When you just can't stop reading

From the opening of Mark Richard's House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home:

 "SAY YOU HAVE A 'SPECIAL CHILD,' which in the South means one between Down’s and dyslexic. Birth him with his father away on Army maneuvers along East Texas bayous. Give him his only visitor in the military hospital his father’s father, a sometime railroad man, sometime hired gun for Huey Long with a Louisiana Special Police badge. Take the infant to Manhattan, Kansas, in winter, where the only visitor is a Chinese peeping tom, little yellow face in the windows during the cold nights. Further frighten the mother, age twenty, with the child’s convulsions. . . . Move the family to Kirbyville, Texas, where the father cruises timber in the big woods. Fill the back porch with things the father brings home: raccoons, lost bird dogs, stacks of saws, and machetes. Give the child a sandbox to play in, in which scorpions build nests. Let the mother cut the grass and run over rattlesnakes, shredding them all over the yard. Make the mother cry and miss her mother."

It had been a long time since I'd read a book in a single day, but Richard's (pronounced Ri-SHARD) memoir grabbed me and refused to let go. It's beautifully written in many ways, but what gives it its narrative power is the unusual use of second person. Instead of I, Richard uses you, a risky choice made famous by Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City. In the paragraph above, he turns the opening into a cadenced set of orders, almost military in tone. Though not literally directed at the readers, they nevertheless compel our attention.

Most of the narration isn't in the imperative mode, but the hypnotic effect of the repeated you is always present:

"You are lost at sea in New York City, headphones on, Bible tract in your back pocket, the seafaring novel roaring in your head, the heaving concrete, headlong black foaming ocean, a pitched deck where men hold on for life in the shadows, a Master somewhere on the upper deck, unseen but seeing, seeing you, no urgency, no destination, no end to the night, you sail under reefed sail, a stranger pulls you by your collar from stepping in front of an express bus on Fifty-seventh Street."

This sentence, with its piled-up, rhythmic phrases and its stream-of-conscious immediacy, doesn't need second person to be powerful. It would work well with the more conventional I or he. But all those you's reach out for us. We become the subject of the story. And when you're watching a life you never knew you had unfold on the pages you hold in your hands, you find it hard to walk away.