Are book clubs for people who love and understand literature – or for people who read as a hobby and must not under any circumstances be depressed or disturbed by what they read?
AM I THE only writer in the world who is confused by book-clubs? Am I the only person who grits their teeth at the mere mention of these gatherings, cosy or savage depending on the members, the personal agendas, and even sometimes the alcohol consumed? What is it that makes what should be a motivated exploration of books – and even literature – into something that sounds like a DIY kit for the death of literary possibility, never mind some understanding of what goes into the making of a book?
I listened to the Tubridyradio show recently and one of the programme guests spoke about what sounded like a fairly good book-club set-up. It wasn't a Friends Only book-club; nor was it an Inner Arctic Intellectual Elitist Freeze-in; it wasn't an inhospitably led group either; nor did it feature the presentation of a gargantuan feast when the necessary discussion was out of the way and people could let their ears back. These people sounded as if they cared about books, they prioritised reading by switching off the telly or going to bed early, and when they came together adopted sensibly constructed rules. The host for each evening chose the book, no debate about it, and off they went.
BUT WHAT I heard next bothered me, as so often when book-club reps begin their casual public assault on their subjects. Some books under discussion in book-clubs in recent years have included We Need to Talk about Kevinby Lionel Shriver, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. By the same token, Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, Claire Kilroy's Tenderwire, Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People, have featured in the clubs. The range of books covered is extensive, sometimes eclectic, ranging from popular commercial fiction to aspirational literature. You have brilliant Banville mixing with feisty Kathy Reichs, John Connolly with psyche-excavating Colm Tóibín, Kate Grenville, Anne Tyler et al.
The Roadwas touched on in the discussion. Cormac McCarthy's arguably magnificent but chilling post-nuclear disaster vision of a father and son in survival mode, belongs to a genre which attempts to look at causes and outcomes, both in terms of human interaction and the grimmer world that humans inhabit. The book did not appeal to the speaker, despite urgings from the programme presenter, because, astonishingly, she did not want to be disturbed. I heard her say the words, "I don't want to be disturbed." She had also found Lionel Shriver's work, about a thoroughly horrifying boy and his nihilistic and cruel destruction of all that is supposed to be valued in human terms, to be depressing.
And this is where many book clubs fail. It is difficult to know whether clubs are peopled by readers who must not under any circumstances be depressed or disturbed by what they have read, or merely that those who open their mouths with such authority on the subject have no grasp of the world of books, beyond reading as a hobby. I realise that I’ll be called elitist for saying that, but from a writer’s point of view this is all ghastly news, although not new news. Furthermore, I do realise that many book clubs are composed partly of writers, so there’s obviously a range of opinion on the subject.
As book-club representatives pick, pore and sniff like dogs moving through rubbish for something tasty – texts that writers spend considerable hours of their lives thinking about, researching and composing – they crucially fail to understand what writing is about. For a national culture that holds itself in some regard with regard to its literariness, this is interesting and raises doubts about the manner in which we have come to view literature. Such readers have not moved beyond the most basic concept of literature as entertainment. Of course, there are many writers who write primarily to entertain, and even some who don’t set out to entertain, miraculously and by default are entertaining.
Many of the clubs pick up books whose genesis is probably based on a writer’s non-autobiographical, ie fictionalised, preoccupations such as conflict, position, emotional life or historical sense – existential stuff depending on the writer – and these problems are gradually hung on to a narrative of some kind. The point of it all is exploration.
If readers become “depressed” by what they read, they are not thinking enough in the first place and I say good luck to the writer who depresses such readers.
Part of some writers’ work is, by definition, to disturb. To cause inner disturbance. In certain cases, think earthquake, volcano and tsunami. Forget superficial normality and find the secret behind the “normal”.
Chill out as you gain a toehold on this world, not so far removed from your own. The best writers accidentally provoke the putative reader into an intellectual engagement of some kind. And if one engages with the narrative of We Need to Talk About Kevinon even the most basic level, entertainment is possible if that's what's needed, just not happy-yappy entertainment. Furthermore, like this one, many novels beg so many questions about our assumptions about ourselves in adulthood: about coupledom, for example, and what that's supposed to be; about parenting and what happens if one parent opts out emotionally; and about all the things society condones as being Good Things in themselves. In the same way The Road, like some of Paul Auster's work, pushes the reader to reflect on the final stages of life in the wake of uncontrolled human violence, expansionist economics and ecological indifference.
THERE ARE no easy laughs in certain books, you see (although I did laugh at parts of the Shriver novel, for all its grimness), or tantalising plot twists, or feisty dialogue encounters. In the world of writing, although the fairytale may lurk at the back of what we write, with its archetypal figures and retributions, the real world of books has evolved to a different plateau.
Writers love to be read. They want their work to be discussed, even half-understood, and above all – if the going gets grim – to depress and disturb so much that the reader will go away with the echo of a new and terrible vision in their heads.
Poet and novelist Mary O'Donnell's sixth poetry collection, The Ark Builders, will be published by Arc Publications UK on Oct 1.