'How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide':Criticism for Beginners

So much for the death of the book. People have been predicting the demise of the hardback for over a century now — in his novel “The Time Machine” (1895), H. G. Wells imagined whole libraries turned to dust — but if book production is anything to go by, Wells was a worrywart. In the 1600s the total number of books available to a literate Englishman was about 2,000. Now, more than 2,000 are published a week, with 10,000 new novels every year. Given a 40-hour reading week, a 46-week working year and three hours per novel, you would need 163 lifetimes to read them all, John Sutherland calculates in his new book, “How to Read a Novel,” which aims to be a user-friendly guide to negotiating this morass. “Done well, a good reading is as creditable as a 10-scoring high dive,” he writes. “It is, I would maintain, almost as difficult to read a novel well as to write one well.” A dubious but nevertheless terrifying proposition, calling to mind the girl at the cocktail party in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” who declares to the room, “I finally had an orgasm, and my doctor said it was the wrong kind.” Is Sutherland serious? We can be scored on this stuff? By whom?

Sutherland is a well-known academic, critic and scholar. He was also chairman of the 2005 Man Booker judging panel that caused an uproar by giving the award to John Banville’s novel “The Sea” — “an icy and overcontrolled exercise in coterie aestheticism,” according to a writer in The Independent, as well as “a travesty of a result from a travesty of a judging process.” It’s hard not to read this book as a riposte of sorts, although anyone expecting the low-down on the judging process, or even an impassioned defense of Banville, will be disappointed. Sutherland recounts the affair with a tone of lofty perplexity: “How can a novel, examined so dutifully and on so many fronts, be judged at the same time as utterly bad and outstandingly good?” Later, he runs over Banville, taking him to task for misreading a squash game scene in a review of Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday.” “Banville does not understand the game of squash,” he writes, indisputably.

Would that the novel were so easily dispatched. What we have here is a biopsy of the form, from intertextuality (“it does give the reader a pleasing sense of ascendancy”), to CIP and ISBN numbers (“Do you know what those acronyms stand for? Do you care?”). This is not a bad idea, but Sutherland’s book seems a little unsure of itself, or its readership, and frequently courts the obvious. I liked his point about the first sentences of “Anna Karenina” (“All happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way”) and “Pride and Prejudice” (“It is a truth universally acknowledged ...”)being neither universally acknowledged nor even true for the novels they begin. But he also points out, in his chapter on titles (“titles play an important role”), that “The Odessa File” seems a title “reminiscent less of fiction than of an MI5 top-secret report.” Er, isn’t that the point? And is it right to praise the opening sentence of “1984” (“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13”) as an example of narrative suspense, on the grounds that it “will not yet divulge” the fact that Winston Smith is, in the coming pages, doomed to be captured and brainwashed by Big Brother? Is Sutherland really praising the first sentence of “1984” for not giving away the entire plot? Don’t most first sentences achieve that modest aim?

None of this would matter if Sutherland didn’t set such store by intelligence as the high bar we all have to aim for. “The ability to read a novel intelligently, I would maintain, is the mark of a mature personal culture,” he writes. The word recurs: “A clever engagement with a novel is ... one of the more noble functions of human intelligence.” And again: the key to choosing what to read is “intelligent browsing.” Does anyone go near the word “intelligent” without an armed escort these days? Until properly defined, it’s a word of use only to those in the business of spreading fear; and indeed, Sutherland’s book is curiously fretful and anxious, rising to a ringing endorsement of an actual novel only in its final pages: Sutherland loves Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” — good for him! — but winces at an offhand comment by Alain de Botton that the novel is “the most overrated ever.” “Perhaps he has a superior critical sensibility which, more correctly than mine, judges Thackeray inferior,” Sutherland worries. “I hope not.” A curiously sweaty entreaty with which to end his book: please God, let me be the superior one!

Anyone interested in the way people really read novels ought to turn to Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns for The Believer magazine: they’re a real-time, on-the-ground account of one man’s monthly battle to square the number of books he buys with the number of books he actually reads, while fighting off the competing demands of TV, kids and soccer. Cultural anxiety is a good subject for a book; but Sutherland is, perhaps, too much its creature.