'In the Middle of a Seismic Cultural Change'

Brooke Allen’s preface to Good Bones: Glorious Relics from the Age of Reading (Tivoli Books, 2025) will read to some like a eulogy delivered by a clinically depressed cleric: “The authors I’ve covered in this collection, though all were famous in the very recent past, are figures that will probably disappear in the post-literate society if they have not done so already.” 

It’s time to accept that aliteracy and illiteracy are no longer looming threats. They have already arrived and are thriving. As a critic, Allen is a realist not a deluded cheerleader. Nor does she scold us or applaud her own readerly accomplishments (she seems to have read everything). She holds no illusions about rallying the troops or turning the non-reading tide. It’s simply a reality. Her collection includes reviews of books, many first published in The New Criterion and The Hudson Review, by and about Oscar Wilde, Anthony Powell, Eudora Welty and John Updike, among others – figures we could have assumed until recently most bookishly educated people would have read or at least recognized by name. Her tone is not mournful or hectoring but matter of fact:

 

“We are in the middle of a seismic cultural change, as transformative as that which followed the appearance of the printing press half a millennium ago. And just as that invention turned the Western world into a literate society, we are now transitioning into a post-literate one. Despite universal public education, thirty percent of American adults read at the level of a ten-year-old. Which is not to say that the other seventy percent read at an adult level; many of them are not much more advanced, and a significant portion are functionally illiterate.”

 

In her reviews, Allen carries on dutifully, evaluating books with insight, skeptical intelligence and obvious pleasure. Her approach is never academic or pseudo-populist. She doesn’t write about certified masterpieces, books by Nabokov or the James Brothers, but often about writers once described as “middlebrow” who might today pass for “highbrow” – W. Somerset Maugham, Ogden Nash, Lord Berners, Sybille Bedford. Here she is reviewing a three-volume biography of the English poet John Betjeman:

 

“The obsession of academic critics with differentiating ‘major’ writers from ‘minor’ ones, and summarily dismissing the latter, serves the interest of no one but their fellow-academics and actively harms not only those authors they deem minor, but also that large majority of the public who reads novels and poems purely for pleasure, with no scholarly or careerist motives.”

 

This illustrates Allen’s unpretentious, non-academic approach to reading and reviewing. She positions herself as the latest incarnation of Dr. Johnson’s “common reader,” and continues:

 

“Within the academy, ‘major,’ at least since the heyday of Eliot and Pound, has tended to mean ‘difficult’ —possibly because difficulty supposes a need for expert interpretation and therefore justifies the existence of professional explicators. Kipling and Trollope, for example, so popular during the Victorian era as to have become an integral part of England’s cultural fabric, are not only ignored in modern universities but actively denigrated.”

Snobbery by professors of literature, of course, is part of the reason literature has turned into a harmless pastime, on a par with collecting beer cans or cultivating bonsai trees. Allen has a knack for reviewing writers who might otherwise be ignored as “non-literary,” who work in forms other than the usual novels and poetry. Eric Newby, for instance, the wonderful English travel writer, author of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958). Allen notes that Newby went to work for his father as a young man and never attended university:

 

“Perhaps it is this background that accounts for his steadfast refusal to lapse into the occasional mandarin riffs that Waugh, Fermor, and Wilfred Thesiger indulged in, and even occasionally [Peter] Fleming.”

 

Even books formerly deemed scandalous are largely forgotten. Take Samuel Butler and his posthumously published The Way of All Flesh (1903), once read by adolescents (including this one) as a sort of declaration of independence and defiance. Allen tells us “it would be hard to exaggerate the influence it once exerted over entire generations of angry young men and women.” Readers of this blog have told me they still read The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Allen concludes her review:

 

“The Way of All Flesh is indisputably his masterpiece. In this hugely entertaining novel Butler said many things that were at that time unsayable and even unthinkable. And in spite of the revolutionary social changes that have occurred over the last hundred years and more, a great deal of what he said is still unsayable, and still needs saying.”

 

The late Irish poet and critic Dennis O’Driscoll in 2005 published an essay, “The Library of Adventure”(The Outnumbered Poet: Critical and Autobiographical Essays, Gallery Books, 2013), that reads like an exultant celebration of reading by a boy from rural Ireland. O’Driscoll already was acknowledging the lingering demise of pleasure-driven reading, though his tone is more joyous than Allen’s. He writes, in words I think Allen would endorse:

 

“It is difficult to state precisely why reading is so essential. It is impossible to disentangle the linguistic pleasures from the moral insights, the wisdom from the knowledge, the cadence from the characterization. . . . The nearest adult experience I know to being a child, eagerly turning pages in the kitchen while my mother—hands gloved in a dishcloth—takes from the oven a sugar-dusted apple pie that is sweating cinnamon through its pores, is being a slow reader of a great book, entering a zone of timelessness. I suspect that it is only in such a state that we are detached enough from the attachments of the everyday to gain access to those profound truths and poignant yearnings that are the ultimate goal of serious readers and the richest reward a writer can bestow.”

 

[O’Driscoll, a marvelous poet, died on this date, December 24, in 2012 at age fifty-eight.]