To be a female reader is to be constantly included, both in book groups and the broader conversation.
Maybe they’re terrified of what they might find out.’ ‘But there seems to be a reluctance on the part of some men to read about women. ‘Women have always told me they read to learn about the world, and they read to learn about men,’ Taylor says. Men approach fiction, especially fiction by women, with an expectation that it is not going to speak to them.’ Men are reluctant to read books by women, but the reverse is not true. ‘Men think reading fiction is a waste of time,’ says Helen Taylor, an academic and the author of Why Women Read Fiction, from 2019, which asked 428 women detailed questions about their reading habits. Whomever a novelist thinks they may be writing for, they are all, with the possible exception of Robert Harris, writing for middle-aged women. In every genre of novel apart from fantasy, science fiction and horror, women outbuy men.Īt a literary festival a couple of years ago, I heard the Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif explain that while he might like to imagine his reader to be a young bookish lad in Karachi, the data was clear that she was, in fact, a middle-aged woman living on the outskirts of Frankfurt. In Britain, men are almost twice as likely not to read books at all. Women buy about 80 per cent of all fiction across the UK, the US and Canada. The figures among men, especially for novels, are particularly low. I paraphrase, but the gist of his argument is that when I listen to Spotify on the Tube while searching Twitter for Arsenal highlights, I am imperilling the modern nation state. Brains addled by digital stimuli are less capable of abstract thought and imagination, with potentially ruinous consequences for liberal democracy, whose foundational observations arise from deep personal interaction with texts. Last year, the American historian Adam Garfinkle wrote in National Affairs of his despair at the loss of ‘deep literacy’ in America. ‘Now it is the multiple screens and there is no competing against it.’ ‘The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people’s reach any more,’ he told Reuters. Forty years after Portnoy, when what would be his final novel, Nemesis, came out, Roth could bemoan a readership incapable of engaging with his work. Arguments are more likely to coalesce around newspaper articles or social-media posts. When was the last time a cultural object in the UK attracted the same kind of attention? Don’t say Fleabag. Its content, rather than the identity of its author, was a subject for debate, a dipstick with which the culture could be tested. The book was a moral cause célèbre for its graphic depictions of masturbation. His 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, about a sex-crazed young Jewish man, sold 400,000 copies in a year and made its author internationally famous. Roth may have been depressed by the trajectory of his own readership. Neither man achieved his position without some intuition for the public mood. I can’t suspend belief in reality… I just end up thinking, “This isn’t f-king true.”’
‘I wised up.’ Two years later, former Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher expressed a similar sentiment in an interview with GQ. I don’t read it at all,’ he told the Financial Times, adding that he still made time for history and biography. In an interview in 2011, the novelist Philip Roth said he had given up on the art form that made his fortune.