired with the urge to sell books -- good books, real books -- to the ordinary people of the USA. Roger Mifflin is a small, pugnacious fellow, part traveling salesman, part preacher, part roadside carnival barker. His Traveling Parnassus* (named for the mountain in Greece where the Muses of the arts were believed to live) is a rickety old wagon, filled to the brim with books and drawn about by a gentle old horse named Peg (for Pegasus). Morley made an interesting choice of narrator, and this is what gives the book much of its interest. Rather than have it narrated by Mifflin, or by Andrew McGill -- rural writer of the beauty of rustic farm life -- it is narrated by Helen McGill, Andrew's sister and a plainspoken, non-nonsense, heavy spinster approaching middle age. Helen is what makes the book work because it surely would otherwise glow warmly with the treacle of nostalgia. Her dry wit and increasing enthusiasm drive the short novel as surely as she comes to drive the Traveling Parnassus, which she buys on an impulse, both to stop Andrew from buying it and to have an adventure -- her first! In this age of closing bookshops, when it seems that students are rarely asked to read real literature, full-length novels, a book like this should be mandatory. It just might be the spark to get a person reading!

[*There is now, by the way, a Parnassus Books, recently opened by novelist Ann Patchett in her hometown of Nashville.  For an interesting NYTimes article on this, see here.]