The Books We Talk About

(and Those We Dont)

Tim Parks
Abner Dean
What is the social function of the novel? Im not thinking about the pay-off for the
author, who gets to develop a skill and earn a living from it and accrue a prestigious
public image into the bargain. Nor about the rewards for the publisher, who may, or
more likely may not, make a significant amount of money. Nor even the pleasure for the
individual reader, who enjoys hours of entertainment and maybe feels enlightened or
usefully provoked along the way. What Im asking is, whats in it for society as a
whole, or at least for that part of society that reads novels?
Conversation. A shared subject of discussion. Something complex for minds to meet
around. This is particularly the case when were talking to people we dont know well,
people we meet, as it were, socially. Of course there are plenty of other topics available.
The weather. Sports. Politics. But theres only so much that can be said about cloud
formations, not everyone sees the fascinations of baseball, and politics, as we know, can
be dangerous territory. Novelsor films or television dramas for that matteroffer a
feast of debate and create points of contact: are the characters believable, do people
really do or think these things, does the story end as it should, is it well written? The
way different people respond to Philip Roths American Pastoral, or J.M.
CoetzeesDisgrace, will tell you a lot about their personalities without anything
personal needing to be said. Novels are ideal subjects for testing the ground between us.
When Laurence Sterne started publishing sections of Tristram Shandy, newspaper book
reviewing was in its infancy. The novels droll sexual innuendoes, its constant flirtation
with incomprehensibility and obscenity, provoked excitement and consternation among
more or less everyone who read books at the time. How could fiction be written in this
way? What relation did Sternes tale have to real experience, and indeed to other books?
Did the unreferenced inclusion of work from other writers (Rabelais, Francis Bacon,
etc.) amount to plagiarism? The debate was fierce. Sterne thrived on it, including
reviewers comments and his reactions to them in later parts of the book. Since Tristram
Shandy was seven years in the publishing, other writers chipped in, offering
unauthorized alternative versions, sequels, and prequels. There was a snowballing
effect. Enthusiasts invented Tristram Shandy recipes, set up graveyards with the tombs
of the novels characters, and named racehorses after them. The book had become part
of a nationaland on occasion internationalconversation. People understood their
relations to each other by gauging how they related to the book.
More than a hundred years later the debate was even more heated around the publication
of Thomas Hardys Tess of the dUrbervilles, famously subtitled A Pure Woman
Faithfully Presented. How could she be pure, reviewers demanded, when first she had
an illegitimate child with a man, then lived with him as his mistress while married to
someone else? It was a good question. But Tess was so attractive, so endearing, and so
incredibly unlucky. The divergence of opinion was so acrimonious that it became
difficult to have supporters and detractors sitting side by side at society dinners.
Essentially the novel had forced readers to reconsider received Victorian opinion on
sexual mores, exposing the phobic side of polite societys moral rigor. Inevitably, the
more people raged against the book the more it sold.
One could list any number of novelsHard Times, Uncle Toms Cabin, Native Son
that have provoked an intense level of public debate, usually because they combined a
seductive plot with issues that mattered deeply to people in that particular time and
place. A novel becomes a focus for such issues, provoking conversations perhaps only
latent to that point, and these conversations then guarantee the works further success
and the writers celebrity. Beyond a certain level of readability, however, the ultimate
quality of the writing, or the art involved, is largely irrelevant, at least for this social
function. A poorly written book, whether it be What is to be Done? by the nineteenth-
century Russian intellectual Nikolay Chernyshevsky or E.L. Jamess Fifty Shades of
Grey, can stimulate intense general conversation far better than an extraordinary but
taxing piece of writingBecketts Trilogy or Robert Walsers Jakob von Guntenor
even a genre work, that, however popular, raises no underlying issues: Simenons
Maigrets, Flemings Bond books, le Carrs spy stories.
So as well as categorizing novels as well or poorly written, popular or unpopular, one
could also, and perhaps more usefully, distinguish those that become part of the
conversation, and those that do not. Jonathan Franzens The Corrections became part of
the national conversation; Lydia Daviss short stories, for all their brilliance, did not. In
Europe Michel Houellebecq is part of the conversation, like it or not (but not liking it
intensifies the conversation); Peter Stamm, an author whose work I always look forward
to, is not. Social issues and literary ambition may be important here, but are really not
essential. Arguably there was a huge conversation generated around the Harry Potter
saga that had nothing to do with social issues, but was perhaps very largely a discussion
about the appropriateness of adults avidly reading stories written for children.
Conversely, many writers who deliberately try to provoke a conversation by novelizing
topical issues that are already at the center of debate, often fail miserably. John
Updikes Terrorist was arguably his least talked-about novel.
But whatever the content or quality of a novel, in order for a general conversation to
take hold, people, or enough people, have to have read it. It is no good if everybody is
reading brilliantly provoking, perhaps electrically interesting, but quite different books.
How often have we been involved in conversations, at a party maybe, where four or five
people ask what others think of this or that novel, only to find that no one else has read
it? Even, or perhaps especially, among people who read a lot it is often difficult to find a
single recently published book that we have all read. The conversation founders,
literature fails to bring us together, no debate is provoked. Or to find a book to talk
about we have turn to one of the blockbusters or media-hyped works of the day,
something one almost feels authorized to talk about whether one has read it or
not:Underworld, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Interview with a Vampire, My
Struggle. Regardless of quality, regardless even of sales, since Knausgaards are
nowhere near on a level with the others, these are books that have been as it
were chosen for the conversation, perhaps precisely because its often embarrassingly
difficult to find a book weve all read to settle on. Instead of the conversation occurring
naturally as with Tristram Shandy, or Tess of the dUrbervilles, it is to a certain extent
thrust upon us.
The extraordinary increase in the number of novels published each year together with
the internationalization of fiction is in good measure responsible for this changed state
of affairs. Victorian England produced a considerable number of novels but at any one
time only a limited number were being serialized in the major weekly and monthly
magazines of the day. This guaranteed that those books had sufficient readers to
generate a conversation. Novelists writing for the magazines knew who their readers
were, more or less, and, reluctantly or enthusiastically, adapted their work accordingly.
Since readers had much in common, it was more likely that a piece of fiction would
open up issues that animated conversation and since there was far less journalism
available than today, difficult topical issues would often be tackled only through novels.
But how does a book enter the conversation today? The serialized novel has been
replaced by serialized television fiction that has become so successful at generating
discussion that those of us who didnt follow The Sopranos or The Wire were often
made to feel left out. Meantime, in the bookshops, readers choose from literally
thousands of recently published titles. In the countries of western Europe a good 50
percent of those books will come from abroad; so peoples reading is not focused on the
society they live in and the stories read are often set elsewhere. In 2011 when I ran a
little survey in a Dutch bookshop on the kind of novels people were reading, younger
readers in particular said they often chose to read popular foreign, particularly American
or English, authorsDan Brown or Ian McEwan or Philip Roth or Zadie Smithso
that they would have a common subject of conversation when meeting other young
people during their summer travels. Their choices seemed random and were taken
regardless of quality. Rather than a situation where people are naturally finding
themselves reading the same thing and then talking about it, some readers are
responding to celebrity in the hope that what they read will enable them to join an
international conversation.
And yet it still does happen that quite unexpectedly a book, a writer, becomes
successful beyond the wildest dreams of their publishers, and perhaps in the absence of
publishers at all, causing people to read things they wouldnt normally read and to talk
together about things they wouldnt normally talk about. Ive recently read and
reviewed two authors who have had this extraordinary fortune, E.L. James and Haruki
Murakami, the one accused of writing trashy soft porn, the other praised for his
evocation of everything disorienting and surreal.
Is it possible that two such different authors have anything in common, anything that
drew this level of attention to their work and created such animated polemics around
them? For while Murakami is sometimes touted for the Nobel he is also frequently
attacked for poor writing, adolescent sensibility, and deliberately seeking a dislocated
global public. (I was recently invited to speak at a conference whose sole purpose
seemed to be to attack Murakami.) And E.L. James, though dismissed by the literati,
found her work reviewed in the most serious literary papers and attracting a readership
far broader than has ever before occurred with a work of soft erotica.
Both authors, it seems to me, in their quite different ways are fascinated by the same
thing: the individuals need to negotiate the most intimate relationships in order to get
the most from life without losing independence and selfhood. If Shades of Grey had any
seriousness, it was in asking these questions: How is sexuality to be negotiated in a
couple? How can I give the other what he/she wants and remain myself? In a sense,
How can I control what appears uncontrollable? In an infinitely more sophisticated and
certainly more mystical fashion, Murakami invariably asks, How can I avoid being
overwhelmed on the one hand by others, on the other by loneliness? Where is the
middle way?
Of course there are many other authors whose work deals with these issues. But how
many books can the world be talking about at any one time? A dozen, twenty? Its hard
not to feel that a certain amount of the merest chance is involved.