How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide - Hardcover

Sutherland, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312359888 ISBN 13: 9780312359881

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2006

Synopsis

"Do we still know how to read a novel?" John Sutherland, Chairman of the 2005 Booker Prize Committee, asks. His disheartened answer is an unequivocal, "No." But Sutherland has not given up hope. With acerbic wit and intellect, he traces the history of what it used to mean to be well-read and tells readers what it still means today. Using this delightful book as a means to an end, he reminds readers how the delicate charms of fiction can be at once wonderful and inspired and infuriating.
            On one level this is a book about novels: how they work, what they're about, what makes them good or bad, and how to talk about them. At a deeper level, this is a book in which one of the most intimate tête-à-têtes is described--one in which a reader meets a novel. Will a great love affair begin? Will the rendezvous end in disappointment? Who can say? In order for the relationship to take its appropriate course all the details must be clearly acknowledged and understood for their complexities: plot, point of view, character, style, pace, first and last sentences, and even beauty.
            Still, Sutherland knows a true understanding of fiction is more than a flirtation with text and style--it is a business. Taking his readers on a trip to the bookshop, he helps them judge a book by its cover based on design and color, wondering aloud what genre might be best, even going so far as to analyze one of the latest American bestsellers to further help the buying reader choose the novel that is right for him or her.
            In a book that is as wry and humorous as it is learned and opinionated, John Sutherland tells you everything you always wanted to know about how to read fiction better than you do now (but, were afraid to ask).

About this title

About the Author

John Sutherland is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. He has published and edited numerous books.  He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and also writes for The New York Times Book Review and London Review of Books. He was the committee chairman for the 2005 Man Booker Prize.

Reviews

Lower the lifeboats, the situation is dire. According to the oft- cited survey "Reading at Risk," which was published by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004 and has been justifiably worrying all those who care about books and reading ever since, the number of American adults who spend their free time reading literary fiction is rapidly sinking, statistically approaching the number of adults who have elective tracheotomies. At this rate of decline, highbrow novel readers will go under one by one, until, by the end of this century, there'll be only a few eccentric survivors left treading water, bookish versions of the last Shakers.

Out into this sea of despond rows John Sutherland. Best known in this country for his popular guides to 19th-century literature (graced with such chipper titles as: Is Heathcliff a Murderer? and Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?), Sutherland also boasts the gravitas of being, among other weighty accomplishments, the emeritus Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and the committee chairman for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. What better figure -- a veritable critical Colossus with one foot planted in the academy and the other in the Grub Street of awards and book reviewing! -- to woo a sluggish reading public away from the dark maw of American Idol-land back to the enduring pleasures of, say, To the Lighthouse?

Sutherland's new book, How to Read a Novel, sets out to remind readers about what a miraculous thing a good novel is and how much enlightening fun it can be to take one apart, starting with its dedication, font and copyright date. (He does a dazzling riff, for instance, on the implications of the multiple copyright dates for D.H. Lawrence's scandalous homage to love-under-the-gorse, Lady Chatterley's Lover). The target audience for How to Read a Novel is those readers -- overwhelmingly female -- who belong to book groups. We know this because Sutherland loses no opportunity to shower book groups with praise far more intoxicating than the wine usually served at their monthly gatherings. He exalts book clubs as cultural sites of "readers' resistance" to publishing-industry hype. He opines that reading groups, "unlike the typical university seminar . . . privilege the female voice," and he pooh-poohs the common criticism that many book clubs devote as much time to gossip as they do to literary exegesis by declaring that gossip and fiction go hand in hand: "Women have always been the best readers of fiction -- which, typically, is what gossip is: 'stories' memorialising the events of the community, tittle-tattle, telling tales out of school." Most wince-making of all is this loony piece of readerly flattery that Sutherland flings out at the end of Chapter One: "It is, I would maintain, almost as difficult to read a novel well as to write one well."

No, no, it is not. The awe we readers experience when losing ourselves in a great novel partly arises out of the sane awareness that never, in a million years, could we have constructed, say, the sentence "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into our past." Easy to read (especially after a glass or two of that tongue-loosening Chablis at the neighborhood book group); impossible to create.

When he's not busy pandering to book-club members and their charge cards, Sutherland is frequently patronizing them. Do folks who are literate enough to browse around bookstores really need to be informed that sometimes one can judge a book by its cover or that, "if a book has chapter titles, then they are worth scanning before purchase" or that the books in bookstores are generally shelved by genre? At moments such as these it's hard not to suspect that Sutherland's view of the common reader is about on par with Nathanael West's vision of the moronic masses in The Day of the Locust.

Too bad, because, at his most genial, Sutherland embodies that literary persona the Brits affect so flawlessly: the raconteur who, fueled by a good fire and a tumbler or two of Glenlivet, can rattle on knowledgeably about books for hours. How to Read a Novel is at its best when Sutherland forgets about trying to woo or (spare us!) educate his audience and, instead, just tosses out provocative opinions about literary culture, as when he offers a one-word response to the million-dollar question of "Why waste one's time by reading novels?" His answer is "race." He claims that fiction, unlike nonfiction, need not "pull its punches" when discussing "hot-button issues" such as race (The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Human Stain, Beloved), Islamic fundamentalism (The Satanic Verses), euthanasia (Sons and Lovers) or pedophilia (Lolita). Certainly this thesis, like so many others Sutherland proffers, could spark spirited book group discussions. Why, though, as the waters close over their heads, book groups should be reading How to Read a Novel instead of the genuine article is a question Sutherland doesn't tackle.

Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

With the literary forest growing by 10,000 novels per year, readers have long needed the kind of map Sutherland provides here. Some of the guidance he offers is cautionary: warnings against the snares in deceptive covers, misleading reviews, and best-selling groupthink. But Sutherland equips readers for the tasks of actually selecting a novel, understanding its text, and tracing the connections linking fiction to the real world around it. Readers thus learn how to negotiate the boundaries between various fictional genres, how to tease interpretive insights out of a book's dedication, and how to recognize the allusions tying one fictional narrative to others. But readers will thank Sutherland most for heightening their appreciation for a literary form through which bold writers confront bigotry, expose corruption, and illuminate history. It is truly an exceptional tutorial that opens a path into the politics in le Carre's taut plotting, the artistry of Flaubert's subtle portraiture, and the metaphysics of Dostoevsky's probing psychology. A key for unlocking an entire library. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312359888
• ISBN 13: 9780312359881
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272