Women

The tenuous condition of the novel was made clear in The Guardian last month where the statistics on buyers and readers affirmed that without female readers, as the article quoted Ian McEwan, the novel will die.

For those of us slogging away on keyboards and working out original stories, it is fortunate that women comprise about 52% of the population or else we might be retraining to do something useful.

The 80/20 rule governs many things and the male novel reader is no exception. Men do read novels but they prefer tightly defined genres, sci-fi and horror. The article was discussing literary or commercial fiction, that is, which is not bound by such predefined rules on plot character and so on.

I do not intend to suggest measurable benefits of literary novel reading, apart from augmenting my bank account, because I do not believe such evidence based argument works. Like any social activity it is practiced because it gives intangible pleasures, not quantifiable benefits; for instance, broadening the mind and enabling social contact and discourse. To advocate measurable benefits in this case is a form of philistinism.

There is an MBA school which has novel reading on its curriculum. It is promoted as a way to extend the understanding, even the imagination, of the students into situations that they might encounter. Tolstoy as your wing-man. Such utilitarianism is essential to a philistine.

It’s perhaps in cooking that solving the dilemma of the male novel reader can be found.

In Eating for England Nigel Slater gives some unflattering portraits of the typical male cook. It is a culturally British stereotype which in these ‘woke’ times could cause offense because of its simple reductionism. Nevertheless, Slater’s caricatures are true in a way that clichés are true.

Slater’s male cooks are show offs, easily taken in by the expensive and measurably best, things like Extra Virgin Olive Oil and flashy fatuous appliances. He draws a nice cameo of the typical cook before the era of food porn, that is with the signature dish, dosed with chili or Tabasco, or both, and equal portions of smug pride and defensiveness about its qualities.

In the last twenty years the social acceptability of culinary knowledge amongst Anglo-Saxon males has birthed, according to Slater, into the pedant who knows mushrooms, vinegars, condiments, Chinese seasonings in the way engineers can roll off car stats and various amplifiers’ RMS: the measurable signs of status and achievement.

What occurred with cooking needs to happen with male novel reading habits.

It’s hard to believe that Eliot (George), Dickens, Trollope, Balzac, Maupassant and others all depended on female readers, primarily, because male and female literacy at that time would have been asymmetrical, biased to men, so the potential female readership was smaller. Additionally, the stories were in paid periodicals and male earnings were higher. An academic may qualify or refute these conjectures.

Social acceptance and utility in the way that women consume and join together over books is one way to increase novel reading. Another way may be to promote a book’s features, for example, one of my favorite books, Absalom, Absalom! has the longest sentence in the canon of English literature. A book jacket proclaiming a 1,288 word sentence just says, big measurable syntax. Come on lads, get it in!

©Copyright Guy Cranswick 2020. All Rights Reserved.

The eternal classic

There is no reason spending valuable time on something that is not significant. As the Paris bookshop Brentano’s once had printed on a T-Shirt, ‘So many books, so little time’. With this cornucopia – and not in a good way –it’s nearly impossible to navigate through the choice.

Fortunately retailers and publishers make it simple: the classic list. The classic says in a quiet donnish voice (that’s Oxford Don, not Sicilian Don) that a book is worthy in so many ways; it has been enjoyed for decades, hundreds of years even, and each year new readers have drawn a plenitude of joy, lessons and rewards from it.

That last part was a fast forward into blurb language. Shocking. It illustrates a real problem with the classic, and that is, it’s very easy to slip into hyperbole.

That fault is also evident in speech, as for instance in idiomatic Australian where the epithet “classic” is freely given to any action which benefits another, or in some rebukes authority however indirectly, such as, for example, obtaining beer after closing time, or taking a sick day from work to go surfing. The interchangeable sobriquet ‘legend’, more often abbreviated to ‘ledge’ or ‘you ledge’ has similar status, and for the same highly commendable actions in pursuit of active pleasure.

One way or another, being classic is the best there is, it is an indisputable cynosure.

One person’s classic is not another’s. I have reviewed some Dickens lately and my own ambivalence to the work, apart from a couple of books, is still the same. I can’t quite see why Nabokov held him in such esteem, yet he loathed Balzac, who I prefer, and for the same reasons that Nabokov hated. I won’t go into the reasons now over the difference between those two authors.

Apart from being read long after the books were initially published, and the authors’ own lifetimes, classics are a varied diverse body of work. Cold Comfort Farm is a classic but then so is The Idiot.

Occasionally newspapers like to perpetrate a prank on agents by sending them classic books as submissions and then republishing the rejection letters. Sometimes the retitled book is noticed but not in many cases. It’s probably true that most classics were not seen as better when they hit someone’s in tray as manuscripts and then sold poorly at first, but time alters reading and perception. It’s mysterious process of filtering.

There is some discussion about what constitutes a classic. I read a blog where a bookseller said it was all a bit moot. I recall from formal English lessons that a book had to be over fifty years old before it could be called classic. Presumably as copyright laws are extended, that will be moved too.

In the future, we can be sure, that machines will read the manuscripts as the task of reading and assessing will, like basic trading on stock exchanges, be utilized by algorithms interpreting texts using exabytes of data to contextualize dozens of criteria. They will also make forecasts on projected sales amongst defined market demographics and, in all probability, know all the other books on readers’ shelves and readers.

Whether in the future classics will be real or just declared like a singer’s autobiography is a bit hazy. The word will remain, as it has for ages, the best, the ultimate, and most iconic in the marketing lexicon.

Guy Cranswick
21st May 2014