How Not to Read a Novel

[Dave Monroe]

The one bright book of life? Not this one
(Filed: 28/08/2006)

Sam Leith reviews How to Read a Novel: a User's Guide
by John Sutherland.

There's a good joke on the back of John Sutherland's
new book. "This is a truly important book: no novel
reader should travel the fictional road without it,"
reads a quote, attributed to "John Sutherland, critic
and literary guide." Underneath, this is glossed: "How
to read an endorsement: a user's guide. There are two
approaches: if you're a trusting soul, treat an
endorsement as you would the icing on a birthday cake
- dip your finger into it, taste and pay up. If you're
a suspicious kind of person, treat it as you would the
cheese on the mousetrap and keep your hand on your
wallet. I'd advise suspicion."

I'd advise suspicion, too. Sutherland, a literary
academic who seems to do much, much more journalism
than academic work, seems to have bashed this
featherlight volume out in a couple of spare
afternoons.
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"Novels," he writes, "can do many things. They can
instruct, enlighten, confuse, mislead, soothe, excite,
indoctrinate, misinform, educate and waste time [
]
And, at their highest pitch of achievement, novels can
indeed be the one bright book of life." Quite so.

Knowing how to read - in the fullest sense - enriches
the experience of doing so. It helps to have an
awareness of the way books relate to other books, for
example; and to think about the experience of
re-reading, as opposed to reading. So Sutherland
discusses these topics, offering scattered readings of
novels, many contemporary, by way of illustration.

He talks about the history of the codex book, tells us
what we can learn from copyright pages, offers
pointers on how to decipher blurbs (as above), advance
praise, jacket copy, and book reviews. He talks about
genre writing, and book titles, and covers. He chucks
in a chapter or two of intriguing but ephemeral gossip
about last year's Man Booker Prize (where he chaired
the judging panel). There are lots of books in
existence, he points out. How do you choose which one
to read? Perhaps, he suggests, you should buy it on
the basis of whether you enjoy page 69 in the
bookshop. Page 69 of this book is about Lady
Chatterley. Cunning.

It's a gumbo, then, of novel-related stuff, cheerily
stirred. But it is a thin gumbo - and that's not the
worst of it. First, the mistakes. Boy, there are a
lot. How to Read a Novel is sloppy to an extent that
would embarrass a journalist and should mortify an
academic.

The line from Milton is "Eyeless in Gaza at the mill
with slaves", not "Eyeless in Gaza he ground corn with
the slaves" - Sutherland's version isn't even a
pentameter. On the same page he describes "brave new
world" as being "Miranda's ejaculation on seeing a
handsome young man, Ferdinand, for the first time in
her life in The Tempest ". No it isn't. Ferdinand and
Miranda meet in Act One, and she's playing chess with
him - in Act Five - by the time she utters that line.
It is possible that she has had her eyes shut all that
time, but unlikely.

The well-known quote from The Silence of the Lambs is
"fava beans and a big Amarone"; Sutherland lifts the
film's version - "fava beans and a nice Chianti" - and
then misquotes even that. The madeleine incident does
not "open" À la recherche. It's not true that "no
authenticated photograph exists" of Thomas Pynchon. It
seems at least unlikely that "even junior school kids"
had mobile phones by the early 1990s. And vellum is
not made from the stomachs of animals, but from their
skins - something you'd think a man writing an entire
book in celebration of the codex would know.

Then, there's the style. Sutherland opens a paragraph
about browsing in online bookshops with a baffling non
sequitur. "Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?
asked Philip K Dick, as the title of his witty 1968 sf
fable." Well, as it happens, no he didn't. He asked
whether they dream of electric sheep. But what - apart
from the word "electronic" - does that have to do with
shopping at Amazon in any case?

How can someone whose life has been dedicated to
literature, in his chapter about film adaptations,
write a phrase as ugly as "the Merchant-Ivory lush
versionings [sic] of Forster's fiction stand out"? Or
one as naff as: "But what, then, of what Barthes
called la deuxième lecture - the second reading?" Of
course he bloody called it la deuxième lecture: he was
French.

I honestly haven't scoured this book for mistakes, and
I really have nothing against John Sutherland. But if
he's asking a tenner of the reader's hard-earned in
exchange for this stuff, it shows a certain contempt
for that reader not to have put a little more effort
into it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/08/27/bosut27.xml&sSheet=/arts/2006/08/27/bomain.html

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