`Need One Really Read More?'

Guilt by association is not always unfair. When certain readers and critics trumpet a book, it amounts to the opposite of an imprimatur: You can assume it is error-ridden and a waste of your precious time. Have Gabriel Josipovici or Terry Eagleton ever liked anything worth reading? Only a brave critic points out such things, and Joseph Epstein is a hero to honest, discerning readers everywhere. On Friday, in the Wall Street Journal, Epstein reviewed How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard, and he made me laugh out loud. I probably won’t read Bayard’s book, but Epstein’s review makes that task unnecessary:

“Mr. Bayard argues that the gaps in our reading shouldn't distress us. His thesis helps one own up to the fact that there are many books that one is supposed to admire but cannot. My own list would include Lolita, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, the novels of Hermann Broch, most of Walter Benjamin, all of Günter Grass. Then there are those writers who seem to have existed less to be read than to have had Susan Sontag write essays about them: Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Michel Leiris. To the not reading of books, to reverse Ecclesiastes, there is no end.

“As Mr. Bayard notes, one doesn't always have to read a book to grasp its value. If certain critics, for instance, are enthusiastic about a book, that is all I need to know. I cannot count how much time the ecstatic endorsement of books on the part of John Leonard, by instantly putting me off reading them, has saved me over the years. Authors, like restaurants, should perhaps be given a second but not a third chance. Having read one or two books by a writer who disappoints, need one really read more?”

I don’t even agree with Epstein on all of his specifics. I love Nabokov, Musil, Broch and Sebald, but Barthes, Leiris and Sontag were frauds with inexplicably loyal followings. Epstein’s point is that most bookchat amounts to posing and politics, an elaborate and ultimately sterile courtship ritual. Books should sustain us and give us pleasure. Leave bad tastes and ideology to grad students and the terminally hip. Let’s give the final word to Samuel Johnson, from his review of Soame Jenyns' A Free Enquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Evil:

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”