The premise of John Sutherland’s new book is that many people wrongly think of reading as an all-or-nothing ability, like, say, tying one’s shoes: either you can do it or you can’t. Such people would no doubt consider a book about how to read a novel as irrelevant as one titled How to Eat Crisps — and yet, Sutherland maintains, reading a novel well is almost as difficult as writing one well.
Perhaps the word ‘reading’ itself is the problem. Strictly speaking, reading is something you can either do or not do, and it’s not terribly difficult. We say that novels by Proust or Pynchon are ‘difficult reads’, but in fact a child of ten could read them: he or she just wouldn’t understand them. Serious readers use the word ‘reading’ as a metonym, to signify the whole process of consumption and comprehension. It is this broader sense that the author has in mind.
How to Read a Novel aims to enhance the reading process for non-specialist readers without drowning them in arcana. Sutherland gives a succinct description of intertextuality, citing as examples the echoes of Howards End in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and the many Greek allusions in Joyce’s description of the sea in Ulysses. One can miss these references and still enjoy the books, but much more will be absorbed if they are understood. He also covers the importance of viewing a novel in the context of when it was written, the merits of re-reading — you lose the element of surprise, but are more alert to symbolism — and the clash between the real world and the fictional. On the latter he cites the way that Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes ‘skims across the fact-fiction border’; one might also note the way in which another of Barnes’s works, A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters, skims across the border between the novel and the short-story collection: it is hard to say what exactly a novel is, and Sutherland, perhaps wisely, refuses an attempt.
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