Over at the Guardian, Nicholas Lezard has been entertaining and informing us about things in soft covers we might otherwise miss for almost as long as I can remember. Usually, he’s as compelling a read as the books he champions. However, on Friday he was dropped into the bear pit of opinion at Guardian Unlimited, and the first casualty appears to have been his coherence.
He launched an, at first, rousing defence of Dedalus Books, which has lost its Arts Council funding. Clearly, this is a BAD thing and a sorry time for Dedalus. But after lamenting their possible demise, Lezard then hoisted the wearingly familiar ‘The End of the World is Nigh’ placard by quoting this bizarre exchange that seems to come right out of some fin-de-siecle novel he’s been reviewing:
We were talking about the slow and painful death of literary fiction, one of whose symptoms is the rise of the reading group where people denigrate books because they do not contain characters they "like" or "can identify with". There was a pause, while we both sighed. "It's over, isn't it?" I said. The novelist, and I was hoping he wasn't going to do this, agreed.
Lezard is too busy doom-mongering to explain himself properly. For starters, what is literary fiction? Last time I checked no one could agree on a definition other than it was whatever whoever happened to be talking at the time considered to be good. (Let’s not get into that debate here, suffice to say it is frequently little more than a means to look down on everything that is considered not to be literary.) Next, the only example Lezard offers of this ‘slow and painful death’ is the rise of the reading group.*
He accuses reading groups of denigrating ‘books because they do not contain characters’ readers ‘ "like" or "can identify with" ’. I would argue that Lezard is guilty of exactly the same crime. We all are. Few of us persist with a book we find a bore. The few of us that do are either studying it or being paid to read it. So in the same way that a reading group of new mums in Surbiton might not find much of interest in a mannered story of a middle-aged melancholic widower lost in his ‘grief, loneliness and isolation’ so a melancholic, middle-aged Lezard might not be devouring Possession.
One hopes Lezard’s point is that homogenization isn’t good for us. If so, he’s not wrong. Diversity provides fertile ground for reading and writing to flourish and there is a tendency towards monoculture in reading groups (in publishing, a ‘reading-group book’ is much sought after). But insisting that reading groups’ success – encouraging people to try books they might not otherwise have picked up, as well as participate in literary discussion over tea and biscuits – is in some sense a pejorative symptom of how Lezard's preferred literary garden goes uncultivated is nothing but brazen snobbery with a dash of elitism. Fashions change. Some books are remembered and others forgotten. We’ve all seen old titles we love fall out of print or squeezed out of bookshops by a rash of new titles.
I’m sorry for Lezard if he feels his tastes are not sufficiently represented in print. But that is all they are. Tastes – not the beginning or end of literature. It is arrogant to think otherwise. And fiction – even the literary kind – in the twenty-first century is thankfully no longer the preserve of white, middle-aged and melancholy European males.
A good few years ago now, when I was not long in college, I went back home to discover that there was a production of Hamlet on at the local arts centre. It was directed by a retired English teacher, and the local paper had interviewed him. I still remember the first line of the interview. ‘Of course,’ said the retired teacher, ‘Hamlet isn’t Shakespeare’s best play. That honour belongs to King Lear.’ What rubbish, I thought at the time. Yet, as I’ve grown older and come to appreciate King Lear a little more and find in Hamlet a little less than I used to, I continue to think that he was wrong. Hamlet, a play about a young man, is no better or worse than Lear, which is a play about an old man. Better and worse in this instance are to entirely miss the point. They are merely different.
Lezard needs to realize that reading serves a variety of functions for a variety of people. Some are no doubt better, and some worse, than others. Most, however, are probably just different. Perhaps then he might learn to enjoy the differences and cheer up a little.
Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter
* Let us forget for a moment that he’s ignoring inconvenient facts like the range and number of popular prizes annually awarded to literary fiction (and even to those in receipt of Arts Council funding, such as Tindal Street Press, though not apparently Dedalus) or the impressive way authors who are accused of being literary such as Updike, Eggers, Smith (both A and Z), Litt and Barker – to name just a few Penguin authors new and old whose sales figures have refused to flat line – keep themselves in print year in and out.
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