Nick Guest, from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, is a consummate English protagonist: both an insider and an outsider, embarrassed by his provincial past, unsteady on his feet among the upper echelons of society, open in his distaste for the elite while desperate to be one of them. He has just graduated from Oxford with a first in English literature, and finds himself in the private library of Lord Kessler for a glittering moment of mid-bourgeois insecurity. Feeling “disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and aesthetic prejudice” Nick muses on his literary horizons: “Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten.”
I haven’t pretended to have read something since I got caught out at college by a teacher over Aristotle’s Physics, Volume II. (Extraordinarily hard to blag your way through that one.) Still, I am sympathetic to Nick’s instincts. He is well read, and mildly anxious to admit to Kessler that he doesn’t know so much about the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope. In the centuries-deep Western literary canon, Trollope might be a defensible blind spot for a 21-year-old. But in a universe in which Nick cannot signal aristocratic insideriness (he is from a run-of-the-mill market town) nor impress with wealth (his father is an antiques salesman), the literary realm has to suffice as his key-card to the British elite. The sound you hear is me cracking the spine of The Way We Live Now with studied determination.
It strikes me as very human to be insecure about being well read, aristo or not. I am 29 and so, as the author Lauren Oyler forgives herself, “I’ve had only about a decade of reading that actually counts.” But my literary anxiety abounds: until I read every Martin Amis novel and essay, is my prose destined to be cliché-ridden for eternity? Banalities, thrown with full force, as he might say? And if Hollinghurst’s Nick is wary to reveal he hasn’t read Trollope, then how on Earth am I going to stomach the admission – with a turbo-Hibernian name like mine – that Ulysses continues to elude my attention?
This is a problem of depth and breadth. If it takes, say, ten to 12 hours on average to get through a book, I have to accept that some will never get touched. Sorry, Infinite Jest. But these opportunity costs are painful, and leave me darting around the artistic realm with no coherent strategy – some Amis here, a bit of Virginia Woolf there. What does it mean to have “read Julian Barnes”? How many is that? There are loads of them! I am left with insight too thin for proper scrutiny, no better than ankle-deep in the literary universe. And that’s when I remember the existence of George Eliot. Add it to the list, I suppose…
This kind of open fretting, I suspect, is far from the insouciance usually demanded by the culture. Much like the English novel’s preoccupation with the insider-outsider dynamic, it often displays a distaste for the aspirational striver, too. We are not necessarily welcomed to sneer at Nick Guest’s arriviste inclinations, but they are conspicuous. And a character lying about reading Trollope really is on the soft end of this spectrum. In EM Forster’s Howards End, the upwardly mobile Leonard Bast suffers a heart attack after a bookcase falls on him – he is, in other words, literally crushed by his literary and class pretensions. This attitude – a light contempt for open aspiration – seems to me one of the more peculiar aspects of the British psyche.
Pretensions are important because they’re a steer towards ambition. Every generation looks badly read until you meet the next one. But something of a crisis is unfolding in British and American higher education institutions. Last year the Atlantic reported that students at “elite” colleges were forsaking full books for extracts and summaries. One professor reported that 20 years ago Pride and Prejudice was no challenge for his students. Now they cannot keep up with the pace or the detail of the text. In the UK, Jonathan Bate, a former professor in English literature at Oxford, lamented that pupils struggled to get through one novel in three weeks.
We can be utilitarian about this: how can we expect this generation to cope with the intellectual demands of the world if the most academically impressive among them cannot parse Daniel Deronda in less than a week? How will they situate themselves in the culture? Or we can be romantic: it is a profound shame that they might shut themselves off from all the interior worlds only available through novels, forsaking lessons on the immutable characteristics of man simply because Cormac McCarthy is out of reach. But I would prefer to be axiomatic: to be well read is its own hard-won reward.
Writing in the Guardian ahead of the publication of The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis said that “one of the historical vulnerabilities of literature… is that it has never seemed difficult enough”. “Interacting with literature is easy,” he added. True, in a narrow sense. My copy of Madame Bovary cost me £3 in the reassuringly erudite Hampstead branch of Oxfam. But there are more antagonists than ever to contend with: the internet, performative anti-intellectualism, suspicion of intellectual ambition. I suspect the solution is to accept these forces exist and to carry on anyway, as though the ghost of Harold Bloom is haunting me: come on, young lady, Ulysses will not read itself!
[See also: Who let the BBC inside Thames Water?]
Content from our partners
This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age