The Dreariness of Book Club

“I AM A MEMBER of two book clubs, and both of them follow the same format: 20 minutes of discussion about our lives, a half hour of discussion about the book, and an hour of discussion over what book to read for next time”

“And in each of the book clubs, the discussion inevitably defaults to the same amateur book review format. Each person says, “I liked it because X, although Y was lacking.” And then we total up all the Xs and Ys and figure out which features worked or didn’t work for each person”

“Thus, we achieve some broad consensus about the features of the text, and we learn a little about how each person responded to those features. Sometimes there is a disagreement about whether the book really had slow pacing or whether the ending really did follow logically from the events, but usually, because we are all friends and are motivated to respect each other’s opinions, we eventually say something like, “Oh yeah, I can totally see how you would’ve felt that way.””

“There’s nothing more to discuss! All we’ve learned is that, yes, we all read the same book, but that some parts of the book resonated more with some people”

“Now if we want to know the why of what makes some people like some things and other people like other things, well … we can talk about it if we want, but on a fundamental level, does anyone care? We already know that different people respond to the same thing in different ways. Surely this isn’t why we started a book club.”

“The whole book club is predicated on the notion that reading these books will improve our minds in some way, and that it’ll contribute measurably to our intellectual lives”

“Is the answer that we’re simply bad readers? Are we like the status seekers C. S. Lewis decries in An Experiment In Criticism (1961), when he says:

As there are, or were, families and circles in which it was almost a social necessity to display an interest in hunting, or county cricket, or the Army List, so there are others where it requires great independence not to talk about, and therefore occasionally to read, the approved literature, especially the new and astonishing works, and those which have been banned or have become in some other way subjects of controversy”

“Say Nothing and Radicalized were fundamentally about ideas: What does the future hold? What motivates a person to kill for a cause? These are big, open questions that you can readily discuss. We all think about ideology. We all think about current events. We can engage easily with these texts and do it on a more even footing, arguing with their conclusions and adding our own experiences to provide a counterpoint”

“But because it’s not grounded in literal truth or in ideology, most fiction isn’t as permeable. You can read it. You can enjoy it. But when the experience is over, you’re left with nothing to say other than “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.””

“And although you can go deeper, trying to justify or analyze your reaction, what’s the point? The book exists: it got critical acclaim — obviously somebody liked it. Ergo, you can’t say the book is bad or it shouldn’t exist.”

“All you can say is that you wish you hadn’t read it, and saying something like this tends to undercut the whole basis of the book club: if you didn’t like it, then that means you only read the book in order to discuss it, and yet your discussion consists only of the fact that you wish you hadn’t read it!”

“Book clubs, by their nature, interfere with the way a book is meant to be experienced. By removing enjoyment as an explicit factor in picking up or sticking with the book (because you’re reading it for the book club), they call into question the worth of the exercise as a whole.

In this, book clubs obviously draw their inspiration from that great temple of forced reading: high school”

“But what’s fascinating about book clubs is that we instinctively drop everything we learned from high school English class. We have the form of the classroom (the schedule, the discussion, the forced reading) but not the content. I’ve never been in a book club where someone did a close reading of a sentence or highlighted foreshadowing or looked for symbols”

“Of course, those academic tools are all holdovers from the New Criticism, which is coming up on 80 years old now, and which long ago lost its foothold in the American university. What almost every college graduate uses now, instead of these skills, are the twin tools given to us by Foucault and Derrida: the analysis of power relations and deconstruction”

“So, even though we’re all sophisticated people, we’re at a loss during book club discussions because our usual tools of analysis are so powerful and destructive that to unholster them would wreak carnage on both the text and the cohesion of the group”

“The obvious solution, which is what I always advocate, is to simply stop picking fiction. This is the choice that most serious review outlets and book pages have chosen. If you open up The New York Review of Books or London Review of Books or The Times Literary Supplement, you’ll see hardly any fiction titles reviewed, and for the same reason: unless you resort to deconstruction, power analysis, or high school–style New Criticism, there’s simply not much to say beyond “This is why you should/shouldn’t read this book” — a topic for which, honestly, a few hundred words would usually suffice”

“Nonfiction, in contrast, offers a jumping-off point for talking about the broader implications of ideas and for arguing with the author’s conclusions”

“Now, could fiction notionally also provide this jumping-off point? Well … yes, but the problem is that good fiction doesn’t contain a clear viewpoint on the material. In its nuances and complexities, good fiction already contains whatever broader points you would want to make. Moreover, fiction doesn’t generalize: it’s about specific people doing specific things. You, as a reader can say, “Well, a person in this situation could do different things!” or “This situation might happen differently!” But that’s not much of a comment, because the novel isn’t making the claim that life is always this way. It’s merely presenting one way things can be”

Note: Superficially, I agree, but this bald assertion of a particular ideology of what makes “good fiction” is jarring, given the prior critique of the New Critical method as outmoded.

“But the problem is that people love fiction. They enjoy reading fiction. They don’t want to read nonfiction all the time. It’s simply unaccountable that — even though nonfiction gets more respect, has higher per-title sales, and has the weight of “being about real things” behind it — book clubs are inevitably going to choose novels. Maybe it’s a hangover from English class. Or maybe, dare I say it, there is something to be said for the complexity of the novel — for the way it eludes easy answers”

“can we come up with a different way of talking about books?”

“First, it has to be civil”

“Second, it has to be grounded in the idea that reading this book was an educational experience”

“Third, we’ve already sat through the book”

“A logical choice that now presents itself is the idea of using the book for our moral education. This idea used to be quite popular”

“A remnant of this tradition survives in the high school English class, where we’re asked to understand, in a very general way, the themes that animate a work”

“Generally speaking, in online discussions of a work of art, whenever we’re not resorting to power analysis, we’re usually engaging in moral analysis. The two are related in some ways, but power analysis is about situating the work within the overarching power structure (and critiquing that power structure), while moral analysis is a bit simpler: it takes the work as given, almost as if the story were nonfiction. In a moral analysis, you talk about the characters as freely and simply as if they were real people you know”

Note: This is all conversations around The Last of Us. As Deleuze says of ethics in Empiricism and Subjectivity, ethics is simply saying “good” or “bad” of things.

“The problem with claiming that fiction has an inherently moral quality is … where does it end? One might say that narrative art is moral, but what about ballet? Or opera? What about visual art? What about abstract art? Is all art about moral problems? Is noise music about moral problems?”

“But if you’re more clearheaded, you have to admit that some forms of art have almost zero moral content, and from there you’re left with a debate: Are the costumes or cinematography of a film essentially moral? When it comes to books, is the cover moral? What about the character names, the rhythm of the words, the choice of metaphors? All of these things have an aesthetic effect — they engage with our sense of beauty — but if they have any moral component, then that component is very obscure”

“The problem is that whenever we engage in moral analysis, we experience the nagging feeling that we’re ignoring the aesthetic aspect of the book, and that it’s exactly these aesthetic qualities that elevate the novel as a topic of discussion and make it more important than the details of our friends’ marriages”

“After all, moral analysis involves abstracting the characters from the novels in which they live and treating them as if they were real. The artistry of the book is still a part of the discussion, but it’s very sublimated. To the extent that the artistry has added nuance and complexity to the characterization, the writer’s craft becomes a part of the discussion, but not the main part. Moral analysis is not going to cut straight to the heart of a book and tell you how the words on the page turned into a story. It’s not going to show you how words become poetry, or how the organization of information and the various stylistic devices used by the author contribute to its themes and story. Those tools, unfortunately, belong primarily to the New Criticism, and, if I’m being honest, most book clubbers don’t have enough familiarity with those tools to make use of them”

“Seen in this way, by paying attention to what the author doesn’t say (deconstruction), or why the author said it (power analysis), or how the author said it (New Criticism), or how we felt about what the author said (book reviewing), we’re missing the point, which is that something happened. Something was at stake in this story. Characters made decisions. Those decisions had consequences. And it’s in that specificity — in what Hegel would call its “determinate content” — that the real value of the story lies”

“I think we read books to become better people, and we can’t become better people unless we admit that we are flawed and human and insensitive and that we vitally need the perspective that this book is capable of providing”

Note: This was an excellent essay, one I will return to, but oh so frustrating. However, this is a productive frustration. I’ll be chewing on what I read here for a while.