What makes a novelist?

I have wondered on this blog what makes some people who can write wonderful prose never bother trying to be writers. (I think of the school students I taught whom I naively thought were destined for literary greatness but who never wrote once they left school; I think of adults I've taught who were simply happy to write small pieces privately but had no interest in writing anything ambitious or in being published - I had a hard time believing them, really.)

It's a question that Guardian reviewer Lee Robson takes David Lodge to task for not asking in Lodge's newly published collection of essays Lives in Writing. Robson answers it himself with reference to the critic Frank Kermode's discussion (in his memoir) of 'what kind of person makes a good novelist'. Kermode himself, a 'champion defeatist', was discouraged from trying to be a novelist by the suggestion that he hadn't had enough real-life experience. He came to the conclusion that people who made good novelists, such as William Golding and Iris Murdoch, were 'people very unlike him'. They had a 'capacity' that he lacked, to write convincingly about things they hadn't actually experienced.

Robson however points out that both Golding and Murdoch, whose early novels were rejected, had to develop that ability (that they too at one point lacked it), and comes to the conclusion that the novelist is rather

'...not someone who can [just] mix autobiography and invention, as Lodge ... suggests, but someone whose sensibility contains a balance of the intuitive and the pragmatic, the introvert and the extrovert, the better to create fiction that is neither too personal nor too [mired in technical facts].'

Which seems about right, if you add in the need for determination and maybe obsession - and perhaps especially in the current commercial literary climate.

Lodge, it seems, is complaining about the kind of reductive biographical readings of fiction about which I've frequently complained here, those that reduce fiction to mere biography or indeed 'disregard' or devalue it if it doesn't fit known biographical facts about the author. However, Robson in turn complains that this 'blinds him to more desirable forms of biographical insight into the writing - and non-writing - of novels', and points to the life experiences that do indeed make people novelists or non-writers, such as Frank Kermode's unhappy childhood that left him with 'a lifelong sense of himself as a failure', the childhood nurturing that, conversely, gave Philip Roth his supreme literary confidence, and the family habits that fed Muriel Spark's subversive wit.

I haven't read Lodge's book, but it seems to me harsh to chastise him for not taking on a different project from the one in which he is engaged - Lodge is apparently concerned with our reading of texts, whereas Robson's interest here is essentially biographical and sociological - but I find Robson's point interesting and astute, nevertheless.

Hooked on Sensation

Recently I saw a wonderful film, Pablo Giorgelli's Las Acacias. What's wonderful about it? Well, nothing really happens - not in the sense we usually mean nowadays when we're taking about film. It opens with a long sequence in which we watch acacia timbers being felled, the sunlight falling through their swaying, tumbling branches. There's sound: the loud yet also distancing sound of the machines. And then we get a shot, a long and contemplative yet riveting shot, of a truck driver's arm  resting on the open window of the cab, cigarette (I think) in hand, as he waits for his load of logs. It's a beautiful arm: sinewy, sheeny in the light falling across it, and mysterious: signalling all of the contradictory possibilities of masculinity - its toughness and tenderness - and thus encapsulating the essence of the film. For this is Ruben, taciturn Ruben, who, we will discover, on this particular lumber-hauling trip from Paraguay to Beunos Aires has been charged by his boss to pick up Jacinta, the daughter of the boss's housekeeper, travelling to seek work and live with cousins. It's a long time before we know this: almost in real-time, we haul out of the timber forest with Ruben, sharing his view of the road ahead and through the wing mirror the road behind and the great sweep of the long log-laden wagon as it takes bends. There's no dialogue: it's a silent movie, almost - apart from the huge sound of the engine, in which, along with Ruben, we are drowned. At last he stops in a lorry park, and slowly we realise he is looking for someone. We see her the moment he does: a pale speck struggling in the distance across the dual carriageway and carrying several bundles, one of which, as she nears, is clearly a baby. Are you Ruben? she asks him, and he speaks his first words of the film: His boss said nothing about a baby. He is not pleased. This is the moment - a fair way in - that the real drama of the film begins. But by this time the film has taught us to watch and attend, which, to appreciate this drama, we need to do:  for the journey is long, and most of it is conducted in silence. We need to listen to those silences (filled with that throbbing engine sound), we need to watch the faces and see the thoughts flitting across them, and only then will we truly appreciate those crucial moments when the silence is broken. It is the five-month-old baby who first breaks through Ruben's displeasure, and a relationship begins to develop between the two lonely adults, but the development is gradual and subtle - and all the more moving for being so.

There is a moment, after Ruben has clearly become attached to Jacinta and her baby, when it looks as if he might lose her. They have stopped to eat at a roadside canteen and at the outdoor table which the drivers share, a young Paraguayan trucker strikes up a conversation with Jacinta in their own language. Ruben comes back from attending to his lorry to find both their places at the table vacated. Has she gone off with the other trucker? There she is: talking to him beside his lorry... Is she going to go off with him? No: in the next shot she and Ruben and the baby are back together on the road, behaving towards each other as before. We are glad, but I have to say I was also surprised. One gets so used to sensation in film, to plot twists geared for excitement, that I fully expected that she would go off with the other trucker, however disappointing that would be (and that possibly Ruben would get her back in the end). The fact that she didn't - that we simply shared Ruben's fear that she would, and the subsequent understanding that it was an irrational fear stemming from his growing emotional investment in her (ie, it was the clinching thing that showed to him he was falling in love with her; that was the point) - was infinitely more satisfying and true to human nature.

Watching this film made me realise that we are no longer used to paying the kind of attention it requires from us (some people walked out of the cinema well before the scene in which Jacinta appears) - an attention to mood and emotion and psychology and relationships rather than event - and the deep satisfactions it yields. We have been schooled for crass over-the-top drama, and I think our response to both films and literature is affected.

Not so long ago I was invited to spend a day in a secondary school since one of my stories, 'Compass and Torch', is included in the AQA GCSE exam syllabus. This is a psychological story about a relationship: it features a moment on a camping trip taken by a father and young son estranged by divorce, and deals with the emotional tensions between them, and at the end suggests a prognosis for their future relationship. It's chiefly a story of repressed emotion, symbolised by the watching wild ponies ignored by a father and son intent on the practicalities and the tensions between them. The story ends thus, as the father and son bed down for the night:

In the plummeting darkness, the man's own anxiety began to mount. He could feel it gathering in the blackening chill: the aching certainty that already, only one year on from the separation, he has lost his son, his child. And the thought grew so strong that he could only half-listen to the child's earnest desperate voice.

At last the child, tucked up in his sleeping-bag, chattered himself out.

The man gently takes away the torch.
 It isn't long before the man, already expert at blanking out pain, falls asleep too.
 
Neither hears the horses moving round the tent in the night.
For years to come, though, in his dreams the boy will see their wild fringed eyes and feel the deep thudding of their hooves. 

I guess very few children nowadays know the experience of feeling the ground thudding as a horse gallops by at a short distance, but I have to say I was taken aback when, in two of the classes I read this to, a boy put up his hand at the end and asked in a troubled voice if someone died. Yes, there is the concept of death in the ending, but it's an emotional death: because of the emotional repression, the relationship between the father and son is doomed and they'll never be close. But the boy, still longing for that closeness, will dream in the future of the ponies they ignored that day (and which moved around the tent in the night and then galloped off again), and which, with their wildness and softness and freedom, symbolised the unexpressed and unfulfilled emotions.

Those boys - though understandably puzzled - had interpreted the ending in a literal way that cuts right across the story's psychological approach and, for me, renders the symbolism illogical: they assumed the horses had trampled the tent. And it's not only school students, it seems: here's one of the teaching activities suggested on the AQA website for the story:

A speaking and listening role play activity in which students agree on a version of events to explain what might have happened during the night and create a report for the evening news.

Well, I have to accept that as an author you can sometimes imply things you never intended, but I do wonder if such readings are due to a growing cultural expectation of sensational event - one aspect of that bogey 'high concept' - in our literature.

It's how you read it.

An article in today's Guardian Review by Alex Clark sums up recent worries about the role of the editor and ponders the pressures that the books industry is putting on that role, including, interestingly, and I'd say ominously, the possibility of changes in the way we read. In literary criticism, he says:

...there has been a shift away from the painstaking analysis of words and sentences and towards straightforward plot recital and a speedy thumbs up or down

and, with reference to reading generally, concludes:

What we have to be aware of is that the creation of serious literature – whatever the degree of collaboration between author and editor – is the result of enormously concentrated mental and aesthetic effort. If it is reduced to a series of narrative effects slapped on to paper or screen, if it comes to be seen simply as one among many interchangeable ways to ingest a story, it will soon begin to look like a very poor slice of the leisure industry indeed.

Exactly. What's important about a novel is not the 'story' but the way it is told: novels aren't just stories, but constructs of language. 'Story' and mode are never separate entities: it is the mode of telling which creates the meaning and thus the story (which is why I'm not a great fan of drama adaptations of novels). A different word order here, a swapped line there, a cut here, and the whole meaning, and thus the story can change altogether. And this is the essential role of the editor: to help the author achieve the construct through which the intended meaning and story can be realized. (I've written about a significant editing experience of my own in an Author's Note on my current publisher's website here.)

As far as I'm concerned any story can be made interesting (and enlightening, and exciting) with the right way of telling (and of course insight) (and conversely any story, however outlandish and promising, can be made ploddingly dull). But an insistence on story for its own sake is probably, I would say, nurtured by the commercial nature of contemporary publishing: a good 'story' or idea can make a marketing pitch in the way claims about good writing simply can't. The idea becomes the be-and-end-all, and quite frankly I now see far too many ploddingly dull novels praised (on the net, especially) for the quirky 'story' or idea they have in actuality short-changed or even massacred, as if the reviewer were simply blind to the actual language of the novels - indeed, to put it at its most strongly, as if they didn't really, properly read them.

Loathe as I am to knock any return to much-missed coverage of books on TV, I'd say that Sebastian Faulks' BBC2 programme panders to this tendency in spades. In the trailer clip he says that he wants to rectify a recent concentration on the author rather than the book, a laudable enough aim, but his solution is to concentrate on characters, whom he says are 'all that matters', and to talk about them as if they are real rather than merely one element of an author's literary construct (and of course all of his examples are vividly illustrated by BBC dramatisations). Two BBC4 programmes on Monday however were to my mind excellent. The Beauty of Books, interestingly appearing just as we are assailed by predictions of the demise of the physical book, showed us in vivid detail and with brilliant photography the physicality of our earliest manuscripts and explained the sociological forces shaping their physical properties. In The Birth of the British Novel Henry Hitchings gave us an incisive and vivid yet truly literary-sociological account. Both programmes were a return to the mode of thoughtful commentary usefully illustrated, with none of that dramatised re-enactment stuff. The one way that the latter programme pandered to contemporary trends was in plonking in a few 'star' novelists for their comments. These moments were like holes in the middle of Henry Hitchings' beautiful logical account: one really had to laugh at Martis Amis and the usually concise Will Self sitting in the pub and telling the scholarly whizz lit critic how to suck literary eggs and losing the plot in waffle - probably because they were disconcerted by the look on his face...

(Only 2 more days I think to see those 2 programmes on iplayer - I'm a bit late with this.)

A Question of Attention

Apologies for my absence from this blog recently. I'm working on a substantial novel, and find that when I can give it the attention it needs it can take up my whole day, or at least my whole focus: I write in the mornings, in the afternoons I type up and edit what I've written in the morning, and the rest of the day is needed for digesting what I've done and thinking about the next day's writing, as well as necessary research. It's easier to write a quick blog post about my writing activities for my author blog than to start getting my head around more general publishing and fiction issues. In the last week I have had to interrupt my novel's rhythm to help publicise my publisher's Just One Book campaign, so the possibility of feeding this blog with useful content has slipped even further away.

There's one preoccupation, however, I do want to air. I think I have said here in the past that when I'm writing intently I find it difficult to read: the language and psyche of another novel is disruptive to my own. However, during the last fortnight, in spite of being so very immersed in my own work, I have had to tackle Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for my reading group, and I'm now halfway through. I don't read crime fiction as a rule, and neither do most people in the group, but we decided to read this book in order to try and understand its success as a cultural phenomenon. It took me a long while to get into it - I found the first 100 pages or so immensely boring - but as most people told me I would, I found that it finally took off and was 'readable'. But what do I mean, in this instance, by 'readable'? I mean that it's like eating ice-cream, it slips down nicely. I don't care a fig about the characters, and so nothing's really at stake for me, and it's not psychologically disruptive. I know the author knows the answer (so why doesn't he just tell me?), and the language is bald and often cliched and there are structurally-erroneous repetitions. But there's enough action and human interest now to compensate and enough of a political theme to make it respectable, and the whole thing, including those things which initially irritated me and made me contemptuous, has become something like a comfort blanket. The main thing about it is that it hasn't interrupted my novel psyche one little bit. The experience is familiar: it's like nothing so much as reading Enid Blyton when I was a child, and then going off and immediately writing my own stories.

It does precisely the opposite of what, as a writer, I have always felt literature should ideally do. And I don't mind such literature existing, clearly it has its uses, but what I do mind is a general cultural squeezing of the sort that provokes and challenges and disturbs.

Well, I don't know, maybe some people do find The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo provocative and challenging...

Anyway, I leave you with the thoughts of a couple of other literary bloggers. Adrian Slatcher has some interesting things to say about the Sunday Time's online paywall and the marketing implications for books, and Peter Finch comments on ponderous lead-in times for print publications in the age of instant online response.

History Matters

Good article by Hilary Mantel on recent comments about historical fiction.

Writers and Readers

Robert McCrum doesn't appear to agree with me: he says in today's Observer that novelists writing with a greater awareness of the market, as did their Victorian forbears, would only be a Good Thing. His argument seems unclear to me, however. Making a general accusation that contemporary literary novelists 'disdain readers', he names no one specifically, and refers only to a 'literary elite'. One might assume from his reference to a time 'when "story" was not a dirty word' that he has in mind here innovative writing or complex texts. In point of fact I can't disagree with his statement that a writer-reader relationship is essential, and I think it's the challenge, and indeed the duty of the innovative writer to find ways of preserving it. But McCrum seems to be implying that all such contemporary writing, and indeed all contemporary 'literary' or 'non-genre' writing generally fails to keep this contract, with his statement that 'if there is a genre where the old contract between writer and reader is still going strong it must be thrillers.' Inadvertent or not, there seems a real anti-literary sentiment here. And then again, he asks in evidence: 'How often have you come away from a literary festival with a sense of regret at the failure of the big name in the marquee to live up to your expectations?', a question which seems like a non sequiteur, revolving as it surely does around the issue of personality and performance and having little to do with the needs of the reading experience.

In a smaller column on the same page in the printed version of the paper, McCrum develops his theme of reader satisfaction by praising the Orange prize for invariably selecting winners that 'your average reader may actually want to read.' And says that this year the prize 'surpassed itself', and goes on to applaud this year's 'worthy winner', the surely highly literary Home by Marilynne Robinson, whose linked earlier novel Gilead was too literary, highbrow and arcane in its religious reference for many of my very literary friends.

But then one suspects that McCrum's twisted knickers are the result of a journalistic need to drum up controversy as our Sunday broadsheets abandon their serious literary agenda.

The Curse of Lists

God, how I hate lists - and have you noticed how linked to film adaptations that Guardian list is?

Even If It's Not True...

Interesting that an author (Milan Kundera) who has worked so hard to keep his life separate from his work should now have his activities publicly investigated, and depressing to think that his work may now be viewed through this prism.

A Bit Hard

Yesterday the Sunday Times review was devoted to The Future of the Book, yet I can't find a link on the website - which may seem confirmation of the view expressed by some contributors that print media is getting left behind by the web. But maybe it's me...*

[*Yes it was me: it was The Independent, as Adele Geras points out. No wonder I couldn't find it: silly me!]

Pretty depressing article by John Walsh who believes like Sven Birkets (who in 1994 examined how students now respond to Henry James) that the way in which the internet has taught us to read is resulting in a loss of the ability to engage with serious fiction:

It seems that we may be losing the capacity of "settling into" a book or - more importantly - in the stream of somebody else's thoughts in a way that readers (and writers) once took for granted ... Now, many serious writers complain, challenging fiction doesn't appeal; "difficult" novels don't sell. Adam Mars-Jones's massive and beautifully written novel Pilcrow, published earlier this year, sold only a few hundred copies, and there have been several similar casualities. Although, traditionally, every Booker winner invariably becomes a world bestseller, the 2008 winner, Anne Enright's The Gathering, made the briefest appearance in the top 10 before disappearing. It had a narrative of sorts, but was broken-backed in structure and its strength was the narrator's wry, funny, piss-taking tone - exactly the kind of thing that Prof Birkets' students hated in Henry James.

To sell now, books evidently need to be big on plot and incident, short on interior monologue - the sort of titles the Richard and Judy Club strenuously promotes.

Just L'il Ole Me with the Power to Ban Books

I'm a bit late with this one, what with being stuck in the hills and that, but I can't resist it:

So on being presented by The Guardian with Carol Ann Duffy's poetic response to the banning of her poem Education for Leisure, Pat Schofield, the external examiner whose complaint led to the banning, had this to say:

"...a bit weird. But having read her other poems I found they were all a little bit weird. But that's me".

Correction: that's an external examiner whom we'd expect to be able to understand poems.

But then that's our education system, it seems.

Fiction as Thesis

I like the way The Guardian gives the right of reply to (admittedly selected) artists criticized in its pages, and today I'm particularly taken by Anthony Neilson's reply to Michael Billington's critique of his new play Relocated (Jerwood Theatre Upstairs). I don't know the play, and I tend to admire the thoughtfulness of Billington's writing and his commitment to championing political writing, but Neilson says something which strikes a deep chord with me, and which I believe also has implications for the ways in which we read prose fiction.

Billington complains about the 'general thesis' of the play, thus, says Neilson, not only misunderstanding the nature of his play but revealing an acceptance of the kind of play - the 'play-as-thesis' - which Neilson goes on to condemn:

This is the great danger of the play-as-thesis. It assumes that the play is an expression of the playwright's character. And, since playwrights desire approval as much as the next person, it leads to dishonest and complacent work. A play should reflect life as the playwright sees it - not as they, or anyone else, wishes it to be. If one sees a world in which there are no permanent truths, it is dishonest to fabricate them for the sake of approbation. Worse, it is a dereliction of duty. A play-as-thesis is by nature reductive, an attempt to bring order to the unruliness of existence. But bringing order is the business of the state, not the artist.

Interestingly, a Guardian book blog yesterday by Sam Jordison echoes something of these sentiments in relation to JM Coetzee's Disgrace in particular (which he finds too much a novel-as-thesis) and Booker winners in general.

How We Read

An article on Alan Sillitoe by DJ Taylor in The Guardian Review has set me thinking about the ways we read and about how far a consciousness of this affects the way we write. The comment of Taylor's which interests me was that Sillitoe's early depictions of working-class life were originally received by critics as anthropological insights, and as a result their artistry was overlooked or ignored.

My first reaction was surprise since it was Sillitoe's artistry which so forcibly struck me as a working-class but educated teenager (and which now, as Taylor says, strikes the critics) - and which indeed fuelled my desire to write. A moment's reflection, though, and it's not surprising at all, given that the literary establishment of the time was middle to upper class and if we accept that one of the main things that people want from books, rightly or wrongly and whether or not they are aware of it, is a sense of identification or inclusion.

Regular readers of this blog will know very well that I frequently rail against the lowest-common-denominator effects of a literary culture which panders too much to this impulse in readers, and argue with James Wood for the encouragement of a more mature reading of fiction, but I have to say that as a writer I take a different tack: I want to lure readers, and I can't assume they are my Ideal Readers, they're only human after all, and it's only human to want to identify with the characters and situations in books.

As a writer you simply can't afford to sneer as James Wood does at the 'book clubs up and down the country' where 'novels are denounced because some feeble reader "couldn't find any characters to identify with", or "didn't think that any of the characters 'grow" ' (my italics). It is as if for Wood these readers are not the real readers, but every writer knows that they are, and as for the literati and the critics, well those fifties critics of Sillitoe were hardly exempt from the 'sin'. For me evidence of the need to identify is everywhere, from my own feelings of exclusion as a teenager from the ethos and mentality of some middle-class novels to Sarfraz Manzoor's recent statement at a reading that he felt excluded from the biographies about 'non-ordinary' lives which he read as a teenager (an exclusion which indeed propelled him write his own memoir as redress). And the trouble is, as Taylor indicates, if you're stuck on that, on non-identification, as indeed were those fifties critics of Sillitoe, you can't easily get past to appreciate or enjoy the other elements of a novel, the artistry, the writing.

The prior experience of the reader ultimately determines - or at least inevitably affects - the reading. At present I'm reading Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky for my reading group and it struck me to wonder how much less vivid the descriptions of the North African landscape and villages (vivid as they are) would have been for me before I had travelled myself. There's another thing we read for besides identification (I'm sure Pierre Bayard must say it in his book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read but I haven't read it - hah!). This is for an extension of our experience - it's what I think most children read for, and why as an aspirational teenager I did gobble up other middle-class books. But when as a nineteen-year-old steeped in images from The Odyssey and Euripedes I made my first trip to Greece, I was still shocked by the reality: so that's what the smell of eucalyptus trees is like! So that's what it's like to be buffeted in the face by a hot wind! So that's why it's called the wine-dark sea! And my re-readings afterwards were incomparably richer.

Which is why I have been known to state that ultimately any piece of fiction is necessarily what a reader makes of it. But that shouldn't stop us as writers trying to draw in as many readers as possible. The most obvious way to do this is to make readers 'like' characters, although this isn't always possible or desirable (and I suppose it's the insistence on this emotionally easy formula which Wood is attacking) but some means must be found to cause the reader to make an emotional investment in at least some of the apparatus of a story or novel - an investment which goes beyond mere anthropological interest if that is not yours as the writer. The point is to get the reader to share with you the emotional heart of the novel, wherever it lies for you as the author, and to do this you must create a spell.

One of the ways I try to do this - probably a result of my background as a teacher - is to follow Orwell's advice and 'never use a long word when a short one will do.' This is not to patronize readers but to strive to make every word immediately lucid in order not to spoil the flow for any reader and break the fictive spell. But then another thing I know is that some people like books with long, abstract or foreign words precisely because they read to have their egos flattered and feel clever...

Is Fiction Enough?

Fay Weldon thinks fiction is not enough. Her book Mantrapped is part fiction, part memoir, and she thinks that this is the 'way things are going to go.' She began it fully intending to write a work of pure fiction, but it started to feel invidious, dishonest to leave herself out of the book.

Interesting. That was always a big concern of feminist writers, of course: the ultimate fakery of the omniscient authorial viewpoint and the colonization involved in adopting a fictional narrative voice. And of course she's not the only one to play games with autobiography in fiction - look at Philip Roth, look at the serious mixings of Sebald in Austerlitz.

But I think these mixings make for a meta-reality - an exciting one - in which the whole concept of autobiography is brought into question, indeed at times consciously mocked, for essentially we read fiction differently from the way we read memoir. It's rather different, I think, when you start claiming bits of your book to be autobiography.

The Cheering Nature of Tragedy

An important article, in my view, by Blake Morrison in Saturday's Guardian Review. He reports on a Merseyside scheme being run by Jean Davis of the Reader Centre at the University of Liverpool in which around fifty reading groups of ten or so have been created for people with physical or emotional health problems, learning disabilities and other problems, and in which the act of reading and discussing books or poetry is proving to be strikingly therapeutic.

The most interesting thing to me is a main point which emerges for Morrison: that it is those books dealing with tragic and serious human issues, and the 'difficult' classics, which are the most therapeutic, operating via catharsis:

As Thomas Hardy recognised, "If a way to the better there be it exacts a full look at the worst." Hence Davis's preference for classic texts which address existential concerns, not anodyne pep-ups.

(and he wryly notes that Hardy could be 'brought low by the excessive optimism of his peers').

Morrison goes on to point out that the therapy can extend beyond those suffering, and makes some points which have been expressed previously on this blog:

This is surely the other great therapeutic power of literature - it doesn't just echo our own experience, recognise, vindicate and validate it - it takes us places we hadn't imagined but which, once seen, we never forget. When literature is working - the right words in the right place - it offers an orderliness which can shore up readers against the disorder, or lack of control, that afflicts them. Most misery memoirs fail in this respect - they invite readers to be prurient rather than to identify, exaggerate where no exaggeration is necessary, and are too clamorous to grant the space to contemplate and withdraw.

Maybe someone should tell the publishers who find the 'dark' and 'difficult' stuff 'too uncommercial' that there's a whole market out there after all.

Not that I've Read His Book

We can only suppose and hope that Pierre Bayard, author of How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is having a laugh in Saturday Guardian Review commentary:

I have often found myself in the delicate situation of having to express my thoughts on books I haven't read. Because I teach literature at university level, there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that I haven't even opened. It's true that this is also the case for the majority of my students, but if even one of them has read the text I'm discussing, there is a risk that at any moment my class will be disrupted and I will find myself humiliated

implying as he does with those words 'a delicate situation' and 'humiliation' that it's all a matter of personal status and dignity rather intellectual honesty and inquiry, and who cares if in the process none of us really knows what we're discussing?

We really shouldn't let the three 'repressive' 'internalized constraints' he lists stop us in our 'non-reading': firstly, 'the [social] obligation to read', which he says (god forbid) 'remains [like all unthinking practices] the object of a kind of worship', secondly, 'the obligation to read thoroughly', and thirdly the 'understanding that one must read a book in order to talk about it with any precision'.

After all, as he says, 'it is sometimes easier to do justice to a book if you haven't read it in its entirety - or even opened it.'

Pity then that his later, more coherent argument for a wider understanding of the different ways we read gets submerged in such a spoof...

The Long and the Short of It

Mark Ravenhill writes about the ‘hunger for the epic’, the apparent need in a world devoted to the soundbite and fleeting images, a world where ‘brevity is everything’, for something meatier: the doorstop novel (he cites Harry Potter), the epic movie (Pirates of the Caribbean) and the hours-long stage play (David Edgar’s popular adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby for the RSC).

Ravenhill has been presenting a series of breakfast-time plays at the Edinburgh festival. The fact that people have got up early (after late festival nights) to pack out his houses he sees as another example of this hunger, because the plays are interconnected and thus episodes in what he views as an epic project.

I think he’s looking at this the wrong way round. As Ravenhill himself comments, ‘Many critics pointed out how much the Harry Potter books would benefit from an editor’s pencil’. What does this mean? It means that those who read Harry Potter don’t mind this, probably don’t notice it, they read it passively, even unthinkingly, rushing on through the narrative in a way which is not at odds, as Ravenhill would have it, with an accelerated world and an impatient culture. It’s the short thing, the tightly-packed thing, the short story or the short play, which requires the leisured and thoughtful response and close attention to language, not the longer work, as Ravenhill claims.

Maybe Ravenhill is right that people are now hungering after more intellectually-challenging literary or theatrical experiences. But could it not be that the popularity of his festival plays is down to their shortness and the linguistic compactness which this allows, the piecemeal presentation which gives the audience the chance to breathe and think and ‘gradually see the rules and patterns’ of the larger project? And could this be why short stories now seem to be on the up?

The Reading Endeavour

I have argued before in this blog for a greater role for writers in the debate about how we should read fiction, and here is Zadie Smith taking that role in yesterday's Guardian, and quoting as her mentors those other great writer-critics, Nabokov, Iris Murdoch and Virginia Woolf.

This second half of Zadie's fiction 'tips' takes a little more work from the reader than last week's offering, though that's perhaps fitting in view of what she has to say about the role of the reader, and she is wrestling - with the writerly honesty which last week she advocated - with concepts which are subtle and nowadays unfamiliar.

Readers, she says, have a duty as great as that which she has outlined for writers, and of a similar nature, a duty which she feels they have generally abdicated. She identifies two kinds of contemporary 'failing' reader or critic: firstly the 'system' reader/critic:

In writing schools, in reading groups, in universities, various general reading systems are offered - the post-colonial, the gendered, the postmodern, the state-of-the-nation and so on. They are like the instructions that come with furniture at IKEA. All one need do is seek out the flatpack novels that most closely resemble the blueprints already to hand ... We want [novels] to be wholly sufficient systems of ideas ... to speak for a community or answer some vital question of the day

and secondly, the 'corrective' reader/critic, who more properly relates to a novel on an individual, personal level, bringing to it his own tastes and prejudices, but less properly fails to admit to himself that this is what he is doing and imagines that he is applying universal aesthetic criteria.

Both types of reader are in consequence closed to novels which fail to fulfil their respective preconditions. Ideally, she says,

Both the writer and the reader must undergo an ethical expansion - allow me to call it an expansion of the heart - in order to comprehend the human otherness that fiction confronts them with.

Like Woolf, she concedes that a perfect meeting of minds between writer and readers is of course never possible; we must always fail in the endeavour, and indeed it is this failure which makes each novel, and each reading, individual and fascinating. But it is the willingness to make the endeavour which allows us to 'fail better.'

How to Sell a How-To Book

I posted below on the tendency in British culture to exclude writers, unlike artists, from debate about the meanings of their work and the ways in which it should be read. Today DJ Taylor writes in the The Guardian about the proliferation of books by experts - most notably John Mullan and John Sutherland - instructing us how to read novels.

Taylor's main point is that these books, aimed in the main at reading groups, reinforce, through their choice of novels for discussion, 'the stranglehold exerted on literature by the three-for-two promotion and the high-street discount'. Thus, he says, they contribute, in a way which would probably horrify their authors, to the 'homogenisation of our literary culture.'

He has a point, I think. The Bitch is in a reading group whose members pride themselves on being immune to hype, and on forming their own opinions without recourse to others - black looks for any fool who brings to a meeting reviews downloaded from the internet. But if these How-To books would never sell to my lot, they are clearly selling to someone. And anyway: which books come to mind when my independent, stroppy lot are thinking of books for discussion: why, the Booker shortlists, of course, the books they've seen in three-for-two promotions - they're the only ones they can be expected to have heard of, after all.

And if these How-To books didn't feed into the expectations of reading groups, how would they sell?