Janan Ganesh’s piece “What and how to read” (Opinion, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, August 3) caused me dismay. His assertion that “to read well is to ignore the now” is a dismal prescription.
If he were dismissing contemporary fiction of the kind promoted by big marketing budgets, I would agree with him. Bookshops and books pages are clogged with what publishers have decided to throw their money at, whether it has literary merit or sex with dragons. However, if the reading public follows Ganesh’s advice and abandons reading anything that has not stood the test of time, it will not only destroy the chances of those who might be or could become great. It misunderstands readers’ changing appreciation of fiction.
Take Edna O’Brien, the Irish novelist who died last month at the age of 93. When her first novel The Country Girls was published in 1960 it became a succès de scandale due to the perception that it was in some way a “dirty” book. It took decades for her to be perceived as a serious literary novelist, addressing urgent questions about women’s lives in Ireland. Had her readership waited 20 or more years to decide whether she was worth bothering with, however, she would not have continued to be published.
Novelists, like everyone, live in the slipstream of the time, but those of us who write about contemporary life try to distil an essence of how we live now. That was as true of The Great Gatsby as it is of Middle England, Caledonian Road and Small Things Like These. We need not just to look back at the past (something to which Britain is fatally addicted) but to grapple with the here and now.
The present is too pressing to be left just to journalists, even one as intelligent as your columnist.
Amanda Craig
Novelist and Critic
London NW1, UK
