What do we mean when we say that we loved book A, couldn’t get along with book B or despised book C? Not much beyond confirming that book A chimed perfectly with our personal prejudices, book B chafed against those prejudices and book C was cast aside not lightly but with great force, as Dorothy Parker recommended.
It would be nice to think we could rise above prejudice but also, perhaps, futile, because this is what we do; as with choosing friends, we choose books that tell us what we like to hear and avoid those that don’t. As readers of fiction it’s a tendency we need to guard against.
Mark Twain said he “wouldn’t read Jane Austen on a salary”, and for all her writerly virtues I’m with Twain on this one, although I’d want to know a bit more about the salary. Taste is so often a matter of temperament and disposition.
I’ve spent years in the inspiring company of Charles Dickens, John Updike, Anne Tyler and Alice Munro. By the same token I’ve spent years not getting along with Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Henry James and, especially, Flannery O’Connor, on whom I wrote a college dissertation. It felt as if I’d been sent away to some mad maiden aunt’s as a punishment; because O’Connor was, among other things, a one-eyed southern revanchist, a Catholic fundamentalist and a woman who spent her short life swimming against the prevailing tide of modernity. By the end of a bruising encounter I was reluctantly forced to admit that she was a great writer, but we were destined never to become soulmates.
Reading things we instinctively dislike is good for us, nevertheless. As readers we need to get out more, meet new people and not just hang out with our BFFs, because critical appreciation has nothing to do with a writer’s perceived likeability; it is more about their ability, period. Oscar Wilde was right. There is no such thing as a good book or a bad book; books are either well written or badly written. Nor are they directly propositional. Novels that are too “abouty”, as Anne Enright has said, tend to suffer as a consequence.
You find this difficulty in the realm of reviewing. Good reviewers leave their prejudices outside the office door. The reviewer is there not to debate ill-defined ideas but to let you know whether the writer has succeeded artistically. A reviewer who attacks the writer while failing to deal with the book is not doing their job. Worse, a reviewer who regrets that a book is what it is, and not as they would prefer it to be, misses the point.
At Christmas I received a gift of Richard Ford's Let Me Be Frank With You, which, despite the egregious pun, delighted me, because I thought Ford was done with ol' Frank. Frank Bascombe is my kind of protagonist. Hanging with Frank Bascombe I find bracing and life-affirming. When he reminds me that "life is teeming, befuddling, and soon followed by the end" I nod assent. When he tells me that writing a novel "is the last outpost for a certain species of doomed optimist" I smile wisely. Oh, he can be a grumpy, Eeyorish figure, but in his own words Frank Bascombe is "a man who takes the high optimistic road, who streamlines his utterances and in all instances acts nice".
In the novels of Richard Ford sense and sensibility coalesce; the head acknowledges the true artist at work while the heart warms to the deep humanity of his great protagonist.
Bert Wright is curator of the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival
