How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 8, pp. 746-748. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710818153

“Novels can do many things. They can instruct, enlighten, confuse, mislead, soothe, excite, indoctrinate, misinform, educate and waste time”. This is how John Sutherland, until recently Lord Northcliffe Professor of English Literature at University College London, ends this delightful and conversational reflection on the appeal and use of novels. His name will be known to readers from numerous studies of the novel, of bestsellers, and literary puzzles (such as Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? from Oxford University Press, 1999). He has also been associated with literary prizes, having been chairman of the Man Booker prize committee in 2005. Informed, whimsical, wise, witty, urbane, sententious by turns, How to Read a Novel is the ideal introduction to anyone – the general reader, the student, the scholar wanting a relaxing but stimulating read – interested in novels and fiction.

He asks searching questions – what use are novels? why read fiction? – and raises sententious points – whether many novels published nowadays that choice is impossible, whether bestsellers and the trend in the book trade narrows rather than widens choice, and whether reviews are fair and even necessary. Mixing the learning of the scholar with the fluency of the regular columnist and radio expert (which Sutherland is), he explores what we mean when we say that a book is “only a novel”, what we really know about a novel if all we have done is seen the‐film‐of‐the‐book, and if readers of novels in bookshops and libraries are really influenced by prize‐giving. This is a book that shows a life‐time of reading at work, generously sharing insights and a love of books.

His expertise shows through, too, in his historical understanding of the novel, from Smollett through Thackeray to the present day, as well as in recent Man Booker authors like Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith and out‐and‐bestsellers like The Da Vinci Code and Harry Potter. His bibliography is in fact a reading list for the keen reader of novels – Airport and Oblomov, Moby Dick and The Time Machine, Wuthering Heights and Ivanhoe, Lucky Jim and Crash, The Bell Jar and The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm and Lolita. So are there too many books, and why is it that the codex format of the book survives against all rivals (like iCue e‐books and other media: who wants to read Bleak House on the Gutenberg website?)? Sutherland puts a good case for reading novels, based on how they can deal with “unspeakable” issues like race, go “where journos and politicos do not dare”, provide critiques of conventional liberal values: an example would be Andrea Levy's Small Island and Philip Roth's The Human Stain. What use are they? – they have been used to give readers ideas on how to disappear, blow up a city, get a husband, understand how the world of politics works, and foretell the future.

They can do all these things but we also encounter problems. For instance, worlds represented in novels often collide with the real world. Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park is fiction but also an oblique form of autobiography, while authors from Smollett to Ballard intervene in their fictions and refract planes of discourse. Worlds collide when we notice anachronisms in Kenilworth, wonder whether Doctorow's novel about General Sherman is “true” and how and if Paton's novels helped to shape South African politics. John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener, like the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Salman Rushdie, are as much engaged with contemporary politics as any fact can be. Then there is genre fiction, not just chicklit and romance and science fiction and detective fiction and graphic novels, but “The Wheel of Time” series and the “Left Behind” cycle with their haunting narratives and messages, a domain where “blog‐crit” plays more of a role than comment in traditional sources.

Sutherland sets these literary factors in an attractive bibliographical and book‐trade framework by devoting some of the 28 short snappy chapters to matters like book titles and famous first words, epigraphs and dedications, copyright and typography and dialogue, hardbacks and paperbacks (what do you buy in the bookshop and why?), reviews and reviewers (there seems no consensus and reviews are often hatchet jobs), and literary prizes (a theme he returns to time and time again, so “sharpen your critical ability against them”). Librarians reading this book will be challenged by his assumption that, as far as novels are concerned, the public library era lasted from the 1950s and to 1980s when “readers would experiment with unknown authors because is cost them nothing”. Today inducements offered by electronic bookstores are the fiction reader's “first port of call – as, thirty years ago, was the public library”. Enough to get one asking how true it is that people buy (at greatly discounted rates from the 3‐for‐2 deals) rather than borrow, and if the Demos case for public libraries, that they are really needed, at least for fiction, contains some truth.

As for the book‐of‐the‐film and film‐of‐the‐book, films may be good (think of David Lean's Great Expectations) but on the whole tend to “sentimentalize, simplify and sog up the source”. However, much they might act as gateways to the novel, ultimately all they do is “fix your mental imagery too rigidly” and “format one's sense of the printed original”. In this, as in what he has to say about bestsellers and prizes, how far knowing a setting helps one understand a novel (are we really Martians, observing but not really understanding!), arguing that novels can deal uniquely with hard issues and claiming that novels can educate and entertain, Sutherland raises issues that any intelligent reader of novels – and buyer of novels for library or bookstore or personal use – cannot ignore. A book to be read both from cover‐to‐cover and dipped‐into, rather like Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Allen Lane, 1998), urbane and hard‐hitting at the same time, confessedly partisan at times, not always convincing but always interesting. In a world of many books and confusing choices, this is sound advice and a sensible challenge indeed.