Does It Hold Up? How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read

And a theory about the function of literary criticism at the present time

It has been eighteen years since How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read was published and had a brief, very meta prominence as a book that people could joke about based on its title alone. It was, in fact, a perfect moment for this kind of humor: it came out in the US a few months before the debut of the blog “Stuff White People Like,” which operated in much the same way. The tone of that blog—and of many blogs and Tumblrs (another product of 2007)—was one of exhausted innocence; often mistakenly identified as a hipster irony, in retrospect it was more truly a bruised sincerity.

I did read How to Talk… at the time, and since I’m writing about it eighteen years later it clearly made a fairly deep impression on me, but I must confess that impression was fairly general. The book now exists for me in the category designated by its author Pierre Bayard “Les livres que l'on a oubliés”—the books we have forgotten. (What, did you seriously think such a book wasn’t written by a Frenchman?)

From the title, one might have imagined that Bayard was a cheekier Bourdieu, primarily interested in the mechanics of how the educated elite extract social and economic capital out of the cultural capital of knowing which opinions to apply to which books and which names to drop in which dinner party. There is some of that, but as I remember it, Bayard was also making an earnest attempt at understanding how readers become “readers”—how people create identities or senses of self from the books they choose to read, cherish, reject, condemn, or evangelize about. In other words, Bayard sees literary chitchat not (just) as impression management—attempting to induce others to think you’re erudite or witty or serious or cultured—but as part of a process of self-creation and self-revision.

Bayard, of course, was not the first person to make that argument, but what he added to it was the step that a sociologist like Bourdieu might have suggested at that point: rather than looking at readers’ responses to the texts they read most fervidly for a demonstration of how people create a readerly self-image, consider instead the sum total of their interactions with books—books as physical objects, as topics of conversation, as subjects of essays or reviews, all of it. Your identity as a “reader”—both what kind of reader you think you are and the very fact that the self-description “reader” is of importance to you—is only partly grounded in the words you have encountered in the traditional manner of reading: your eyes traversing printed letters from page one to page last, no cheating. Being a “reader” is also about the books you have on your shelves and the books you are meaning to read and the books you abandon; it is about the books you make up your mind not to read and the books you know you should pretend to have read.

Even this point, however, is not exactly a revelation, and indeed the reviewers of How to Talk… characterized it not as saying anything new, but only saying something that most people know but are too embarrassed to admit: the universe of books we want people to believe we have read is bigger than the galaxy of books we have actually done the hard work of reading.

It is in that part about hard work, though, that Bayard’s book seems from the vantage point of today to have been, if not cutting-edge, at least forward-looking. In Bayard’s account, the hard work of becoming “cultured” is a problem of scale, and only secondarily one of training. If you want to be considered “well-read” today, you have to have read (or be able to fake having read) an enormous number of books. Being “cultured” is more and more a bulk proposition, and one marker of this condition is that literary culture is increasingly dominated by lists: lists of bests (all-time, best of the century, best of a genre, best of the year); lists of forthcomings; lists of best-revieweds; “what are you reading” or “what’s on your nightstand” lists; lists of “forgotten” or “neglected” classics; and—more than anything—TBR (to be read) lists. Lists of books—or listicles—are everywhere these days; they are made and consumed by people both inside and outside of the academy, by professional writers and professional critics. It might even be not much of an exaggeration to say that the list is the dominant form of written literary criticism today, rather than the review. And, while not explicit, the message conveyed by this inundation of lists is that if you are a “serious reader”—if you are “cultured” and “well-read”—you will measure yourself against these lists and be able to say you’ve read a significant number of the works that appear on them.

I think it’s accurate to identify the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list that came out in 1998 as the starting point for this reorientation in literary culture because so many alternative “100 best” lists were generated as responses to its obvious biases. Another possibility, though, is Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), because what both have in common is their abundance. One hundred titles is a lot, particularly as some entries comprise multiple novels.¹ But Bloom surpasses that profusion by more than an order of magnitude: my best attempt at counting the full Bloom canon yields 1,525 separate titles.

Although I think it’s clear that they intended the opposite effect, Bloom and the Modern Library eroded an earlier concept of a canon as something one could “master” through intensive study of a small number of transcendent works of genius. Lists that ran to three or four digits implicitly promoted a bulk definition of being “well-read.” This was a major change.

For much of the twentieth century, the complexity of modernist and postmodernist literature provided the line of demarcation between being cultured and being uncultured: you might have only read “The Metamorphosis,” but if you had a strong sense of what the description “Kafkaesque” entailed, you’d be in better shape than someone who slogged through The Trial without understanding why it was different from, say, Perry Mason.

In other words, for most of the twentieth century the challenge for someone trying to become “well-read” or “cultured” was a matter of knowing which “difficult” authors one needed to devote some considerable time to deciphering, whether that was by earnestly reading and re-reading or by taking a class or by picking up Cliff Notes or some accessible “A Beginner’s Guide to” Faulkner or Woolf or whoever it might be.

But Bayard was writing at a time where this challenge was quietly being replaced by the obstinate problem of plenitude. The hard work that was now required had little to do with the intrinsic complexity of the material; it was simply the volume. I don’t remember how explicit Bayard was about this, but necessary to his argument is a recognition of the fact that we can’t read everything.

Becoming literate has been characterized as an exhausting and inexhaustible process at least since the author of Ecclesiastes (12:12: “making many books has no end, and studying much is a weariness of the flesh”), so we might well wonder why it suddenly seemed newly important for Bayard to be stressing this point in the mid-2000s. Because it was not just Bayard who asked serious readers—especially academics—to put this problem of scale at the center of our image of literature and our understanding of what it meant to be “well-read.”

2007 was also the year that Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters was published in English (it came out in France in 1999), and it was often discussed around that time in conjunction with Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, and Trees. Although they did so in different ways, both books problematized scale and challenged literary scholars to re-examine their own practices of reading, teaching and scholarship in light of the vastness of the literary archive, attacking the presumption that we could say something intelligent about “literature” based on a tiny and geographically parochial sample.² Moretti and Casanova were primarily concerned with how scholarship ought to change to take this into account, but Bayard’s insistence that readers of all types ought to stop enforcing the sharp and severely moralized distinction between books we have read completely and books we have some knowledge of had obvious implications for scholarly conduct as well.

But Bayard’s argument was more than a scholarly intervention; it was a vision of a new etiquette of literary culture. That meant that it took on not just literature as a source of knowledge—our knowledge of what happens in Jane Austen’s novels, our knowledge of what reading Joyce is like—but also as a test of and school for taste. Bayard’s position suggested that taste was also undergoing a redefinition: if the criteria for being “well-read” were shifting from intensive training to extensive consumption, having good taste was also more a matter of the scope of one’s exposure to literature rather than the selectivity of one’s private preferences. Taste was more about adaptability and adventure, about novelty and diversity, less about standards and comparison.

In some ways, this reorientation of taste is best seen in the rockist vs. poptimist debate that came to the fore after Kelefa Sanneh’s 2004 New York Times piece “The Rap against Rockism.” But because I am concerned primarily with literary culture, I’ll not say any more about that connection and instead note that, again, Bayard was not the only academic grappling with scale as a problem for the formation of taste. I vividly remember reading one of the closing lines to Mark McGurl’s 2009 The Program Era with a frisson of almost transgressive affirmation: “Is there not more excellent fiction being produced now than anyone has time to read?” Were literary scholars allowed to say things like that?

Evidently they were, although my experience with literary scholars suggests that relatively few are actually happy about the “systematic excellence” of contemporary literature. (I think they prefer believing that most literary production is slush and excellent fiction is a rare and probably endangered species.) Professional literary critics—those who write for newspapers or magazines like the New Yorker or the Atlantic—have generally been more sanguine about the abundance of really good new fiction, and their role, I think, has self-consciously changed in the face of this bounty.

Critics exist because they solve real problems for ordinary readers. The most serious problems facing ordinary readers for much of the twentieth century were incomprehension and uncertainty: incomprehension in the face of difficult modernist and postmodernist works, and uncertainty about whether a difficult work was brilliant or just ostentatious.

Today, the ordinary reader’s problems are different. They are now inattention and distraction, two problems that sound like they are the same thing but aren’t. Inattention is a problem of bandwidth: just as we can’t read everything, we also can’t keep tabs on everything. Even readers who try very hard to update themselves on what new books have come out and what old books have been “recovered” (a process which itself has become a specialty for many critics) will miss dozens of titles without the help of those above-mentioned lists and the critics who write them. Distraction, on the other hand, is a temporal problem: the profusion of excellent fiction also means that, if we hear about one book we “must read” or simply really want to read, it is quite likely that by the time we are in a position to take action on that book, several other titles have jostled their way to the front of our mind. Critics and, again, the lists they make can provide some support for keeping certain books in our faces: the repetition of a book’s title or author’s name allow readers to circle back to works we already decided we wanted to read but forgot about.

It is possible that some of you may find these new critical functions modest, perhaps insultingly so. I think they are invaluable. One way to think about the role of the critic is that she reads the books we cannot. This may be because she had the good fortune to have been well-trained in the decipherment of abstruse texts or it may be because she has the good fortune that reading fiction is what she gets paid to do, and it may well be both. But the literary world we are all in—academics, critics, ordinary readers—has been wholly redefined by the problem of scale, and works like Bayard’s How to Talk… are important guides to the realities of these new conditions. I may even re-read it.

1. The “100 Best” really entails reading 121 novels (by my count). The multi-novel titles are: U.S.A., Studs Lonigan, A Dance to the Music of Time, Parades End, and the Alexandria Quartet.

2. Moretti had introduced his key concept of “distant reading” all the way back in 2000, but I think it’s correct to date its moment of arrival as a widespread topic of debate and discussion in the US academy closer to 2007.