'Simply Leaving Me Flat Cold'

It’s a common enough human event: one reader enjoys a book and recommends it enthusiastically to another reader. Long before Twitter and book clubs, people were doing this sort of thing. It’s a casually generous act, wishing to share pleasure with another. 

When this happens I like to report back to the reader making the suggestion – whether I read the book and if I liked it. A reader I hadn’t previously known recommended a novel published several years ago. I seldom read contemporary fiction but it sounded potentially interesting, so I borrowed a copy from the library. I read the first eight pages and put it down – not for me. I’m jealous of my reading time. When young, I could plow through anything. It was a matter of honor to finish every book I started reading. No more. In this case I was tempted to close the book after two pages. The narrative voice was childish and strident, not someone with whom I would choose to spend my time. I thought I was being tolerant by finishing eight pages.

 

I told my reader of my experience with the book, thanked him for thinking of me and urged him to keep the suggestions coming. He replied by calling me a snob and, inevitably, a fascist, among other things. He asked how I could read James Joyce but not Novelist X. He seemed to be getting angrier as he continued writing his email. It took him four sentences before he deployed his first obscenity. Not the ideal way to nurture trust in a fellow reader.

 

I thought of something Philip Larkin had written. In 1957, The London Magazine sent a list of questions to Larkin and eight other writers. Their responses were published in the magazine’s May issue. Larkin’s, titled “The Writer in His Age,” begins:

 

“My only criticism of a writer today, or any other day, is that he writes (as I think) badly, and that means a great many things much more certainly than it means ‘non-engagement’; being boring, for instance, or hackneyed, pretentious, forced, superficial, or – the commonest -- simply leaving me flat cold. Therefore, if I find a novel or poem the reverse of all these things – gripping, original, honest, and so on – I shall be much too grateful to take up a quarrel with its author or over motives of material.”

 

The novel I tried to read possessed all the qualities identified by Larkin – “boring,” etc. I held up my end of the bargain. The novelist and my reader did not.

 

[“The Writer in His Age” is collected in Larkin’s Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews (Faber and Faber, 2001).]