Catcher in the Rye, How to Read, Arsy-versy, Pope Francis, AI Cheating, Austen and abolition, Diaries in the 1560s, Conrad, highcounterculture, handwriting, memorising poetry, Graves vs Milton, Lewis

The irregular review of reviews, vol. VIII

I wouldn’t date a man reading Catcher in the Rye

The worst part of this article is the headline and the best part is the final paragraph, which made me want to read Conjugal Love, by Alberto Moravia. While I share some of the author’s worries about the decline of reading, it seems to me that at some point, literary people are going to have to decide if they want to spread the good news and encourage people to read great literature (all of it, any of it, and yes, that includes Catcher—a good book to read at all ages!) or whether they merely want to join in with the status-grabbing culture they pretend to despise, and complain a bit to garner themselves some attention. I keep saying that the philistine supremacy is real—well, it is often most real among the people who profess to dislike it. What is more philistine, to read a trash book or to spend your time being a snob on Twitter about a young woman on TikTok? This piece is yet another example of modern literary culture ironising the social(-media)-merry-go-round in order to make it acceptable that the author is a very willing and active participant in the whole thing.

There are two basic conclusions to be drawn from what this author observes among her friends: first, having status accrue to reading is fine and to be encouraged (we want reading to be high status and yes that involves some cafe posing! the first step towards being serious is aspiring to be serious which involves being unserious and pretending to be serious—seriously); second, you can either improve that status to encourage more people in to the garden of literature, or you can act as a gatekeeper to preserve a sense of exclusivity to yourself. The choices many literary people are making seem to belong more to the first category that the second.

I don’t doubt that some unpleasant men can be identified by their reading habits (nor that women should be attentive to such “red flags”), but it’s not a “ruse” that people follow trends and read what other people are reading. It’s normal behaviour. What we need to do is to set an example of reading what we think is valuable, to make use of this inherent characteristic of human behaviour rather than quibble and moralise about it while doing the exact same thing ourselves. Having scorned those people who pretend to read feminist works in order to attract women online, the author then quotes her friend saying this: “I always assume that the worst men I know read Kerouac. With the exception of Allen Ginsberg, the Beat generation is so overrated.”

Are these people supposed to know the Beats are overrated without reading them? What’s wrong with a man reading literary fiction (at a time when many men don’t)? How comfortable would we be to have a man write in the Times about the books that makes him assume a women to be “the worst”? Mostly what this does is to nudge the status spiral of literature down rather than up.

Sally Rooney is very good at skewering this kind of not-as-self-aware-as-it-seems culture and I look forward to her next novel being both popular among readers and a popular target of scorn among self-consciously literary readers.

Anyone who is enjoying Catcher at the moment, by the way, is well advised to read Franny and Zooey next, followed by The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen for a view from a similar period (though in Britain) of what it is like to be a teenage girl.

What and How to Read

Janan Ganesh wrote in the FT that “To read well is to ignore the now. This is true of no other art form, because no other art form is so time-intensive.” He does have a point of course—, but the idea that we should ignore modern books made me chuckle a little, because while Ganesh writes like a highbrow what he said brought to mind Virginia Woolf’s satire of middlebrow consumption habits: