How to Be a Serious Reader

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.

Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Henry Oliver.

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Henry Oliver is the literary critic behind The Common Reader, a newsletter helping you make the most of your reading. He’s also a Research Fellow and Emerging Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I sat down with Henry to talk about literature, poetry, the relationship between reading and empathy, and how to develop your taste.

Below is an extract of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.

A CONVERSATION WITH HENRY OLIVER

Jared: Henry Oliver, thank you for joining me.

Henry: Thank you for having me.

Jared: So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?

Henry: That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.

The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.

I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.

“The elite tier has kind of given up on being elites.”

Jared: Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, Succession’s really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy.

Henry: There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions.

Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. It's all full of the ordinary TV tropes we're all used to from a million other things. I didn't think the dialogue was that good. And I also felt the story was just dragging and dragging and dragging. But I'm happy to say, okay, a lot of people know TV better than me, and they think it was amazing. And like, I can just be wrong about that.

But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading.

Jared: What were the conditions that sort of led to this Philistine supremacy? What changed?

Henry: One thing I should say is there's still a lot of excellence. And I'm not saying that everything's gone bad. I'm saying there's this new segment in the culture, right? I think part of it is that it's very hard to make money writing about Shakespeare, writing about new novels, writing about whatever the NYRB is putting out. It's very hard to get an audience for that.

How many New York Review of Books can there be? How big is their audience base ever going to be? No one is really pretending that we can hit a million subscribers if we just do these six things. It's not there, right? And so I think part of it is just to stay commercial and to stay relevant. We had TV, now we have social media—that's just where people are. I'm a bit close to being like, blame the people. But partly you just have to adapt in the normal ways, right?

Even if you're writing about a popular literary novelist like Brandon Taylor or Sally Rooney, the audience is just much smaller for a "here's what I think the book's about" essay than for "what does Sally Rooney say about conservative sex politics in this moment in our generation?"

Jared: I don't think I've ever read a review of a Rooney novel that wasn't actually about Rooney's politics. Or just about Sally Rooney. There's actually a shocking turn towards the author—half of the word count will just be about what Sally Rooney is up to, or what she's done this time, or did she support this political cause enough or too much. The same would be true for Brandon Taylor’s work. A lot of the critical discussion will end up being about Brandon Taylor or what he stands for, rather than, you know, the novel.

You reviewed his new novel, right?

Henry: I think it’s his best novel. I thought it was great. He is openly engaging with ideas in a different way. So obviously, all novels are novels of ideas. And there are lots of different ways in which novelists diffuse ideas. They embed them in different parts of the book. They might be more open, more subverted. But he is now making his characters ideological, making them have arguments about ideas. The narrator voice is quite intrusive in the discussion of these ideas, and it ties the themes together as well. So it’s a bit more like what we’re used to from an Iris Murdoch novel or something, right? The ideas are right open on the page and they’re fighting it out. And I think that’s a very good development for him as a writer. And I also think it’s a good development for fiction as a whole.

Jared: You think about Iris Murdoch—that’s a good comparison because she’s a novelist. She’s a serious novelist worth taking seriously. She’s also just a thinker and an essayist. And Brandon has increasingly, if you just follow what he does online, been engaging very much with literary criticism, with philosophy. And it would be very hard for a good writer to engage with that and then not want to bring it into the novel somehow. But I don’t know how many writers are consciously doing that while trying to write literary fiction that’s not purposefully experimental, and aiming for a space where he’s writing at major presses and writing big novels, but also engaging with ideas.

Henry: Right, and he’s trying to revive realism in a way, because there’s a large segment of the literary community that dislikes realism. He’s trying to defend it. He’s been reading Lukács and Zola, and he’s really dug into what realism is and is trying to bring some of those things back.

I do think other writers are engaging with ideas, but with a different set of ideas and in different ways. So Catherine Lacey wrote Biography of X, I think one or two years ago now. And one of the most enjoyable things about the book that makes it accomplished is that it’s hugely embedded in the ideas of mid-20th century culture and literature, but is fictionalizing them to some greater or lesser degree throughout the book.

Jared: So, okay—Brandon Taylor, Catherine Lacey. Who are other contemporary writers right now that you’re excited about?

Henry: Oh, I like Sally Rooney. I don’t have a problem. I think she’s great. You have these arguments like, oh, it’s just commercial fiction disguised as literary fiction. It’s such an affront, all this stuff. Just relax. You can just read a book and enjoy it and not worry about whether it’s George Eliot enough, you know? I think she’s a very clever writer. The last book, which everyone hated because it had the fake Ulysses kind of writing style and it drove everyone crazy—and as you say, all the reviews were not really reviews. They were just personal essays going, I thought she was the voice of my generation. Why is she doing this?

Actually, that book was a very interesting exploration of autism. And at least one of the characters is plainly autistic in some degree. There’s a lot of discussion now about the expansion of the diagnostic criteria. But somewhere on that new way of understanding it, this character is autistic. And I think it’s one of the better novels that we have about what autism is, what it’s like to be autistic in that sense. Not in the, you know, that famous book about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, about the boy who is autistic. That’s a different kind of thing. But that’s what I found interesting in the last book.

Jared: Have you followed the critical discussion of the new Pynchon novel that’s coming out soon?

Henry: No.

Jared: You don’t strike me as the biggest Pynchon guy. But there was a, I believe it was in The New Yorker—if not, I’ll put a link down below so people can see it. There was a big New Yorker piece. And the sort of headline was, it’s great for Pynchon fans, and it’s great at what Pynchon does, but what about the rest of us? And I thought—that might be a great example of this Philistine attitude, where it is engaging with a work of serious fiction. Great. But its first response is, why isn’t this for everyone?

Henry: Yes, yes. And I do think there’s a kind of democratic impulse to the way we treat art these days that’s misguided, in the sense that it creates a false opposition. Some works are both democratic and elite. A lot of the canonical authors, like Jane Austen and Shakespeare, work on both levels. You can read it for the story, or you can really get into the footnotes and spend your life on it. And those were conscious decisions that those authors made. But a lot of works aren’t like that. Ulysses isn’t like that. You can obviously—everyone can read it and get something from it. But Ulysses is a conscious attempt to do something else. And that’s fine. And we should just, again, relax. What’s the big deal?

Jared: There is a group—they meet at the public library once a week. And they have been reading Finnegans Wake for 10 years. It’s like six or seven of them. There was a news story about them.

Henry: And they’re starting again, right?

Jared: Yes. They spent years just going page by page together and really diving in, because it’s the kind of novel that can sustain that. And it’s very much not a democratic novel. If you think you’re going to read Finnegans Wake in a month by reading it an hour before bed every night—get real. It’s just not that sort of book.

Henry: But that, I think, is the perfect example. I’m so glad you brought that up. I loved that news story because it is open to people, the non-democratic form of art. There used to be this idea—I think Frank Kermode first said it, and then Philip Larkin said it, and Betjeman used to say this—that modernism had put up a “no through way” sign on the road and said people can’t come in anymore. Literature is not for you anymore. But in a funny way, that sort of both is and isn’t true, and that sign is a simultaneous invitation to say, well, actually, if you want to go to the library every week for a decade, it is for you. And for some people, that is quite democratic, right?

Jared: If someone were listening to this and they think, well, I read Romeo and Juliet in high school and I hated it. I think I read Romeo and Juliet in high school and hated it. But then I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I thought, oh, I liked this more. And then I read Othello and thought, oh, I really like this. So I’m just wondering, how would you coax them to give Shakespeare another chance? Perhaps they’re a little older. They’re no longer being forced to read it. What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?

Henry: So the first thing I would say is, you’re not at school and you’re not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn’t like at school that are no longer relevant. So just move on. Put that to one side. That’s over. Shakespeare’s the best. People get a little fussy about, can we say the best, and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes, he’s the best. He’s the heart of the English canon. He’s the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read some Shakespeare in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it’s crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary?

Jared: So—you have this piece about how to have good taste. I think it’s your most popular piece on Substack. Tell me a little bit about what taste is and maybe what’s different about taste and preferences.

Henry: So taste is the idea that you have a well-refined sense of what is good or what is not good in a particular domain. So you might have taste in movies, books, food. But people increasingly talk about the importance of taste at work, because one of the things that AI is doing is making human taste and human judgment one of those fields that’s going to rise in importance and rise in value, because it’s obviously something that’s slightly more reserved to us than to the AI.

But the question of taste is very confused in popular discourse. And the confusion is that people don’t see the difference between taste and preference. And sometimes when people say “I need to refine my taste,” they think they need to have a stronger set of preferences. But that’s not really taste. That’s just knowing what you like and being better at knowing what you like.

Jared: And I think you see this when people first develop a sense of ownership over their aesthetic sensibilities—they start saying, oh, that stuff, that’s s**t. And this stuff’s great. And they speak in these very stark terms. But in a way that kind of reflects that maybe they don’t understand what they’re talking about.

Henry: I think so. And I think whether you enjoy it and whether it is good, as we talked about with Succession, are separate questions and should be treated as such. Often there’ll be overlap, but often there won’t. Taste is knowledge. That’s what it comes down to.

If you’re a chef and you have taste, you can pick up ingredients. You can tell if they’re fresh enough, firm enough. You know how sharp or strong the taste is going to be based on how fresh or how mature they are. You know how to combine them. You know what the result of that will be. So your taste in selecting and using and cooking ingredients is just a huge knowledge bed that you’re able to draw on all the time.

Jared: So let me ask you about some more of the work that you’re doing on Substack. The publication is called The Common Reader. Why did you choose that?

Henry: That is a phrase from Samuel Johnson. He was writing his Life of Gray. Gray is a famous English poet who wrote the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which at one time every schoolchild knew—probably many of them memorized—and which now no one reads. And he had spent several pages trashing Gray, saying, my God, look at this, terrible rhyming, lazy in the meter. He’s really just upset with everything. And then he turns around and says, well, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” though, is a wonderful poem. And I rejoice to concur with the common reader and say that I love it. And it became a famous phrase. The whole concept of what is a common reader—is there such a thing? Some people deny it. But you can see with the rise of commercial society, the sheer number of books that were published in the 18th and 19th centuries, that there did become such a thing as a common reader.

“I think we’re going to live through a small revival of the humanities.”

They’re not involved in criticism or academia. Maybe they’re not very well schooled. Maybe they’re not even formally trained in literature in any way. They pick up the books and they read them, and the tradition is there for them. The phrase was then famously taken up by Virginia Woolf, who called her two books of critical essays The Common Reader. And she took that from Johnson. And she wrote the best literary criticism of the 20th century. And she was a true common reader. She was so deeply immersed in the tradition. So that’s where I got the phrase from.

Jared: So do you feel a kinship with the uneducated or the less educated person who just wants to read literature because they love it, or because they just have a desire?

Henry: I don’t know if I feel a kinship, but that’s basically what the blog is about. And I think there are a lot of those people out there. And I think there will be more of them in the future. I think we’re going to live through a small revival of the humanities, and those people are going to be a big part of it.

Jared: I definitely suspect that we are going to see an emergence of an era of autodidacts—people who are just curious about knowledge or about art that’s out there. And for a very long time, we thought that if you wanted to explore any of those topics, you went to school, you went to university, maybe you got a master’s degree, maybe considered doing a PhD, and then you were serious enough to really discuss this stuff. But I think increasingly people have this urge to take their education into their own hands.

I’ve written about this a decent amount. And I think the humanities stand to benefit from that. I do not endorse the view that some people would want to put out, that the academy has killed the humanities or anything like this. I think people who say that often don’t know what’s going on in the academy. But I think the humanities can thrive outside of the academy in a way that, say, mechanical engineering can’t.

Henry: Exactly. But also, even when the academy is doing well, it relies on having common readers. And there is a much more direct relationship than there is with some of the more STEM subjects. In the sense that people who have nothing to do with it, who never took the degree, are a big part of your reading base for the primary texts, at least. And even if the professors don’t want to be directly engaged with those people, simply the fact that they exist is part of why we have as many departments, as many courses, as many graduates as we do. So I think it’s very important.

And I also think we wouldn’t have literature if we didn’t have an ordinary audience. Someone has to want the books to exist. Because you used to have this before books were selling in volume—Chaucer didn't sell any books, sold some manuscripts maybe, but there were still people who wanted to have his poems read out, and those people were not always in the universities. Maybe they were at court, or maybe they were elites in their own way, but fine. In one sense, they're still common readers, and that's very important for poetry.

Jared: So what do we do about all these Philistines? The elite Philistines?

Henry: Well, actually, that’s why I call it a supremacy—because they’re ruling over us.

Jared: Say a little bit more about what you mean by “elite” here.

Henry: The people who are running the institutions. The book critics at the big newspapers, the editors, the professors. Again, it’s a certain selection of them. By no means is it all of them. There are so many excellent people out there. But it’s reached a sort of tipping point where there’s a large presence of it in the media. This is why I say, don’t trust all the critics. Take it into your own hands. Go to Substack, go to YouTube, go to Twitter, go to wherever, because you will also find great stuff there.

We have this old-fashioned model that you follow particular people. It used to be that you could just read Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. He’s always good. You’ll always get some great information from him. Now you really want to be looking around and following different people and finding different things. It varies by topic. It varies by what you’re doing. So just bear that in mind very strongly. But Liberties is a new journal, that’s been set up in the last five years or so, that’s doing great work—a kind of, to use awful phrases like “challenger brand” or whatever, a really strong alternative. I think there’s a lot of good work on Substack. And I think a new culture will emerge from all of those alternative ways of doing it.

Jared: One of my favorite things about talking to you is when you talk about writers you hate.

Henry: You're not going to make me say names?

Jared: We won't talk about any contemporary writers. Are there canonical writers that you think are just overrated, that have just been included? Because you're kind of a defender of the canon on the grounds that it's all pretty good. But are there any canonical writers that you look at and say, I just don't see what the argument is for this?

Henry: Yes, there are some in the 20th century. It is hard to bring names to mind because eventually you decide you’re leaving this alone permanently, or for some time. I do think that the canon is good. I do think it’s very hard to knock someone out of the canon. And when those attempts have been made, they’ve often failed.

So there was famously a generation that didn’t like Milton—the T.S. Eliot generation. Several very prominent critics all made their case against Milton and thought he was overrated and all this stuff. And, well, look how that went. It was Christopher Ricks, I think, who came back with Milton’s Grand Style, which is a really good book of criticism, and defended Milton. And he’s still here. You would have to be ideological or cracked not to pick up Milton and say, yeah, this is some of the best.

Jared: Yeah.

Henry: Of course, no one ever wished Paradise Lost was longer. Everyone agrees with that. But the best of Milton is just extraordinary.

Jared: And you’re not just thinking about Paradise Lost when you say the best of Milton, right?

Henry: Well, a lot of people would say that is the best of Milton and that the rest is hard work. I think he’s a great sonnet writer at a minimum. Many of the short poems, which you can read in the John Carey edition, are excellent. But I accept the general criticism that Lycidas and some of the others are overdone and not up to his best standards. I also think the prose is excellent—some of the best prose we have.

Jared: Well, let me ask you about American writing. I think I told you last night as we were browsing a bookstore that every American writer is secretly an Anglophile, and we suspect that maybe our literary culture doesn’t stand up. Some of them not so secretly. But even the ones who would deny it, I think—we all think that the UK editions of our books look better. If there’s a UK audiobook, it sounds better. And what we’re putting out is garbage compared to what you can get overseas.

Henry: But these are all surface considerations.

Jared: Yes, but I think deep down people start to worry: have we produced great novels in the same way, or great poetry in the same way, that England has?

Henry: I think that’s a very valid question. I’m not as well read in American literature, but I don’t think you have as good a poetic tradition as we do, by any means. There are like twelve names of true excellence. And I think some of the African-American poets are on that list. And there’s been some controversy about that over here, which I find very puzzling. Gwendolyn Brooks is one of your best poets. I don’t even understand that it’s a question.

Jared: Do you like Langston Hughes?

Henry: Yeah, exactly. Another perfect example. That said, you’ve only had 200 years, right? Whereas we go back to the Saxons with our poetry. So The Oxford Book of English Verse is a summation of a thousand years of great cultural tradition. You can’t really compete with that. But I am surprised that there are so few truly great poets.

I suspect one reason is that people like Whitman and Dickinson are true originals, and they’re immersed in the long tradition—they know their Bible and they know all these things. And then in the quest for an American poetry, this gradually faded to become a replication of Whitman and Dickinson rather than doing what they did, which is to be truly immersed in the long tradition. That’s probably unfair, but I think there’s something to it.

Jared: What about novels, though, or American novelists?

Henry: I have not read the American novel tradition in the same way. I think the 19th century is incredibly strong. Willa Cather, who I’ve started reading recently—clearly one of your best. But when I get into the 20th century, I truly don’t see the fuss. Obviously some of it’s great, but I think an awful lot of praise has been given to things that are not that good. But by the end of the 20th century, literature is becoming much less significant in culture everywhere. And America was not a very literary nation to begin with. Tocqueville says there’s a Shakespeare in every wooden hut, every cabin that he visits.

Jared: Remarkably hard to find.

Henry: I’ll take him at his word, but yes, you don’t see the influence of that in a lot of places. The founding fathers were incredibly literary, but was there a general literary culture? I think when you come over here and you start a nation from scratch, you don’t have the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, and you don’t have the shelves and shelves of books. So maybe that’s part of it. But this idea that the mid-20th century—Saul Bellow and all these people—and they’re all such geniuses? I don’t really see it. But I’m very English. So that might be the problem.

Jared: I know you like Melville. Or at least you like Moby-Dick.

Henry: Yes.

Jared: But you don’t maybe like his poetry so much.

Henry: I tried reading the Civil War poems, and I think—is it “Sheridan at Cedar Creek”? There’s one about a particular battle that I read the other day, and I thought that was excellent. But in general, I thought the poems would be excellent based on Moby-Dick, but not really.

Jared: Moby-Dick feels singular in his work.

Henry: I’m about to read through the other novels, and I’ve been told it’s worth it.

Jared: I don’t think they’re bad. I just think that Moby-Dick stands apart, not only in his work, but in American literature. We talked last night, and I said Moby-Dick is the great American novel. I just think the argument’s easy to make. What do you think about—there’s been a bit of a resurgence. I see our friend Ted is a fan of David Foster Wallace.

Henry: Oh, I haven’t read David Foster Wallace. I’m sorry, I know.

Jared: Wow, okay. Well, that gives me nothing to talk about. I could see you hating Infinite Jest.

Henry: I love his essays. I think he’s a great essayist. I’ve read most of those. I just don’t feel compelled. I read some of Mason & Dixon and a couple of the other novels of that ilk that came out at that time, and I didn’t like any of them.

Jared: Yeah, you haven’t read DeLillo either.

Henry: Nope. None of it appeals to me at all.

Jared: I want to ask you our final question. We ask all of our guests. I ask for a book recommendation for the listeners. It’s supposed to be a book everybody should read, but for some reason nobody’s reading it. And I prepared you for this. I hope you have something good.

Henry: Yeah, I’m going to pick The Oxford Book of English Verse. There is something for everyone in it. It is a storehouse of most of the best writing in English. You’ll get bits of Paradise Lost, so it might send you to Milton. You’ll get bits of Shakespeare, so it might send you to one of the plays. But it also just gives you entire poems from hundreds and hundreds of authors, and you might realize that you love the Elizabethans, or you love the modernists, or whatever it is. And there’s a lot of stuff in there that you don’t get at school. No one is given any Robert Herrick at school. He’s wonderful. I just memorized one of his poems because I liked it so much. And that can happen to you with this wonderful anthology.

Jared: Henry Oliver, thanks for joining me.

Henry: Thank you for having me.

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