Novelettish
In the first issue of The Scrivener’s Fancy, I expressed my view that a person is not necessarily intelligent just because they like to read books. A few months later, the teetering piles of The Lost Symbol that I see everywhere I go has made me want to not exactly revisit this topic, but address a related one: is reading novels, in itself, an intrinsically worthwhile activity?
Firstly, I am singling out novels rather than non-fiction because, no matter how daft a non-fiction title is, you will at least glean some information from reading it. Secondly, I want to make the point that I am essentially in favour of novels; I’m not just trying to look modern. In fact, I was annoyed back in the mid-nineties when I read that Justine Ettler, a briefly famous Australian ‘grunge’ novelist who authored the bestselling The River Ophelia, a work firmly of the ‘I could smell my cunt’ school, said that she would rather listen to a CD than read a novel because she found most novels to be irrelevant to her and her way of life. Her comment upset me not only because, I felt, she was merely trying to look modern, but because, she, a novelist, wasn’t siding with novels, a literary form that always seems to be under threat from the fact that readers like memoirs so much.
That is, I felt protective of novels, and they are something to which people tend to have a chivalrous attitude. I can only compare it to the public’s standpoint on Kylie Minogue: it’s as though, because she’s only four feet tall or whatever she is, it is enough that she simply makes it through a string of concerts, she doesn’t actually have to perform with distinction. Just as Minogue’s mere presence seems to be sufficient for most people, it doesn’t seem to matter what novel it is, reading it is supposed to be, by definition, a more desirable thing to do than, say, watching television.
For example, if an author ‘gets teenage boys to read’, they will be treated like they’re Jesus Christ, because they are, it is alleged, inculcating in these youths the ‘habit’ of reading. Just as there are those who would have you believe that pulling bongs will lead inevitably to a heroin addiction, there are those who would have you believe that a little Matthew Reilly will lead teenage boys seamlessly to Henry James. I believe that we can safely assume that this won’t happen. But what troubles me far more is the other assumption that even if these young men don’t end up glued to The Portrait of a Lady in a few years’ time, it’s still better that they’re reading now.
Is it, though? Yes, of course it’s better that they’re reading than engaging, say, in gang rape, but let’s not get carried away. For example, the 2005 Books Alive Matthew Reilly novella, Hell Island, was about Marines in bloody battle with genetically enhanced gorillas. Good-oh, but let’s not fool ourselves that this experience with the written word is any more than it is. Of course, it’s a great thing that many people read this book and enjoyed it, but this doesn’t mean that doing so was a fundamentally IQ-increasing activity. And it’s not that I have any objection whatsoever to something that is ‘just’ entertaining; I’m merely saying let’s give credit where it’s due, but let’s not give more credit than is due.
Believe me, it’s not that I think everyone reading novels has to be challenged all the time. As a reader of novels, or of anything, I have an intense dislike of being challenged. Actually, I’ve determined that pretty much the only type of novel I like to read is set between 1950 and the present; is about middle-class people who live in the US, the UK or Australia, in the city, or, at least, a big town; and is, ideally, about people getting divorced (not people with children, though; I don’t usually like to read about children). Alternatively, I like to read about people who are exactly as described above, and who are, if not divorcing, fucking up hugely at work. What’s more, my tastes become even more limited the nearer I get to old age and death; as soon as I see any mention in cover copy of, say, the distant past, magic realism or inventive language, back the book goes to the pile.
So, why do I read novels? It’s obviously not because I want to learn anything about history or different cultures – to learn about anything much that you can put your finger on. What I do require from a novel is some kind of insight into the behaviour of humans who are very much like me and the people I know. I read such novels and feel less alone, or feel, if erroneously, that I now understand the internal workings of, for example, my Year Eight music teacher who used to, in a nervous-breakdownly way, rock her piano stool violently back and forth, as she tried to get us to engage with singing a ‘rock opera’ called The Moonrakers, of which I have never heard, before or since.
Naturally, there are a lot of bad novels, just as there are a lot of extremely good ones; this is nothing new, but now we live in an age of so much brilliant television. I think there’s an argument that in 1938, say, you could be reasonably confident that a given novel would be more sophisticated than a given film or radio serial. Take, for example, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca – the book was a massive popular success upon its release but not a critical one; the Times reviewer said, I believe, that ‘the material is of the humblest’. Reading Rebecca these days, though, it seems a most superior novel; yes, the language can be a little florid, but it is a highly literate piece of work, and its characterisation is first-rate. If you went to the movies in 1938, on the other hand, you’d have to cop, for instance, Jezebel, one of the most ludicrous films of all time, in which Bette Davis rampages around as a southern belle, addressing people as ‘dumplin’. Yet, she won an Oscar for this performance and the movie was nominated for Best Picture! This indicates to me that everyone was pretty happy with Jezebel, which also indicates to me that the bar for motion pictures was lower than it is today. So, whether novels are better or worse than they once were, I would argue that their competition in being cerebral is stiffer. Is a particularly cracking episode of Six Feet Under or The Sopranos or Breaking Bad really less intellectually engaging than some novel that appears to have been written by numbers?
And this isn’t about literary novels versus mass-market ones: there are many excellent mass-market novels, just as there are many very ordinary literary ones. The issue for me is this: unless a work of fiction has characters who are actually recognisable as reasonably complex human beings and the author has made some effort to write decent prose, going to see Transformers will be just as elevating a pastime as reading a novel. If novel-reading is to continue being an activity on which people think they can pride themselves and which they like to see other people doing, we need to expect more from the books, not be saying, ‘At least he’s reading!’
Avril Rolfe is a Melbourne-based writer.
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