Joseph Epstein has a book coming out about charm this fall—Charm: The Elusive Enchantment— and this is what he has to say about his subject: “Charm is magic of a kind; it casts a spell. In the presence of charm the world seems lighter and lovelier. A charming person can cause you to forget your problems, at least temporarily, to hold the world’s dreariness at bay. Charm is a reminder that the world is filled with jolly prospects and delightful possibilities. Watching Fred Astaire dance, or listening to Blossom Dearie sing, or reading the poems of C.P. Cavafy, or merely looking at Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner, one recalls that the world can be a pretty damn fine place.”

I’ve been dipping into the work of the Indian writer R.K. Narayan again and believe charm—casting a spell—to be one of his chief virtues. It isn’t an unearthly charm, like the dancing of a Fred Astaire or the beauty of a Rita Hayworth, but of a  more mundane variety. It consists in the humor and gentleness with which he treats his characters. The book I’m reading is The Bachelor of Arts, the second short novel in a quartet bound together by the Modern Library. The central character, Chandran, is at first a ruthlessly overachieving student, who after graduation discovers the only reading plan worth putting into action:

“He became a member of the Town Public Library and read an enormous amount of fiction and general literature. He discovered Carlyle. He found that after all Shakespeare had written some stirring dramas, and several poets were not as dull as they were made out to be. There was no scheme or order to his study. He read books just as they came. He read a light humorist and switched on to Carlyle, and from there pounced on Shakespeare, and then wandered to Shaw and Wells. The thing that mattered most to him was that the book should be enjoyable, and he ruthlessly shut books that threated to bore him.”