Why I read — in defence of the novel
This piece originally appeared in the Summer issue of Alvar Magazine
Novels do not fare well in an age of distraction. Even as I write this my phone is buzzing with instant messages, an exciting game of rugby warbles on the television and I must constantly resist the urge to check Facebook.
In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay in which he outlined the cost of reading versus the cost of smoking cigarettes. Even Orwell, a voracious reader, found his annual tobacco bill to be higher than his spend on reading. His conclusion was that reading was not unpopular due to expense but rather that other pursuits — the dogs, the pictures, the pub — were more exciting pastimes.
In 2014 we can be fairly certain that smoking is still more expensive than reading. Even a modest habit would cover the cost of two new paperbacks or Kindle editions per week. The difference is that other pursuits are even greater in number, much lower in cost and available 24/7 at the touch of a button. Our generation’s limiting resource in our quest for entertainment is certainly not money or lack of choice — it’s time.
The decline of reading for pleasure, particularly among the young, is beginning to attract the attention of researchers. Aware of my own declining reading habit and with a vague anxiety that it wasn’t a good thing, I set myself a target last year to complete, with enjoyment rather than mere speed, two literary novels per month. This meant no speed reading or technological assistance, I was forced to make enough time in the day to complete my goal. I didn’t manage it, in the end scraping through 17 for the year, but I remembered something I had forgotten: why I read novels at all, and why I think they’re important.
As literary fiction faces more competition in its struggle to remain relevant, it is important to recognise the impact it has on our development and to make time each day to read. Why do I believe that, in a free market of competing interests that are cheaper and easier to enjoy, literary novels deserve such special treatment? I will outline my reasons below.
1) They nurture our sense of empathy
Novels tells us more about what it is to be human than any other art form. Through the development of characters and their responses to certain stimuli, we are able to relate to the strengths, weaknesses and peccadilloes of fictional strangers sometimes better than those of our closest friends. We weep with them when they lose their loved ones, we hate those who deceive them for personal gain, we suffer with their unrequited love. We feel their happiness and their sadness, for a few brief minutes at a time, as if it were our own.
The more sensitive, too, we become to the lives of people who are alien to us. Novels bridge divides in class, race, creed and time to allow us perspectives that we cannot gain from studying history or journalism alone. The more sensitivity we develop in our understanding of these fictional characters, the more practiced we become at empathising in reality.
2) They increase our understanding of motive
Observing the behaviour of fictional characters gives us an understanding of motive that can take years to recognise in our relationships with real people. When characters trick and manipulate each other, for instance, we learn about the darker side of human nature in a way that our naivety, prejudice or willful blindness will often preclude in our real relationships.
In allowing us to analyse characters both internally and from a distance, novels empower us with knowledge and thought processes that we rarely turn in on ourselves or on those we know in real life. That learning becomes part of us, even if only by osmosis rather than conscious effort. Reading a handful of classics, therefore, gives us a head start in understanding human behaviour that would otherwise come only through long and painful experience.
3) They stimulate our imagination
Television and cinema, if well made, do not require us to make a leap of creative faith in our own minds. In those media the visual and aural stimulation is provided for us, we need only decide whether we’re convinced enough to suspend our disbelief. The novel, by contrast, forces us to create entire worlds in our own imagination. A good novelist gives us all the tools we need to build that world, but from that point on we are in charge of how it looks and feels.
4) The sheer pleasure of it
A simple point but one that deserves to be made. A great novel is, for all the reasons above and more, a source of unutterable enjoyment. Whether through the cathartic release of pain or the simple joy of a compelling plot, a good novel is an undertaking that pays its way in pleasure. There is, too, something enjoyable in the feeling of completing a “difficult” book. Who has not toiled their way through War and Peace only to come out the other side a triumphant, if smugger, person?
My own love of reading developed through my mother. Born into a working class family in the Black Country as once-great industries began their inexorable decline, her love of reading and the English language inspired her to become a journalist. In DH Lawrence she found a voice that she could relate to, a writer who was not afraid to delve into the forbidden topics of love and sex. In Lawrence, too, she saw the decline of a certain way of English life and its transition into something new. The very way of life that, 50 years on, she could see itself drawing to a close in the collapsing factories of her neighbourhood. Though Lawrence’s world must initially have seemed light years from her own, the parallels between them helped her to make sense of her own life and the personal aspirations so far removed from those of her parents.
The same books that she collected while growing up filled the bookcases of my childhood home. As a child I was told many things that I could not do. I could not leave the premises, for instance, or play computer games. I was never, however, told what I had to do. I could not leave the premises, but an acre of wild garden was my playground. I could not play computer games, but the two towering bookcases on the landing were mine to explore. Slowly, through the novels that I found there, I grew to understand a world far beyond the confines of the garden.
Novels eventually began to put my own life in context and to help me understand a world that terrified me and to which I didn’t feel I belonged. In the bleak, friendless early-teenage years after my father’s suicide, I found solace in the apathy of Meursault in Camus’ L’Etranger. After dad’s life insurance money propelled me into a public school full of people far above my social stratum, Brideshead Revisited helped me to understand British class identity and the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously wanting in and out of the worlds of money and privilege. Later, as an undergraduate, I became obsessed with Philip Roth, whose hysterical portrayal of compulsive masturbator Alexander Portnoy was a source of both entertainment and anxiety…
Through novels I grew up and without them I would not be the man I am today. They taught me, inspired me and consoled me when I was most alone. That is why I make time each day to read and why I believe that every one of us should. Time when the smartphone’s din is silenced and the competition of free market entertainment is put into abeyance. The novel deserves such privileges.
