HOW TO READ NOW: Essays, by Elaine Castillo
“White supremacy makes for terrible readers,” writes Elaine Castillo in her collection of essays “How to Read Now.” The sentence, like the title of the book, is both a dig and a challenge, evolving into an urgent plea: “We need to change the way we read.” For Castillo, a California native of Filipino immigrants, this “we” is “generally American”; her book focuses on the marginalized communities that make up much of this country.
Castillo’s debut novel, “America Is Not the Heart,” outlined the daily lives of Filipino migrant workers (nurses, maids, sex workers) who are all too rarely at the forefront of American literature. The book acknowledged its literary debt—to Carlos Bulosan’s foundational 1943 novel “America Is in the Heart,” about Filipino farmers in California during the Depression era—while also expanding its relevance to contemporary readers.
“How to Read Now” is an even more explicit meditation on issues of heredity, fulfilling Castillo’s responsibilities not as a writer, but as a reader. The eight chapters engage the readers who have most informed her own practice, beginning with her father: an otherwise humble “old Pinoy security guard at a computer chip company” who “made me read Plato’s “Symposium” when I was in high school, a fact none of my white teachers believed.”
This is a readership book that is itself a series of lectures. Castillo leads by example, offering exegesis on texts from Henry James to Wong Kar-wai, Jane Austen to “X-Men.” Reading is hardly limited to books for Castillo and includes popular television, a colonial treaty and a statue.
Despite the search quality, “How to Read Now” approaches reading as a political act that involves everyone. Being a good reader, Castillo suggests, means being open to the different interpretations of other people, perhaps especially the ones you disagree with. “None of this work is meant to be done alone,” she writes. “Critical reading is not intended to be work performed only by readers and writers of color.” Here Castillo reminds us that her “we” contains multitudes – a Whitmanian collective that is necessarily porous and shifting.
Castillo’s non-fiction has the same animated verve as her novel. Sometimes the prose tends towards the polemical, but only to disturb our piety: that reading teaches us empathy, that white artists, unlike artists of color, can be separated from their art and from identity politics. Instead, Castillo writes for the author’s “unexpected reader”: “one who was not even remotely imagined—perhaps not even imaginable—by the creator of that work of art.”
In “Main Character Syndrome,” Castillo does a masterful removal of the cult of Joan Didion, who has “become shorthand for a certain kind of bourgeois intellectual white feminism so beloved by luxury capitalism for the veneer of authenticity and depth it offers.” In ‘Autobiography in Asian Film’ she explains why the discourse ‘representation matters’ around centering more Asian-American characters in mainstream media will always fail to take into account the true heterogeneity of the Asian-American experience.
Despite its declarative title, “How To Read Now” isn’t so much a manual as it is a serious invitation — “an open-ended question,” she writes. “I too now want to know how to read.” What ensues is a fascinating and provocative conversation with a playful interlocutor who wanted me, her reader, to talk back.
There’s a breathless seriousness to Castillo’s writing, which unfolds into long sentences laced with elaborate parentheses and subordinate clauses. Its chatty prose and rhetorical bloom are clearly millennial: “but go away”; “You okay boomer?”; “TLDR” When I started reading the book, I (another Asian American living in the Bay Area) often found myself in ambivalent or even direct disagreements with Castillo. Gradually it became clear that that was the intention: to become for me hair ‘unexpected reader’, thus feeling the full weight of her argument. “How to Read Now” is a book that doesn’t so much try to stop current literary discourse as shake it up. And on this I agree with Castillo: it has to change so fast.
Jane Hu is a critic whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Bookforum and elsewhere.
HOW TO READ NOW: Essays, by Elaine Castillo | 340 pages | Viking | $26