I’ve always been bothered by the notion that literature is worth reading chiefly for what it teaches us about life. Of course we learn things about life from literature: it’s self-evident that a book may make its reader wiser or more philosophical in some measure consequent upon the nature of the book itself, the timing and circumstances of the reader’s encounter with it and the reader’s openness to transformation. But there is also something intolerably banal about the idea that the main reward of reading a novel by Leo Tolstoy or George Eliot should be my becoming a slightly better person. Partly I am troubled that the motive of pleasure recedes so far from view. This kind of emphasis on self-improvement also steals the limelight from a more stringently cognitive aspect of reading. Not the simple fact of transportation, of being lost in a book, but rather a form of intellectual play that seems to me ultimately as ethical as its lesson-driven counterpart: ethical in the sense of its developing one’s capacities of comprehension to the fullest, taking the jumbled furniture of the human mind (the meager apparatus of Lear’s “poor, bare, forked animal”) and teaching it to make meaning out of words. To make the idea that literature tells us about life the primary reason for reading Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and their like degrades the very thing that draws me to literature in the first place: the glimmer of the sentences, not first and foremost the wisdom contained in them. By stripping literary language down to its constituent parts, I perversely gain a sense of transcendence, an emotional as well as intellectual liberation that comes by way of the most precise consideration of details of language.
All sentences are not created equal. Some are more interesting, more intricate, more attractive or repellent than others. This book originated in a series of lectures I gave at Columbia University in the fall of 2009. The course was called “On Style,” and we read through what I think of as one of the central genealogies of the European realist novel (Emma, Madame Bovary, The Golden Bowl and the opening chunk of In Search of Lost Time) along with a more idiosyncratic set of sequels in style: shorter pieces by Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Wayne Koestenbaum, Luc Sante and Gary Lutz, and then W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, with Sebald representing the culmination of one line of thought as to what might be done in the novel by way of a Proustian first-person subjective narrating intelligence and Hollinghurst standing for the radical reimagining of a third-person mode of narration associated with Gustave Flaubert and Henry James. That sequence of readings remains the core of the book, though I have trimmed the discussions of Flaubert and Marcel Proust and permitted myself to roam more freely and waywardly between texts and topics than the license of a class syllabus necessarily permits. Most of all, I have allowed my extracurricular reading to inflect the book’s observations about style and sensibility. I am in possession of a novel-reading habit that invites terms like compulsion or addiction, and that on the face of things has little to do with my working life as a professor of literature. (Being a fast and voracious reader is not a necessity for academic life, merely a valuable convenience.) Visiting our family in the United States the summer I turned five, my English grandmother was sufficiently worried about the extent and intensity of my reading that she wanted my mother to take me to the doctor, and my reading undoubtedly remains excessive, unbalanced.
My guide, in terms of the selection of texts, has been personal taste, not representative coverage of the full range of possibilities for literary language in English. One reader of an earlier draft of this book commented on its having been fairly standard, in the middle of the twentieth century, to tell a story about the great tradition of fictional prose style that began with Austen or Flaubert, proceeded through James and Proust to high modernism (James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Woolf) and thence to Samuel Beckett or the French new novel (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute et al.). To some extent I take that story for granted, but it’s not a story I see the need to retell. Indeed, I am not really interested in making an argument about style, what it is and its genealogies in the Anglo-American novel. The rationale for the inclusion of each passage I write about is often just that it speaks to me strongly—that it has a high glimmer factor—or that it lets me single out some aspect of style on which I wish to comment. If there is an argument here, it operates in the fashion of a field notebook, by way of selection and description, as an entomologist or ornithologist might not merely transmit something of a way of looking, sharpening the tools of perception, but perhaps also begin to elicit a deeper comprehension of how to know which objects most reward such scrutiny.
Francis Spufford called his memoir of childhood reading The Child That Books Built, and like Spufford, I feel that I have been largely shaped by the books I have read. I was a “word child,” as one of Iris Murdoch’s novels has it: novels were a means of escape, of transport from the quotidian (childhood is full of long boring stretches!), first into worlds like Narnia or Laura Ingalls Wilder’s prairie but later into spaces less physically rendered and more purely conjured as constructions of language and intellect, T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, say, or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor’s cell. As a precocious reader in late childhood and adolescence, one is forced to find intellectual guides in odd places: Robert Graves was an important one, leading me by way of I, Claudius to The White Goddess and from there to Sir James George Fraser’s The Golden Bough, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici; the detective novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Nicholas Blake sent me to Jacobean revenge tragedies and the pastiche work of Thomas Lovell Beddoes and A. E. Housman, and Ezra Pound’s anthologies and works of criticism (especially Confucius to Cummings and The ABCs of Reading) opened up a route to Chapman’s Homer and Hardy’s lyrics. I cannot reread John Fowles in adulthood without my enjoyment of the novels being overshadowed by a sense of the unpleasant personality revealed by the posthumous publication of his journals, but The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman opened up worlds for me then. Perhaps my most indispensable guide was Anthony Burgess: the verbal playfulness of his Enderby novels in the first instance, but also the sub-Joycean byplay of his Shakespeare novel Nothing Like the Sun (in which Burgess voluntarily restricted his vocabulary to words Shakespeare could feasibly have known, allowing only a single exception, spurgeoning, a verb he coined to honor the critic Caroline Spurgeon), the intense linguistic inventiveness of A Clockwork Orange, the sparky polemical engagements of books like The Wanting Seed and The End of the World News.
And then I obtained a copy of Burgess’s little guide 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, and I was transfixed. It is a peculiar and cranky book, one that prompts the suspicion of its having been slapped together in considerable haste (in an interview, Burgess once claimed it had been written in two weeks). Novels are presented in chronological order, two or three for each year, perhaps contributing to some of the peculiarities of the selection (things like the omission of A House for Mr. Biswas or the inclusion of Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, which is pretty certainly not one of the best novels written in English since 1939). This slender volume, though, led me to Pale Fire and Giles Goat-Boy and The Alexandria Quartet and At Swim-Two-Birds, to Alasdair Gray’s peculiar and brilliant Lanark (aside from its other distinctions, one of the great literary representations of skin disease) and V. S. Naipaul’s dreadfully bleak A Bend in the River. One of the most significant reading experiences I had as a consequence of 99 Novels was Gravity’s Rainbow, which I am not sure I would have persisted with otherwise at age fifteen, but which Burgess’s praise persuaded me to make my way through with the help of a dictionary. One of the most striking features of Thomas Pynchon’s style in this book is the crashing together of a number of different specialized vocabularies, a unique mélange that can be effectively evoked by synecdoche (smegma, Ouspenskian, Poisson distribution); it transformed my sense of what could be done in language.
I was lucky to be a student at an excellent independent school in Philadelphia—Germantown Friends School—that was also attached to a library that transcended the limitations of the ordinary school library, the Friends Free Library of Germantown. I worked there during summers in high school, and its small but excellent adult fiction collection, tucked away on an upstairs balcony, served almost as my private preserve during those years; the children’s room at the Friends Free saw much heavier use, while adult readers of popular fiction would have sought out the much larger, more up-to-date and reader-friendly collection a few blocks away at the large public library branch on Chelten Avenue. The Friends Free held many of the books Burgess recommended—it was that sort of collection, high-middlebrow with not much to recommend itself to a reader less bent on self-education and mind expansion than my teenage self. That was where I found Gravity’s Rainbow and the novels of Muriel Spark, Joyce Carol Oates and Doris Lessing, indeed of Burgess himself. I have a vivid memory of sitting at age thirteen in my polyester kilt and polo shirt on the bleachers at a Friday afternoon lacrosse game, immersed in Burgess’s Earthly Powers (“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me”) and very much hoping that the coach wouldn’t puncture my readerly bubble by subbing me in. I was a terrible lacrosse player, but I liked the arcane names for the defensive positions I usually played, point and cover point; it speaks to the extent of my literary preoccupations that I often accidentally misremembered the second as “counter point,” as in the Aldous Huxley title Point Counter Point (Huxley, according to Burgess’s somewhat unbalanced account, having written three of the best ninety-nine novels published in English since 1939).
In the meantime I was also reading and rereading Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Josephine Tey, Alice Walker, Diana Wynne Jones, the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson: really, whatever came to hand. I experienced a shock of recognition when I came across a passage, quoted in Stephen Burt’s biography of Randall Jarrell, in which Jarrell describes his own childhood: “A shrew or a hummingbird eats half its weight in twenty-four hours; when I was a boy I read half my weight in a week. I went to school, played, did the things the grown-ups made me do; but no matter how little time I had left, there were never books enough to fill it—I lived on the ragged edge of having nothing to read.”1 I read greedily, omnivorously and much too quickly for my own comfort: The Tin Drum and Terra Nostra were usefully copious fodder, and so were Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels and the complete works of Piers Anthony, Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, Robert Ludlum and a host of others.
Going to university and gaining firsthand access to one of the world’s great research libraries would open up new dimensions of reading to me. I had hungered illicitly as a high school student for Barthes and Jacques Derrida, whose names were mentioned in the Sunday supplements but whose writings I would not have known how to get hold of. I remember with a tinge of remorse (it was certainly neither the first nor the last time I spent the night at a friend’s house lost in a book) plucking S/Z from a shelf in my friend S.’s bedroom the summer after our high school graduation; her stepmother, to whom the book belonged, had done graduate work in literature, and Barthes’s approach to literary analysis held for me the force of revelation. Now I immersed myself in the writings not just of Barthes and Derrida but of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Gérard Genette, Victor Shklovskii and many others. A few years later, in graduate school, I would become a serious reader of John Locke and David Hume and Adam Smith and Edmund Burke and William Hazlitt. I have always had a particular soft spot for the novelist-essayists, writers like George Orwell and Rebecca West and James Baldwin whose genius resides more in the texture of thought in the prose than in one particular individual novel, but I would also increasingly encounter works of scholarship that possessed the near-magical force and clarity of my favorite novels: Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions, John Passmore’s The Perfectibility of Man. Novels no longer had to serve as my proxy for the whole world of ideas.
The immersive reading of my childhood was a great gift, that ability to transport myself by losing myself in a book; so was the wide and deep exploratory reading of adolescence, with Burgess and others as my guide, and then the more intellectually focused reading I began to do at age seventeen or eighteen. But all along, from earliest childhood, I was practicing and honing a set of reading skills that would become not just a valuable professional or personal asset, a mode at once of consolation and of academic self-advancement, but actually my chief way of being in the world. This reading, it would not be hyperbolic to say, is what makes life itself worthwhile: there are other things I like to do also (running, swimming, yoga, eating cake), but I think I would die if I didn’t have reading to protect me from the buzz of unwanted thoughts, the tedium of everyday existence, the stresses and strains of human interaction, etc. etc. This mode of reading has something in common, as I have already suggested, with the natural historian’s way of looking closely and lovingly at things, of describing in order to understand, an orientation I associate especially with writers like Oliver Sacks or the British paleontologist Richard Fortey. It involves the application of a critical intelligence, more neutrally observing than judging or summing up and yet very ready to make selections and discriminations when they are called for. This kind of reading has been as much a compulsion for me as the more purely escapist forms of novel-reading to which I remain in thrall. Looking very closely at the style and techniques of certain literary works, books that will repay near-infinite amounts of reading and rereading, seems to me at once perversely unworldly and profoundly practical, at one and the same time supremely playful and deadly in earnest. It is what I spend a great deal of my time doing in the classroom: it may be valuable to arrive at broad thematic generalizations about a work or an author, but it strikes me as rash to try to answer the big questions about what something means if you can’t yet parse the meanings of the words in one dense enigmatic sentence.
Reading Style is not my own 99 Novels. It has less to say about which books must be read than about how to read. That said, the book does offer a sort of anthology of prose styles, the primary logic for inclusion being strong personal preference rather than representative selection. In that sense, it’s not a genealogy or taxonomy so much as it is a sampler of sentences I have loved. (Beckett is a notable omission, perhaps because I love his plays much more passionately than his prose fiction; play texts are outside the scope of this book, although I have long had a yen to write a little book on the history from earliest times to the present day of the stage direction, which seems to me to bear an interesting relationship to the forms of notation novelists would come to develop for representing human movement in third-person narration.)
The unit of taste in this case is the sentence, sometimes the paragraph, its structure and sensibility, its fugitive feel on the tongue. I strongly experience the allure of a certain type of box of chocolates not so much because of the chocolates themselves as because of the exquisite nature of the choice offered in map or legend. In my mother’s family, that paper guide was known as a “suggester”: a chart of sorts representing each chocolate’s exterior and signaling (graphically, verbally) the delights contained therein. If I were choosing a box of Jacques Torres chocolates for someone else, I would pick the dark-chocolate selection because of its clear gastronomical superiority, but if I were buying it just for myself, a decadent and unlikely prospect, I would choose milk chocolate; dark chocolate may be aesthetically preferable to milk, but I like it much less than its sweeter, less pungent counterpart. My taste in prose differs from my taste in chocolate, but it similarly lacks a sense of proportion (“Truth is disputable, taste is not”). I love anchovies, I hate dill, but it would be absurd to construe my preferences as objective verdicts on the respective merits of those two foodstuffs. When I loathe a book, though, my passionate contempt is colored partly by my conviction that it’s morally as well as aesthetically pernicious. I feel furious or even outraged by, say, the sentimentality of Markus Zusak’s young-adult Holocaust novel The Book Thief or the cultish paranoia of Mark Danielewski’s intricately self-protective House of Leaves; this is one of the ways in which morality enters into even the most stringently formalist ways of reading, and I will return later to the complex antagonisms and interdependencies that unite reading for the sentence and reading for the heart.