Where I'm Reading From

DO WE NEED STORIES

LET’S TACKLE ONE of the literary set’s favorite orthodoxies head on: that the world “needs” stories. “There is an enormous need,” Jonathan Franzen declares in an interview with Corriere della Sera (there’s no escape these days), “for long, elaborate, complex stories, such as can only be written by an author concentrating alone, free from the deafening chatter of Twitter.”

Of course as a novelist it is convenient to think that by the nature of the job one is on the side of the good, supplying an urgent and general need. I can also imagine readers drawing comfort from the idea that their fiction habit is essential sustenance and not a luxury. But what is the nature of this need? What would happen if it wasn’t met? We might also ask: Why does Franzen refer to complex stories? And why is it important not to be interrupted by Twitter and Facebook? Are such interruptions any worse than an old landline phone call, or simply friends and family buzzing around your writing table? Jane Austen, we recall, loved to write in domestic spaces where she was open to constant interruption.

Proponents of the-world-needs-stories thesis are legion, but one of the more elaborate statements comes in Salman Rushdie’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). Here, in a text that falls between fable and magical realism, the telling of many stories is aligned with the idea of a natural ecology; in the normal and healthy way of things, we’re told, all the different stories of the world flow together in a great ocean of narrative. But now this harmony is threatened by an evil “cultmaster” who seeks to poison and eventually shut off the flow of stories, imposing universal silence and sterility as part of a bid for omnipotence.

Given Rushdie’s personal plight at the time of writing, it’s hard not to think of the “cultmaster” as a metamorphosis of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Stories are presented as a manifestation of the natural pluralism of the imagination, engaged in a mortal battle against any fundamentalism that would impose its own, univocal version: fiction is on the side of freedom. Of course.

Rushdie’s idea is charming, but his ocean-of-stories argument never, to risk a pun, holds water. Far from flowing together in a harmonious ecology, stories tend to be in constant competition with each other. Far from imposing silence, cults, religions, and ideologies all have their own noisy stories to tell. Christian fundamentalism with its virgin birth, miracles, exorcisms, and angels boasts a rich narrative flora; if we toss into the mix the Catholic saints and their colorful martyrdoms, we can hardly complain that the censorship and repression of the Inquisition resulted in storyless silence.

Rather the problem is that preacher and polemicist want us to accept just one, exclusive set of stories, one vision, which we must believe is true. And many people are happy to do this. Once they’ve signed up to a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or even liberal pluralist narrative, it’s unlikely they’ll go out of their way to research competing accounts of the world. People tend to use stories of whatever kind to bolster their beliefs, not to question them.

But I doubt if this politicized version of the we-need-stories thesis was what a writer like Franzen had in mind. “This is an excellent novel,” I remember a fellow judge for a literary prize repeatedly telling the rest of the jury every time he encouraged us to vote for a book, “because it offers complex moral situations that help us get a sense of how to live and behave.” The argument here is that the world has become immensely complicated and the complex stories of novels help us to see our way through it, to shape a trajectory for ourselves in the increasingly fragmented and ill-defined social environment we move in.

There’s something to be said for this idea, though of course stories are by no means the exclusive territory of novels; the political, sports, and crime pages of the newspapers are full of fascinating stories, many of them extremely challenging and complex. What the novel offers, however, is a tale mediated by the individual writer, who (alone, away from Facebook and Twitter) works hard to shape it and deliver it in a way that he or she feels is especially attractive, compelling, and right.

Here again, though, even if we are not immediately aware of it, and even when the author is celebrated for his or her elusive ambiguity (another lit-crit commonplace), such stories compete for our assent and seek to seduce us toward the author’s point of view. D.H. Lawrence attacked Tolstoy’s novels as evil, immoral, and deeply corrupting. Writing about Thomas Hardy, he rather brilliantly questions the motives behind Hardy’s habit of having his more talented and spiritually adventurous characters destroyed by society; Hardy goes “against himself,” Lawrence tells us (meaning, against his own specially gifted nature), to “stand with the average against the exception,” and all this “in order to explain his own sense of failure.” To Lawrence’s mind, a tremendously complex story like Jude the Obscure becomes an invitation not to try to realize your full potential but to settle instead for self-preservation. Hardy reinforces the mental habits of the frightened reader. It is pernicious. In this view of things, rather than needing stories, we need to learn how to smell out their drift and resist them.

But there’s something deeper going on. Even before we actually tell any stories, the language we use teems with them in embryo form. There are words that simply denote things in nature: a pebble, a tree. There are words that describe objects we make: to know the word chair is to understand about moving from standing to sitting and appreciate the match of the human body with certain shapes and materials. But there are also words that come complete with entire narratives, or rather that can’t come without them. The only way we can understand words like God, angel, devil, ghost is through stories, since these entities do not allow themselves to be known in other ways, or not to the likes of me. Here not only is the word invented—all words are—but the referent is invented too, and a story to suit. God is a one-word creation story.

Arguably the most important word in the invented-referents category is self. We would like the self to exist perhaps, but does it really? What is it? The need to surround it with a lexical cluster of reinforcing terms—identity, character, personality, soul—all with equally dubious referents suggests our anxiety. The more words we invent, the more we feel reassured that there really is something there to refer to.

Like God, the self requires a story; it is the account of how each of us accrues and sheds attributes over seventy or eighty years—youth, vigor, job, spouse, success, failure—while remaining, at some deep level, myself, my soul. One of the accomplishments of the novel, which as we know blossomed with the consolidation of Western individualism, has been to reinforce this ingenious invention, to have us believe more and more strongly in this sovereign self whose essential identity remains unchanged by all vicissitudes. Telling the stories of various characters in relation to each other, how something started, how it developed, how it ended, novels are intimately involved with the way we make up ourselves. They reinforce a process we are engaged in every moment of the day, self creation. They sustain the idea of a self projected through time, a self eager to be a real something (even at the cost of great suffering) and not an illusion.

The more complex and historically dense the stories are, the stronger the impression they give of unique and protracted individual identity beneath surface transformations, conversions, dilemmas, aberrations. In this sense, even pessimistic novels—say, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace—can be encouraging: however hard circumstances may be, you do have a self, a personal story to shape and live. You are a unique something that can fight back against all the confusion around. You have pathos.

This is all perfectly respectable. But do we actually need this intensification of self that novels provide? Do we need it more than ever before?

I suspect not. If we asked the question of, for example, a Buddhist priest, he or she would probably tell us that it is precisely this illusion of selfhood that makes so many in the West unhappy. We are in thrall to the narrative of selves that do not really exist, a fabrication in which most novel-writing connives. Schopenhauer would have agreed. He spoke of people “deluded into an absolutely false view of life by reading novels,” something that “generally has the most harmful effect on their whole lives.” Like the Buddhist priest, he would have preferred silence or the school of experience, or the kind of myth or fable that did not invite excited identification with an author alter ego.

Personally, I’m too enmired in narrative and self-narrative to bail out now. I love an engaging novel, I love a complex novel; but I am quite sure I don’t need it.

WHY FINISH BOOKS?

“SIR—” REMARKED SAMUEL JOHNSON with droll incredulity to someone too eager to know whether he had finished a certain book—“Sir, do you read books through?” Well, do we? Right through to the end? And if we do, are we the suckers Johnson supposed us to be?

Schopenhauer, who thought and wrote a great deal about reading, is on Johnson’s side. Life is “too short for bad books” and “a few pages” should be quite enough, he claims, for “a provisional estimate of an author’s productions.” After which it is perfectly okay to put an author back on the shelf if you’re not convinced.

But I’m not really interested in how we deal with bad books. It seems obvious that any serious reader will have learned long ago how much time to give a book before choosing to shut it. It’s only the young, still attached to that sense of achievement inculcated by anxious parents, who hang on doggedly when there is no enjoyment. “I’m a teenager,” remarks one sad contributor to a book review website:

I read this whole book [it would be unfair to say which] from first page to last hoping it would be as good as the reviews said. It wasn’t. I enjoy reading and finish nearly all the novels I start and it was my determination never to give up that made me finish this one, but I really wish I hadn’t.

One can only encourage a reader like this to learn not to attach self-esteem to the mere finishing of a book, if only because the more bad books you finish, the fewer good ones you’ll have time to start.

What about those good books, though? Because Johnson certainly wasn’t just referring to the bad when he tossed out that provocation. Do we need to finish them? Is a good book by definition one that we did finish? Or are there occasions when we might choose to leave off a book before the end, or even only halfway through, and nevertheless feel that it was good, even excellent, that we were glad we read what we read, but don’t feel the need to finish it? I ask the question because this is happening to me more and more often. Is it age, wisdom, senility? I start a book. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, and then the moment comes when I just know I’ve had enough. It’s not that I’ve stopped enjoying it. I’m not bored, I don’t even think it’s too long. I just have no desire to go on enjoying it. Can I say then that I’ve read it? Can I recommend it to others and speak of it as a fine book?

Kafka remarked that beyond a certain point, a writer might decide to finish his or her novel at any moment, with any sentence; it really was an arbitrary question, like where to cut a piece of string, and in fact both The Castle and America are left unfinished, while The Trial is tidied away with the indecent haste of someone who has decided enough is enough. The Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda was the same; both his major works, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana and Acquainted with Grief, are unfinished and both are considered classics despite the fact that they have complex plots that would seem to require endings that are not there.

Other writers deploy what I would call a catharsis of exhaustion: their books present themselves as rich and extremely taxing experiences that simply come to an end at some point where writer, reader, and indeed characters all feel they’ve had enough. The earliest example that comes to mind is D.H. Lawrence, but one thinks of Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett, and the wonderful Christina Stead. Beckett’s prose fiction gets shorter and shorter, denser and denser as he brings the point of exhaustion further and further forward.

All these writers it seems to me, by suggesting that beyond a certain point a book might end anywhere, legitimize the notion that the reader may choose for him or herself where to bow out (of Proust’s Recherche for example, or Mann’s Magic Mountain) without detracting anything from the experience. One of the strangest responses I ever had to a novel of my own—my longest not surprisingly—came from a fellow author who wrote out of the blue to express his appreciation. Such letters of course are a massive boost to one’s vanity, and I was just about to stick this very welcome feather in my cap, when I reached the last lines of the message: he hadn’t read the last fifty pages, he said, because he’d reached a point where the novel seemed satisfactorily over.

Naturally I was disappointed, even a little angry. My leg had surely been pulled. Wasn’t this damning criticism, that I’d gone on fifty pages too long? Only later did I appreciate his candor. My book was fine, for him, even without the ending. It wasn’t too long, just that he was happy to stop where he did.

What, then, since clearly I’m talking about books with aesthetic pretensions, of the notion of the work of art as an organic whole—you haven’t seen its shape unless you’ve seen all of it? And, since again I have mainly referred to novelists, what of the question of plot? A novel that is plotted requires that we reach the end, because the solution to the tale will throw meaning back across the entire work. So the critics tell us. No doubt I’ve made this claim myself in some review or other.

But this is not really my experience as I read. There are some novels, and not just genre novels, where plot is indeed up front and very much the reason why one keeps turning the pages. We have to know what happens. These are rarely the most important books for me. Often one skims as heightened engagement with the plot reduces our attention to the writing as such; all the novel’s intelligence is in the story and the writing the merest vehicle.

Yet even in these novels where plot is the central pleasure on offer, the end rarely gratifies, and if we like the book and recommend it to others, it is rarely for the end. What matters is the conundrum of the plot, the forces put in play and the tensions between them. The Italians have a nice word here. They call plot trama, a word whose primary meaning is weft, woof, or weave. It is the pattern of the weave that we most savor in a plot—Hamlet’s dilemma, perhaps, or the awesome unsustainability of Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon—not its solution. Indeed, the best we can hope from the end of a good plot is that it not ruin what came before. I would not mind a Hamlet that stopped before the carnival of carnage in the last scene, leaving us instead to mull over all the intriguing possibilities posed by the young prince’s return to Elsinore.

In this regard it’s worth noting that stories were not always obliged to have an end, or to keep the same ending. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso shows that one of the defining characteristics of a living mythology is that its many stories, so excitingly tangled together, always have at least two endings, often “opposites”—the hero dies, he doesn’t die, the lovers marry, they don’t marry. It was only when myth became history, as it were, that we began to feel there should be just one “proper” version, and set about forgetting the alternatives. With novels, the endings I’m least disappointed with are those that encourage the reader to believe that the story might very easily have taken a completely different turn.

To put a novel down before the end, then, is simply to acknowledge that for me its shape, its aesthetic quality, is in the weave of the plot and, with the best novels, in the meshing of the writing style with that weave. Style and plot, overall vision and local detail, fascinate together, in a perfect tangle. Once the structure has been set up and the narrative ball is rolling, the need for an end is just an unfortunate burden, an embarrassment, a deplorable closure of so much possibility. Sometimes I have experienced the fifty pages of suspense that so many writers feel condemned to close with as a stretch of psychological torture, obliging me to think of life as a machine for manufacturing pathos and tragedy, since the only endings we half-way believe in, of course, are the unhappy ones.

I wonder if, when a bard was recounting a myth, after some early Athenian dinner party perhaps, or round some campfire on the Norwegian coast, there didn’t come a point when listeners would vote to decide which ending they wanted to hear, or simply opt for an early bed. In our own times, Alan Ayckbourn has written plays with different endings, in which the cast decides, act by act, which version they will follow.

Might it be that, in showing a willingness not to pursue even an excellent book to the death, you are actually doing the writer a favor, exonerating him or her from the near impossible task of getting out of the plot gracefully? There is a tyranny about our thrall to endings. I don’t doubt I would have a lower opinion of many of the novels I haven’t finished if I had. Perhaps it is time that I learned, in my own novels, to drop readers a hint or two that, from this or that moment on, they have my permission to let the book go just as and when they choose.

E-BOOKS ARE FOR GROWN-UPS

INTERVIEWED AFTER WINNING the Costa Prize for Literature, the distinguished British novelist Andrew Miller remarked that while he assumed that soon most popular fiction would be read on screen, he believed and hoped that literary fiction would continue to be read on paper. In his 2011 Man Booker Prize acceptance speech, Julian Barnes made his own plea for the survival of printed books. At the university where I work, certain professors, old and young, will react with vehement disapproval at the notion that one is reading poetry on a Kindle. It is sacrilege.

Are they right?

In practical terms it is all too easy to defend the e-book. We can buy a text instantly wherever we are in the world. We pay less. We use no paper, occupy no space. Kindle’s wireless system keeps our page, even when we open the book on a different reader than the one on which we left off. We can change the type size according to the light and our eyesight. We can change the font according to our taste. Cooped up in the press of the metro, we turn the pages by applying a light pressure of the thumb. Lying in bed, we don’t have that problem of having to use two hands to keep a fat paperback open.

But I want to go beyond practicality to the reading experience itself, our engagement with the text. What is it that these literary men and women are afraid of losing should the paper novel really go into decline? Surely not the cover, so often a repository of misleading images and tediously fulsome endorsements. Surely not the pleasure of running fingers and eyes over fine paper, something that hardly alters whether one is reading Jane Austen or Dan Brown. Hopefully it is not the quality of the paper that determines our appreciation for the classics.

Could it be the fact that the e-book thwarts our ability to find particular lines by remembering their position on the page? Or our love of scribbling comments (of praise and disgust) in the margin? It’s true that on first engagement with the e-book, we become aware of all kinds of habits that are no longer possible, skills developed over many years that are no longer relevant. We can’t so easily flick through the pages to see where the present chapter ends, or whether so and so is going to die now or later. In general, the e-book discourages browsing, and though the bar at the bottom of the screen showing the percentage of the book we’ve completed lets us know more or less where we’re up to, we don’t have the reassuring sense of the physical weight of the thing (how proud children are when they get through their first long tome!), nor the computational pleasures of page numbers (Dad, I read fifty pages today). This can be a problem for academics: it’s hard to give a proper reference if you don’t have page numbers.

But are these old habits essential? Mightn’t they actually be distracting us from the written word itself? Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

What are the core characteristics of literature as a medium and an art form? Unlike painting there is no physical image to contemplate, nothing that impresses itself on the eye in the same way, given equal eyesight. Unlike sculpture, there is no artifact you can walk around and touch. You don’t have to travel to look at literature. You don’t have to line up or stand in the crowd, or worry about getting a good seat. Unlike music you don’t have to respect its timing, accepting an experience of a fixed duration. You can’t dance to it or sing along or take a photo or make a video with your phone.

Literature is made up of words. They can be spoken or written. If spoken, volume and speed and accent can vary. If written, the words can appear in this or that typeface on any material, with any impagination. Joyce is as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman. And we can read these words at any speed, interrupt our reading as frequently as we choose. Somebody who reads Ulysses in two weeks hasn’t read it any more or less than someone who reads it in three months, or three years.

Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end. More than any other art form it is pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself. Memorized, a poem is as surely a piece of literature in our minds as it is on the page. If we say the words in sequence, even silently without opening our mouths, then we have had a literary experience—perhaps even a more intense one than when we read them on the page. It’s true that our owning the object—War and Peace or Moby-Dick—and organizing these and other classics according to chronology and nation of origin will give us an illusion of control: as if we had now “acquired” and “digested” and “placed” a piece of culture. Perhaps that is what people are attached to. But in fact we all know that once the sequence of words is over and the book closed what actually remains in our possession is very difficult, wonderfully difficult to pin down, a richness (or sometimes irritation) that has nothing to do with the heavy block of paper on our shelves.

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

DOES COPYRIGHT MATTER?

DO I, AS an author, have the right to prevent people copying my books for free? Should I have it? Does it matter?

“They have taken away my right to own a slave,” wrote Max Stirner, the opening words of the chapter on human rights in his great book, The Ego and its Own (1844). One paradoxical sentence to remind us that what we call rights are no more than what the law concedes to one party or another in any given conflict of interest. There are no rights in nature, only in a society with a legal system and a police force. Rights can be different in different countries, they may be notional or enforced.

Copyright, then, is part of a mass of legislation that governs the relationship between individual and collective, for the most part defending the former against the latter. You will only have copyright in a society that places a very high value on the individual, the individual intellect, the products of individual intellect. In fact, the introduction of a law of copyright is one of the signs of a passage from a hierarchical and holistic vision of society, to one based on the hopes and aspirations of the individual. Not surprisingly, the first legal moves toward creating the concept of copyright came in late-seventeenth-century Britain.

Officially the idea is that the writer, artist, or musician should be allowed to reap the just rewards for his effort. This is quaint. There is very little justice in the returns artists receive. Works of equal value and quality produce quite different incomes or no income at all. Somebody becomes a millionaire overnight and someone else cannot even publish. It is perfectly possible that the quality of work by these two writers is very similar. The same book may have a quite different fate in different countries. Any notion of justice in the incomes of artists is naive.

What we are talking about, more brutally, is preventing other people from making money from my work without paying me a tribute, because my work belongs to me. It’s mine. What we are talking about is ownership and control. The law, as it now stands, concedes that I own what I write and hence have the right to keep track of every copy of the book I have published and to demand a percentage of the sale price. This right is the same whether I sell two hundred copies of the book at a local newsstand over some years, or twenty million over five continents in eighteen months.

And I can pass this ownership on to my children or heirs when I die; they inherit the right to collect royalties on every copy of my work made and sold, as if they had inherited a company or a property I was renting out. But only for seventy years. Having conceded so much to the individual, and then to his or her family, society finally denies that intellectual property is the same as physical property. My heirs can own my house forever, but at a certain point the product of my mind will be turned over to the public domain. The official rationale here is that I have made enough, and society, in order to build up and enjoy a shared culture, encouraging the accumulation of collective wisdom, needs to have free access to the products of my intellect, in much the same way as it has gained access to many of the great art collections and country estates of the rich men of the past.

We all sense that there is more instinct than logic at work here. We simply feel that it would be bizarre to be taking royalties from the work of an ancestor who lived four hundred years ago. It would be bizarre not to be able to quote Shakespeare without paying something to his descendants, if there are any. At the same time we do not feel that if we owned a painting an ancestor made and left to the family we should not have the right to keep it or to sell it for any price the market will offer.

In the recent past the duration of copyright after an author’s death was extended from fifty to seventy years. We sense at once that a decision like this is arbitrary and could easily change again. Was it really necessary that James Joyce’s grandson could charge more or less what he liked for quotations of the author’s work, even in academic books, up to sixty-nine years after his death? Does it make sense that to quote three or four lines from The Four Quartets in a book about meditation I have to pay T.S. Eliot’s estate £200? One feels the authors themselves might have rebelled, which gives us an insight into the real reason why works are allowed to go out of copyright protection. Because the author would have wished it thus. Once the immediate family has been protected, availability and celebrity is more important to an author than a revenue stream for descendants he has never met. The lapse of copyright is a concession to the author’s dreams of immortality at the expense of the family.

Copyright has always been contested and hard to police, suggesting that there has never been a profound consensus about its ethical rectitude. Dickens, Lawrence, Joyce, and hosts of lesser authors all fought against pirated editions of their work. In the twentieth century, the opening of an international market for books and the progress in copying technology has exacerbated the problem. Can one really expect all countries to defend the rights of foreign authors, when the majority of international bestsellers come from half a dozen countries and overwhelmingly from the United States? Nor has copyright crime generally been “felt” in the same way as straightforward theft or burglary; I have never heard of copyright pirates afflicted by feelings of guilt and remorse. To make the situation more unstable, the combined innovations of the Internet and the e-book have not only introduced new ways of copying books, but also created a feeling, at least in some quarters, that all books should be freely available and consultable through my laptop or iPhone. There is a growing sense that copyright enforcement could become impossible.

To see how copyright law may survive, we have to ask, beyond the pieties and legal niceties, what its real social function is and whether there is at least a large constituency in favor of that function continuing. Copyright gives the writer a considerable financial incentive and locks his work into the world of money; each book becomes a lottery ticket. Huge sales will mean a huge income. Copyright thus encourages a novelist to direct his work not to his immediate peer group, those whose approval he most craves, but to the widest possible audience in possession of the price of a paperback.

On the one hand, then, by conceding copyright, society declares that it holds individual creativity in high esteem—every member of society can dream of one day benefiting from copyright, of transforming genius into money—but by the same token it draws the author into a bourgeois mentality where writing is a job with an income; the writer now has an investment in stable markets and attentive policing. In short, copyright keeps the writer in the polis, and indeed it is remarkable how little creative writing today is truly revolutionary, in the sense of seeking a profoundly different model for society. There is a subversive writerly attitude, of course—liberal, antiauthoritarian—which has paradoxically become almost a convention; dissatisfaction with society is expected of an author. All the same with a royalty check whose arrival relies on international agreements, electronic funds transfer, and a willingness to prosecute copyright piracy, he or she is more a creature of the status quo than its enemy. Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps it is limiting. Perhaps good things are inevitably limiting.

Imagine copyright were phased out or became impossible to enforce in any meaningful way: you can’t expect an advance from a publisher, you can’t even sell your work directly to readers online. So, creative writing is no longer a “job.” You won’t be able to turn it into a living unless you become a big-time celebrity, in which case no doubt there would be lucrative spin-offs; but celebrity is always a long shot and how will it be achieved if the ordinary commercial channels disappear? Isn’t today’s celebrity mostly constructed on sales, which are largely generated by hype, and which would evaporate if a publisher no longer had an exclusive right to publish a given book—or if a publisher could no longer charge the prices necessary to support the publicity required to get a book to its intended public? It’s true that a certain buzz can now be created around a book simply by making it freely available on the net, as was the case with Fifty Shades of Grey; but that would be of little help if there were no prospect of turning that excitement into publishing support and money.

How would this situation change the way a writer works? Would it make sense now to write the thriller, literary or otherwise, that was once packaged and sold to entertain and to earn? Would I really want to write all those pages, if there wasn’t even the chance of an income? Maybe yes. There is fan fiction after all. But many writers would not. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Samuel Johnson once remarked. I’m not with him 100 percent, but I know where he’s coming from. One sees here the difference from the music industry: unable to police their copyright on CDs, musicians nevertheless go on writing songs and can enjoy the feedback and hopefully some income from performing them to an appreciative public; if the songs happen to catch on through the Internet then the musicians can enjoy notoriety and expect bigger concerts, if not a huge income from selling albums. But there is no such performance possibility for the prose thriller, or even the great American novel. Without the prospect of money, the author would have to think very hard about what he really wants to write and how he plans to engage with an eventual community of readers whose appreciation, if not cash, must suffice to give him the gratification and encouragement he seeks. In short, you wouldn’t launch blindly into a major novel, as so many young writers do, simply because novels are the form that command attention and promise an income.

As soon as we put it like this, as soon as we imagine, or try to imagine, the extraordinary confusion, creative and otherwise, that might occur, the many and fragmented ways people might enjoy and share and despair of putting together reflections and entertainments in words for each other, you can see that it is not going to happen. There is still an enormous demand for the long traditional novel, for works that reinforce the idea of an individual whose identity is projected through time and who achieves some kind of wisdom or happiness through many vicissitudes. There is simply no form of escapism, mental immersion, or sustained illusion quite like the thousand-page fantasy narrative, whether it be the endless Harry Potters or the Millennium trilogy; if to have that experience we have to guarantee a substantial income to its creator then society will continue to find a way to do that, in the same way European soccer clubs still find ways to pay exorbitant salaries to their star players.

Copyright, we see, is not essentially driven by notions of justice or theories of ownership, but by a certain culture’s attachment to a certain literary form. If people only read poetry, which you can never stop poets producing even when you pay them nothing at all, then the law of copyright would disappear in a trice.

THE DULL NEW GLOBAL NOVEL

NOT ALL WRITERS share the same sense of whom they are writing for. Many may not even think they are directing their work at any audience in particular. All the same, there are clearly periods of history when, across the board, authors’ perceptions of who their readers are change, something that inevitably leads to a change in the kind of texts they produce. The most obvious example is the period that stretches from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century when writers all over Europe abandoned Latin for the vernacular. Instead of introducing their work, as before, into an international arena presided over by a largely clerical elite, they “descended” to local and national languages to address themselves to an emerging middle class.

In the history books this shift to the vernacular tends to be presented as a democratic inspiration that allowed a wealth of local vitality into the written text and brought new confidence to the rapidly consolidating national languages. That said, it was probably driven as much by ambition and economic interest as by idealism. There came a point when it no longer made sense to write in Latin because the arbiters of taste were now a national rather than international grouping. Today we are at the beginning of a revolution of even greater import that is taking us in a quite different direction.

As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go out of English rather than into it. However, more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.

In recent years authors in Germany, France, and Italy—all countries with large and well-established national readerships—have expressed to me their disappointment at not having found an English-language publisher for their works; interestingly, they complain that this failure reflects back on their prestige in their home country: if people don’t want you elsewhere, you can’t be that good. Certainly, in Italy where I live, an author is only thought to have arrived when he is published in New York. To appreciate how much things have changed one only need reflect that the reputations of writers like Zola or Verga would not have been dented at all by a failure to achieve publication in London.

This development has been hugely accelerated by electronic text transmission. Today, no sooner is a novel or even an opening chapter complete, than it can be submitted to scores of publishers all over the world. It is not unusual for foreign rights to be sold before the work has a local publisher. An astute agent can then orchestrate the simultaneous launch of a work in many different countries using promotional strategies that we normally associate with multinational corporations. Thus a reader picking up a copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or the latest Harry Potter, or indeed a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world. Buying the book, a reader becomes part of an international community. This perception adds to the book’s attraction.

The proliferation of international literary prizes has guaranteed that the phenomenon is not restricted to the more popular sector of the market. Despite its questionable selection procedures and often bizarre choices, the Nobel is seen as more important than any national prize. Meanwhile, the International IMPAC in Ireland, Premio Mondello in Italy, and the International Literature Award in Germany—prizes aimed at “international” literature rather than works from the country in question—are rapidly growing in prestige. Thus the arbiters of taste are no longer one’s own compatriots—they are less easily knowable, not a group the author himself is part of.

What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. Writing in the 1960s, intensely engaged with his own culture and its complex politics, a novelist like Hugo Claus apparently did not care that his stories would require a special effort on the reader’s and above all the translator’s part if they were to be understood outside his native Belgium. In sharp contrast, contemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerbrand Bakker, and the Italian Alessandro Baricco offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor the rewards that such effort will bring. More importantly, the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.

If culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments, other strategies are seen positively: the deployment of highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as “literary” and “imaginative,” analogous to the wearisome lingua franca of special effects in contemporary cinema, and the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the author among those “working for world peace.” So the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk always go hand in hand with a certain liberal position since, as Borges once remarked, most people have so little aesthetic sense they rely on other criteria to judge the works they read.

What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms or Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.

READING IT WRONG

HOW FAR IS language really able to communicate something new, something that runs contrary to my expectations? Or rather, how far will I allow it to do so?

One of the intriguing aspects of teaching translation is watching students struggle with sentences that say things they didn’t expect them to say. They are used, of course, to the process of passing from not understanding a foreign text to understanding it, that moment when a seemingly meaningless drift of words suddenly falls into place. But they also know that they often make mistakes. They must be careful. If the text says something ordinary and commonplace, there will be little doubt in their minds: “This is the kind of thing people say. It must be OK.” But if a writer should come up with some perplexing idea, or, worse still, some declaration running contrary to received wisdom or political correctness, then anxiety sets in; the words will be examined and re-examined even if their individual meaning and the overall syntax is fairly clear. In many cases, especially if the novelty is expressed subtly, students, but also practiced translators, will end up reducing the text to something more conventional.

This tic can take the form of introducing words a translator thinks should be there but aren’t. Take this fairly innocuous example: In D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Ursula reflects that she’s not even tempted to get married. Her sister, Gudrun, agrees and carries on, “Isn’t it an amazing thing . . . how strong the temptation is, not to!” Lawrence comments: “They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened.” A recent Italian edition of the book offers something that, translated back into English, would give, “They both burst out laughing, looking at each other. But deep in their hearts they were afraid.”

Experimenting over the years I’ve realized that if I ask a class of students to translate this into Italian, approximately half will introduce that but. It appears to be received wisdom that one doesn’t laugh if one is afraid; hence when Lawrence puts the two things together, translators feel a but is required to acknowledge the unusualness of this state of affairs. Lawrence on the other hand suggests that nothing is more common than laughing and being afraid; one laughs because afraid, in order to deny fear.

However, what is most interesting about this phenomenon is that when I quiz the students, most will admit they were unaware of having introduced the but. They actually read the text like that. Which means, one can only suppose, that a vast number of ordinary readers will be reading it like that too. Indeed, what I’m suggesting is that the kind of slippage we see in translations is probably indicative of an even greater slippage among many readers who are not of course considering the text as closely as the translator does.

This kind of automatic correction toward what the translator or reader expects can work in all kinds of ways. Later in Women in Love Lawrence describes how a sexual experience can induce a state of deep calm. Having made hurried love to Birkin in the back room of an inn, Ursula finds herself in unusually good form pouring the tea. Lawrence heaps on the significance with some unusual usages of the verb forget and the adjectives still and perfect:

She was usually nervous and uncertain at performing these public duties, such as giving tea. But today she forgot, she was at her ease, entirely forgetting to have misgivings. The tea-pot poured beautifully from a proud slender spout. Her eyes were warm with smiles as she gave him his tea. She had learned at last to be still and perfect.

The Italian translator has trouble with this, perhaps finds it embarrassing—in any event, resists. If we translate the Italian version back into English we have Ursula “entirely forgetting that she was inclined to be apprehensive”—a rather more standard statement than “forgetting to have misgivings.” But more remarkably, for the last sentence: “Finally she had learned to do it with a firm hand and perfect composure.” As if Lawrence had merely been talking about her tea-pouring abilities.

Do we as readers subconsciously make these “corrections”? How far can they go? One of the things that always surprises me when talking about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is how little attention is given to the fact that this novel presents the suicide of one of its characters as a gift of individual to collective, on a par with, or at least comparable to, the party that Mrs. Dalloway throws for her well-to-do friends, or indeed the writing of the book itself. These are not fashionable or “safe” thoughts. At the crucial moment, when Septimus Warren Smith, feeling threatened by another doctor’s visit, throws himself from the window onto the railings below, he yells, “I’ll give it to you!” The Italian translation offers, “Lo volete voi,” which in English literally is “It’s you who want it!” or, more idiomatically, “You asked for it!” Was the translator aware she had altered the text?

It’s true that Septimus is frightened and angry, but the idea of the gift is essential to the book. Do readers, for the main, take the idea on board? To judge by how often this novel is seen as a rather flowery manifestation of soft feminism, I suspect not. Curiously, this Italian translator also has a habit of removing any unpleasantly disparaging comments Woolf makes. When Clarissa Dalloway is described as “a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives,” the translation omits the dull. In general all that is snobbish in Woolf or Clarissa is gently removed.

Interestingly, exactly the opposite occurs when Machiavelli is rendered into English. Again expectation is everything, and Machiavelli is celebrated of course for being Machiavellian. Received opinion must not shift. So when having considered the downfall of his hero and model, the ruthless Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli rather ruefully writes:

Raccolte io adunque tutte le azioni del duca, non saprei riprenderlo.

(Literally: “Having gathered then all the actions of the duke, I would not know how to reproach him.”)

The translator George Bull gives, “So having summed up all that the duke did, I cannot possibly censure him.” Here the word censure has a strong moral connotation, made stronger still by the introduction of cannot possibly, which is not there in the Italian. In line with the author’s reputation for cynicism, Bull has Machiavelli insist that he has no moral objections to anything Cesare Borgia did. Actually, Machiavelli simply says Borgia didn’t make any big mistakes. The true scandal of Machiavelli is that he never considers moral criteria at all—he doesn’t feel they are applicable to a politician fighting for survival. But it is easier for us to think of an evil Machiavelli than a lucid thinker deciding that good and evil do not come into it.

In short, there is a tension between reader and text that the translator experiences in a special way because, rewriting the text in his own language, he has to allow that tension to happen again for a new group of readers. Becoming aware of how you might instinctively wish to change a text and eliminate the tension is both to understand the book better and to understand something about yourself.

WHY READERS DISAGREE

“I LOVE THE new DeLillo.”

“And I hate it.”

It’s a familiar conversation: like against dislike with no possible resolution. Or alternatively: “I can’t see why Freedom upsets you so much. I didn’t like it either, but who cares?” Interest against disinterest; as when your wife/brother/friend/colleague raves about some Booker or Pulitzer winner and you feel vaguely guilty. “Sure,” you agree, “great writing, intriguing stuff.” But the truth is you just couldn’t find the energy to finish the book.

So, is there anything we can say about such different responses? Or must we just accept De gustibus non disputandum est? The fact is that traditional critical analysis, however brilliant, however much it may help us to understand a novel, rarely alters the color of our initial response. Enthusiasm or disappointment may be confirmed or attenuated, but only exceptionally reversed. We say: James Wood/Colm Tóibín/Michiko Kakutani admires the book and has given convincing reasons for doing so, but I still feel it is the worst kind of crowd-pleaser.

Let me offer a possible explanation that has been developing in my mind over a decade and more. It’s a central tenet of systemic psychology that each personality develops in the force field of a community of origin, usually a family, seeking his or her own position in a pre-existing group, or “system,” most likely made up of mother, father, brothers and sisters, then aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so on. The leading Italian psychologist, Valeria Ugazio, further suggests that this family “system” also has “semantic content”; that is, as conversations in the family establish criteria for praise and criticism of family members and nonmembers, one particular theme or issue will dominate.

In my family, for example, the quality that mattered most was never courage or independence, success or community spirit, but goodness, usually understood as renunciation. My father was an evangelical clergyman and both parents were involved in the Charismatic Movement. Every person, every political issue, was understood in terms of good and evil. In another family, appraisal might revolve chiefly around, say, the courage and independence someone has shown, or the extent to which another person is timorous and dependent. In such a family it’s a fair bet that one member will have shown a remarkable spirit of adventure while another rarely takes risks of any kind.

That is—according to Ugazio’s theory—family members tend to manifest the qualities, positive and negative, around which the group’s conversations revolve. So it was that at a certain point in his adolescence, my brother made a great show of being “evil” in the terms my parents understood the word: he grew his hair long, drank, smoked dope, locked himself in his room with cute girlfriends, and even told us, with a fair parody of a malignant grin, that he was demonic. As the youngest of three, I found my own adolescence shaped by constant parental pressure to choose between my “bad” brother and “good” sister who played the guitar in church and dressed with exemplary propriety.

Each developing family member, this theory suggests, will be looking to find a stable position within the polarized values the family is most concerned with. Persons who for some reason find this difficult, perhaps drawn emotionally one way and intellectually another, might eventually develop symptoms of psychological unease; they cannot figure out where they stand in the group; which, in a family, might not be far from saying that they don’t quite know who they are.

In her remarkable book Semantic Polarities and Psychopathologies in the Family: Permitted and Forbidden Stories (2013), Ugazio offers examples of this process from celebrated novels: all members of the Karamazov family, she points out, can be understood by placing them on the good-evil axis: the wicked Dimitri, the saintly Alyosha, and the more complex and untrustworthy Ivan who oscillates between the extremes. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, on the other hand, the characters are fearful or reckless, patient or courageous, pusillanimous or bold. Of course they have other qualities too; they are complex, fully-drawn people, but it is their position along the fear-courage axis that is decisive as the plot unfolds. Moral issues in Thomas Hardy’s work usually present themselves in the form: Do I have the courage/recklessness to break this conventional moral rule?

When writing reviews I have occasionally used this kind of approach to help me get a fix on a writer. Reading through scores of Chekhov’s stories recently, I became aware that the key issue throughout was belonging: Do I belong, the characters ask themselves, to this family/institution/social class, or don’t I? Am I excluded from this relationship, am I merely trapped in this marriage? Most of the central characters display an ambivalence about whether they want to be part of the group or not: or rather, they want to be part, but then feel diminished by this belonging. They need to feel superior to the group or relationship as well as being in it; they need to escape, but if they do, they are immediately anxious to return.

So far so good. But let’s take the argument a little further than Ugazio does. Systemic theorists (or “positioning theorists” as more recent jargon would have it) see people as constantly taking the position developed within the family out into the larger world. Some of them go so far as to say that identity is no more (no less!) than the position one consistently adopts, or seeks to adopt, in each new situation. As a result, misunderstandings may occur—at work perhaps, or in a newly formed couple—between people who have grown up with quite different criteria for assessing behavior and establishing a position in relation to it. Hence expressions like: “I don’t know where she’s coming from”; “He really doesn’t get it, does he?”

Could not something of the same failure of two psyches to mesh occur between writers and readers? Or alternatively, might not the psyches of writer and reader mesh all too powerfully, but in quarrel rather than harmony?

For example, not only does a writer like Chekhov focus constantly on issues of belonging and escape, but he does so in such a way as to invite our sympathy for the complex behavioral strategy that he personally always adopted: an attitude of generous involvement with others that nevertheless safeguards absolute independence and allows him to retain a certain separateness and superiority. Many of Chekhov’s stories, about people trapped in relationships on the one hand, or excluded from their peer groups on the other, might be read as warnings to himself (the author) not to change this strategy. Not all readers will connect with this.

Or we might consider D.H. Lawrence. In Sons and Lovers the moral veto that Miriam places on sex before marriage is “unmasked” by her boyfriend, Paul, as merely fear finding an alibi in moral convention. In an extremely bold move Paul declares fear to be the evil, not sex. Victorian morality is turned on its head; for those in love, Paul insists, making love is a moral imperative. Fear is a betrayal of life. While writing this novel, Lawrence ran off with a married woman, encouraging her to abandon her husband and three young children. Reading Lawrence’s strange Study of Thomas Hardy, we can see that he was intensely locked into Hardy’s imaginative world; the two of them shared the same need to find a position on issues of fear (one thinks of a poem like Lawrence’s “Snake”). But what he hated in Hardy was that his characters so often choose not to be courageous, or when they are bold and defy convention the gesture is presented as merely reckless and they are destroyed by it. He must always “stand with the average against the exception,” Lawrence complains.

It’s interesting that in his time Hardy’s novels were severely criticized for being immoral, because they suggested that society’s crushing of sinners and above all adulterers was cruel. Today there is no such criticism and we all (excluding, perhaps, evangelicals like my parents) side gladly with Tess, Jude, and Hardy’s many other victims of Victorian severity. We have a different take on life and on Hardy’s novels because we grew up in different systems. Lawrence, on the other hand, has enjoyed no such turnaround in reader response. He is so forthright as a storyteller, so determined to have his way, and so blithely unconcerned when a pusillanimous character is brushed aside by anyone who has the courage to live life to the full; one thinks of poor Banford in The Fox, dispatched without pity because she stands in the way of Henry and March’s marriage, or indeed of Professor Weekley himself, whom Lawrence deprived of an extraordinary wife.

What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of “system” or “conversation” we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity. Dostoevsky is always and immediately enthralling for me. The question of whether and how far to side with good or evil, with renunciation or indulgence, grabs me at once and takes me straight back to my adolescence. And how I loathe the end of his books where the sinner repents and gets on his knees and sees the error of his ways in an ecstasy of self-abasement. I love Dostoevsky, but I argue furiously with him. Same with an author like Coetzee in Disgrace. I feel locked into argument with him. Beyond any question of “liking” these books are important to me.

On the other hand, when I read the Norwegian writer Per Petterson, who again is chiefly concerned with fear—vulnerability to the elements and the terror of being abandoned by those we have most trusted—I immensely admire his writing, but find it hard to care. When asked on two occasions to review Petterson, I read every word carefully and with pleasure and gave the novels the praise they very much deserve, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to read another book of his. His world, the disturbing imagery he draws on, the rhythm and pacing of his sentences, are far removed from my concerns. Affinities, as Goethe tells us, are important. Few works of art can have universal appeal.

WHERE I’M READING FROM

IT’S NOW A commonplace that there is no “correct” reading of any book: we all find something different in a novel. Yet little is said of particular readers and particular readings, and critics continue to offer interpretations they hope will be authoritative, even definitive. In this regard, I’ve been thinking how useful it might be if all of us “professionals” were to put on record—some dedicated website perhaps—a brief account of how we came to hold the views we do on books, or at least how we think we came to hold them. If each of us stated where we were coming from, perhaps some light could be thrown on our disagreements. Here is my own contribution.

Books began, in my case, when my parents read to me, so I knew from the start that reading must be a “good” thing. Fervently evangelical—a clergyman and his wife—my parents only did things that were good. They read us children’s stories and the Bible. Later I exploited this faith of theirs in the essential goodness of literature to plot my escape from the suffocating world in which they lived and wanted everyone else to live.

When they read to us, a daughter and two sons, perhaps beside a smoldering coal fire, with an evening cup of cocoa, the books created a feeling of togetherness; we were united in one place in the thrall of one parental voice, my mother’s usually, and afterward there was a shared store of stories and memories that made us a family. But when I read alone, searching out books that offered a broader view of life, books isolated me and divided us. Now I had ideas and arguments that countered theirs. I read avidly, safe in the knowledge that they thought this was a good thing. But soon enough they picked up my copy of Gide, of Beckett, of Nietzsche; then there were tears and conflict. Away from the Bible and children’s books, reading was not always good, and when it wasn’t good it was bad. Very bad.

Even today there is a subtle tension in my reading between the desire to free myself from the immediate community with its received ideas, and the desire to share what I read with those around me, those I love. On the other hand, it was perfectly clear to me in adolescence that when we read alone, each member of the family would choose quite different books, and that what you were reading inevitably declared where you stood on the things that mattered in our house. You had to be careful when you chose to share a book.

My father’s study was wall-to-wall Bible concordances, huge tomes in scab-red covers, each brittle page divided into two yellowing columns and dustily flecked with text references, brackets, footnotes. A glance was enough to tell me I would never read them. Perhaps they inspired my lifelong impatience with books that seem overtechnical: jargon-ridden works of literary criticism, for example. I connect them with my father. There was something unhappily withdrawn about his study; he hated noise; no one could challenge him in his knowledge of the scriptures. But it did not seem like all that cross-referencing had much to do with living and breathing. My family created a situation where I went to books for fresh air, not scholarship.

Mother had no shelves of her own but supplied the books kept in a small rotating mahogany bookcase in the living room; these were family books where goodness was not a theory or theology but a question of warm, benevolent emotions or, perhaps, swashbuckling patriotism. Dickens had the most space I suppose, closely followed by the adventure stories of a British World War II pilot with the improbable name of Captain Bigglesworth. John Buchan was there, and The Secret Garden, and Water Babies, and of course, Three Men in a Boat. This was permitted reading. I read them all and felt hungrier than ever.

Right at the back of the cubbyhole under the stairs, where you had to get on your knees as the ceiling came down to meet the floor, wrapped in thick brown paper and tied in string, was a book published in the 1940s about marriage and sex; it included some instructions as to how to go about making love if you never had before. Things like: Don’t be in a hurry to get all your clothes off. Think of your partner’s pleasure as much as your own. This book, whose title I have forgotten, was hugely useful to me. It was also interesting to discover that my righteous parents did this stuff, and again that the book could not appear on other shelves in the house. Evidently, there were books that were good, or for the good, but not good for everyone at every moment.

In my sister’s room, painted pink with flowery curtains and a pink bedspread, the shelves were full of Georgette Heyer and similar romances of a historical flavor. At some point I must have noticed the relationship between the book covers and the room’s decor. This was the aura my sister moved in. Five years older than me, she played the guitar in church and was always prayerful; anything to do with sex had to come in a patina of propriety and pink. I read about half of a Georgette Heyer novel, but did not find it useful.

My brother, the middle child, was the rebel. In his bookshelf, among sundry science fiction by Asimov and Ballard, not even hidden, was a paperback called Lasso Round the Moon by Agnar Mykle, published in 1954 (the year I was born). Paperbacks were new to me. There was a photograph on the cover that promised sensual not spiritual bliss. I understood at once that only certain sections of this volume need be read. They were already well thumbed.

It will seem all too easy, this fusion of topography and attitude, but it’s true: my room was sandwiched between my brother’s and my sister’s. It too had a bookshelf. There were no rosy historical romances, no girls clutching a last shred of clothing to their modesty. There were no concordances, no innocent children’s books. Way before I could possibly understand them, there were Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Chekhov and Flaubert and Zola. These books were foreign. Out of it. They never gave me the crasser joys I craved, but then again they never made me feel I was merely indulging, or merely provoking; I wasn’t locked in a fight with my parents, as it seemed to me my brother was. Neither good nor bad, they were good and bad, there was adventure and debate. If my parents made the whole world black and white, these books were colored and immensely complicated.

Over the past year or two I’ve realized how much this organization of the books in my childhood home still influences my reading and reviewing. When I negatively reviewed a book like William Giraldi’s Busy Monsters, it was because it seemed to me an exercise in literary exhibitionism; intellectuality as an end in itself, self-indulgent performance whose main intention was to encourage the reader to concede that the author was smart, rather as if those biblical concordances had been rewritten by Agnar Mykle. When I admired aspects of Dave Eggers it was because I recognized his constant division of the world into good and evil, and when I doubted him it was because in the end it seemed to me he was preaching. The analyses I offered of Fifty Shades of Grey and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy were very much operations in understanding their position in the geography of our old family bookshelves. Funnily enough, their immense success immediately makes sense when described in this way. They are both books that allow you to read a little hard violent sex while siding with a hero or heroine eager to eliminate such things from the world. Anyone turning to my piece on Peter Matthiessen in The New York Review of Books will now understand both my attraction to his novel In Paradise and my reservations.

Will I never escape from this? Is it a miserable limitation? Should they stop commissioning reviews from me? We all have our positions. Identity is largely a question of the pattern of our responses when presented with a new situation, a new book. Certainly the idea of impartiality is a chimera. To be impartial about narrative would be to come from nowhere, to be no one.

The challenge, I suppose, is to be aware of one’s habits, to be ready to negotiate, even to surprise oneself. Perhaps it’s the books that very slightly shift an old position, or at least oblige you to think it through again, that become most precious. I still recall my perplexity, then growing pleasure, when I read Peter Stamm a couple of years ago: first a sense that his novels were truly different; not the fireworks of would-be experimentalism, but a voice I hadn’t heard before. I had to struggle to place it, to find where I stood in relation to it. Essentially, Stamm constructs stories that my background leads me to think of as moral dilemmas—as in the case of a long extramarital affair in which the mistress falls pregnant—but that his characters understand entirely in terms of fear and courage, dependence and independence. The writing is, if I can put it this way, comically serious, in its simultaneous awareness of and refusal to engage with the moral side of events. In the end I was fascinated.