a gallimaufry

is a writer obligated to give readers the pleasures they expect?

In the comments on last Monday’s post on The Flint Anchor, Lory asked this excellent question:

‘Is a writer obligated to give readers the pleasures they expect?’

I have many Thoughts about this, which I couldn’t really cram into a reply to her there; instead, I’ll bore you with them here. As Sir Humphrey might say, ‘Well, yes and no.’

(Constantin Hansen, The Artist’s Sisters Signe and Henriette Reading a Book, 1826; Statens Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Denmark; found here)

A writer is of course not obliged to anyone in their writing, they are completely free. I am still pottering about writing my second attempt at a children’s book and I am doing whatever I please. I cannot say, however, that the results so far are anything I’d want anyone else to read. The characters are weak and keep shifting about, they mess up the vague plot I am trying to follow, or I change my mind, or I realise there’s a massive hole in it, or it gets just dreadfully boring. If a reader bought it from a bookshop or borrowed it from a library, they would be appalled.

Therefore, I would argue that a writer does have to fulfil a few obligations if they expect readers to read their work. And I termed those obligations as ‘pleasures’ – not perhaps the best word to use. However, I do believe that a novel, like any work of art, should provide a form of pleasure to at least some of its readers; and by ‘pleasure’ I mean it should provide some sort of aesthetic, emotional, intellectual or even educational satisfaction. And when you slide a book off a shelf and open it, you do so in expectation of one of those forms of satisfaction.

That satisfaction might take the form of characters who feel ‘real’ to you, it might be a delight in the language the writer has used, it might be in the recognition that the writer has expressed something true about the world, it might be an eagerness to find out what happens next, it might be learning about life in sixteenth-century Florence... When you read a novel that provides you with no form of satisfaction on any of these levels, you feel that the novel is ‘bad’ or ‘poorly written’. And this is what I mean by ‘pleasure’, ill-chosen as the word is.

Some of these pleasures – the emotional ones, I’d say – are more easily evoked in the reader. Bestsellers tend to provide them: excitement, fear, identification with the characters. Others are harder to discern or are those that many readers don’t enjoy. We might here think of the difference between Riders and The Waves, both of which offer pleasure to readers but of different sorts, reflected in their respective sales figures.

The ‘expectation’ of such a pleasure is not unreasonable in a reader, and so to that extent I would answer, yes, the writer does have an obligation here. But this is one interpretation of Lory’s question and it’s not I think what she meant by it. (I could be wrong! Lory – tell me!) She is, I believe, thinking of readers’ expectations in terms of dictating how that pleasure is delivered. And to that I would answer, with her, ‘No’.

Does a novel have to have characters who feel ‘real’ to you? No. Nor does it have to have characters who are likeable or admirable. It doesn’t have to be moral or tell you how to live. It doesn’t have to have a compelling plot, or beautiful writing, or strike you at a deep emotional level. A reader might expect or hope for or want these elements, and might be annoyed if they didn’t find them in a novel – but that might well be a failure of reading. We don’t read Agatha Christie for complex characterisation; we don’t read James Joyce for unicorns; we don’t read Tolstoy for laughs.

There are plenty of writers, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, who choose to subvert expectations in their work. This may upset some readers. It can lead to novels which are challenging, not easy to read, but it can create exciting fiction. A ‘good’ writer does this while retaining some element of pleasure, even if some or perhaps many readers do not notice it: a ‘bad’ writer makes a mess. A ‘good’ reader, in my opinion, tries to approach every book with an open mind and let the book show them how to read it. (This doesn’t mean we should all ‘enjoy’ every novel published but if we want to pass an informed judgement on it we should be alert to ‘pleasures’ that we may not personally enjoy.)

Here’s an example of the difference between the expectations a writer should satisfy and the expectations a writer should not. You want to read a detective novel, you’re in the mood for it. Detective novels have certain conventions, the most obvious being: there’s a crime and the detective solves it. You, an avid reader of detective fiction, understand these conventions.

The novel proceeds in the usual way, crime, detective, but then, at the end – the author doesn’t tell you who the murderer was! You’re outraged! But that’s the point. Now you’re thinking about why you’re outraged, you’re re-evaluating what you’ve just read... The novelist has subverted your expectations but in a way that causes you to question them, to re-categorise the novel not as a whodunnit but as something else... It’s a form of satisfaction.

Now you pick up a second detective novel. The writing is ridden with clichés, the characters are stereotypes and the reason for the crime implausible – the whole thing is silly. On no level are you satisfied. This book has abided by the conventions, the expectations of a detective novel, but it has failed to deliver any form of satisfaction.

What do you think? How would you answer the question?

And many thanks to Lory, for posing it.

the detective novels of Joan Smith

The most unexpected way in which the past few months have affected my reading is that it is completely dominated by whim and obsession. There’s no discipline any more and no urge to read anything even remotely demanding. If I want to read something, I REALLY want to read it and I want to read it right now and then I want to read EVERYTHING like it. I have completely eschewed the literary equivalent of a wholesome balanced diet in favour of stuffing my face with chocolates. I owe two reviews and Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week looms and I am sticking my fingers in my ears and singing.

(June will be the Month of Responsibility.)

(Felix Vallotton, A Woman Reading, 1922; oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

So, first there was the Frances Hardinge obsession. Then the Diana Wynne Jones. Then the Dorothy L. Sayers. (Actually, that is continuing, I just ran out of her work and so am awaiting three more at the point of whose arrival the obsession will resume.) And then I saw my copy of Joan Smith’s A Masculine Ending, which I bought about twenty years ago in a charity shop and quite liked. Suddenly, it was the ONLY book in the house I wanted to read. And then I wanted to read ALL the rest of the books in the series, so I ordered them and read them in less than two days.

Joan Smith is a respected British journalist and in the late 1980s and early 1990s she published a series of five ‘detective’ novels featuring a lecturer in English literature at London University, Loretta Lawson. I’ll list them all, not least because the titles are so good:

• A Masculine Ending (1987)
• Why Aren’t They Screaming? (1988)
• Don’t Leave Me This Way (1990)
• What Men Say (1993)
• Full Stop (1995)

I freely admit that for me much of their appeal is nostalgia. They cover the years of my late teens and early twenties, and during that time I studied English literature at university and went on to live in London for a while (as Loretta does). Detective novels are often concerned with the minutiae of everyday life, what people were doing and when, and so are full of reminders of things we did and technology we used. Smith’s novels focus very intensely on a few days and there is plenty of minutiae to please. Loretta sends faxes and uses answerphones, word processors and floppy disks – upgrading to a laptop in the last novel. There are a few fashion moments – a shocking pink handbag, a tube skirt, harem pants. There’s fresh pasta from the deli and Habitat sofas. There’s a sobering reminder of the casual sexism that still abounded at the time. And there’s plenty of politics: Why Aren’t They Screaming? is set around a women’s protest at a US air base similar though smaller to Greenham Common, the academics in What Men Say scoff about the government’s cutbacks to education and insistence on courses’ ‘relevance’.

But politics is not just a surface issue to the novels. As a series, they examine the often brutal nature of the power imbalance between men and women. Most significantly, they demonstrate how men’s potential for violence impacts women’s behaviour (and, in some cases, ability to live) while women’s concerns are easily dismissed as hysterical or unimportant. Against the macho world of the police forces she has to deal with and the rarefied sexism of some academics, Loretta strives to live a feminist life. She remains on good terms with her ex-husband, John (conveniently for many of the plots, he is a journalist), although he is convinced that their marriage was destroyed by Loretta’s joining a women’s group. She is loyal to her friends, most notably Bridget, a lecturer at Oxford University whose own late marriage and high-risk pregnancy are the focus of What Men Say. In A Masculine Ending and Don’t Leave Me This Way it’s her over-developed sense of guilt – a very female trait, Smith implicitly suggests – which spur her on to investigate.

The final and probably the best novel, Full Stop, finds Loretta staying in a friend’s apartment in an oppressively humid New York. She starts receiving obscene telephone calls. Gradually, her judgement is undermined. Is she being followed? Can she trust the police? Was the man in the theatre just being friendly or did he have another motive? She even starts to distrust her ex-husband. How can you navigate the world in this state of constant suspicion and alertness – and yet, how can you not? The discombobulation of being in a slightly alien culture adds to the sense of menace.

Smith is pretty meta in her approach and plays around a bit with the conventions of detective novels. Her heroine is not a detective (although this is nothing new in the genre) and not always very good at detecting. Still, the identity of the murderer is usually pretty clear and Smith isn’t interested in sudden twists – outwitting the reader is not her aim here. Every novel denies the reader a comfortable ending. The guilty often profit from their crimes; sometimes, the innocent are imprisoned.

Crime fiction is not really perceived as ‘women’s fiction’ and yet some of its greatest practitioners have been women. Perhaps, Loretta suggests, that is why it is looked down upon. In Don’t Leave Me This Way one of her lovers, Robert, sneers when she tells him she’s going to set up a course on female crime writers: he doesn’t believe that Agatha Christie is a fit subject for academic study (now that dates the novel! Things have moved on a lot since then). Later, she discusses the writers she’ll include on the course with a colleague:

‘[...] If it’s Americans you’re after, how about Sara Paretsky?’
‘I’ve got her. She’s wonderful.’
‘Amanda Cross?’
‘Oh, maybe.’ The conversation was having a calming effect on Loretta, and she elaborated. ‘I’m not so sure about academic mysteries. I tried one by Joan Smith the other day and she got all the details wrong...’

Guffaw. These novels aren’t great forgotten masterpieces, though I miss the characters, but I can only say that they hit the spot for me and if you see them, try them.

The Mysterious Mr Quin, by Agatha Christie

The shelf of English-language books at my local kringwinkel (shop selling second-hand and recycled goods) is always full of surprises. There are thick tomes by Marian Keyes and Sophie Kinsella, a book on the Mayan Prophecies which has been sitting there unloved ever since I first visited it about five years ago, a clutter of elderly diet and exercise books (Callanetics!). Sometimes there’s a curio I can’t prevent myself from buying: Haydn’s Visits to England, by Christopher Hogwood, was a book I’d never known before I saw it that I would need to read, and I also fell for The Old Burma Road: A Journey on Foot and Muleback, by Doctor Neville Bradley (foreword by the enchantingly named Lady Erskine Crum). Currently I’m toying with the purchase of Tolstoy’s edited correspondence, volume one. This is a book I’d like to believe I’d read, but would I? Is it, what I’d call an ‘aspirational purchase’ (I’d like to be the sort of person who reads it, but never actually get round to doing so).

A few weeks ago I spotted a trio of Agatha Christie paperbacks, with those slightly lurid Fontana paperback covers of the late 1970s. One of them was The Mysterious Mr Quin, a collection of stories first published in 1930. It was the beginning of the new school term, a time of particular stress and paperwork for teachers, and this seemed just the ticket for a tired and confused brain (I am not very good at administration).

‘You think it’s all bunkum on my part, Mr. Satterthwaite? But there are people, you know, who can tell you when a storm’s coming. They feel it beforehand in the air. And other people can foretell trouble. There’s trouble coming now, Mr. Satterthwaite, big trouble. It may come at any minute. It may—'

[Porter] stopped dead, clutching Mr. Satterthwaite’s arm.  And in that tense minute of silence it came—the sound of two shots, and following them, a cry—a cry in a woman’s voice.

‘My God!’ cried Porter. ‘It’s come!’

He raced down the path, Mr. Satterthwaite panting behind him. In a minute they came out on to the lawn, close by the hedge of the Privy Garden. At the same time, Richard Scott and Mr. Unkerton came round the opposite corner of the house. They halter, facing each other, to left and right of the entrance to the Privy Garden.

‘It—it came from in there,’ said Unkerton, pointing with a flabby hand.

‘We must see,’ said Porter. He led the way into the enclosure. As he rounded the last bend of the holly hedge, he stopped dead. Mr. Satterthwaite peered over his shoulder. A loud cry burst from Richard Scott.

There were three people in the Privy Garden. Two of them lay on the grass near the stone seat, a man and a woman. The third was Mrs. Staverton. She was standing quite close to them by the holly hedge, gazing with horror-stricken eyes, and holding something in her right hand.

‘Iris,’ cried Porter. ‘Iris! For God’s sake! What’s that you’ve got in your hand?’

These stories do not show the Queen of Crime at her best: they were early works and – here I must admit a prejudice – I don’t think the short story format lends itself too well to murder mysteries since there isn’t enough space to be subtle in introducing clues. If someone mentions a priest’s hole or a strange stain on a window pane, you know that it is significant and it isn’t hard to piece things together. However, the stories are all pleasant enough, evoking a rather Jeeves-and-Woosterish society of weekends at country houses, holidays with duchesses on the Riviera, characters whose place in society is clearly indicated by their clothing and whose personalities by their faces. There are deaths in locked rooms, star-crossed lovers, ghostly cavaliers, predatory countesses and uncouth artists. If Christie is a bit sentimental in many of the stories, her pacing can’t be faulted.

The principal character, Mr Satterthwaite (he is always Mr Satterthwaite), is one of Christie’s outsider sleuths in the Poirot and Marple tradition: elderly, single, fussy about his food and creature comforts. Independently wealthy, or wealthyish, he has never worked or married and considers himself to have observed rather than participated in life. However, his powers of observation and his instincts about people, developed over his long life, are acute. In each story a visit by a mysterious Mr Harley Quin, whose face is often shadowed as if masked or whose clothes often have a look of motley about them – I mentioned the stories aren’t subtle – heralds a mystery which Mr Satterthwaite must solve. Mr Satterthwaite investigates new crimes but also unsolved mysteries because, Mr Quin claims, it is actually an advantage to examine something at a distance:

‘The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting a true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.’

When I read that, I did expect my S-Level history teacher to bob up shouting ‘Discuss with reference to at least three major historical events!’ If you like your mysteries light, short and nostalgic, you could do worse than this. And it reminds me to reread some more of Christie’s work, I was a teenager when I last read any of it.