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Bookends

How Does an Author’s Reputation Shape Your Response to a Book?

Zoe Heller and

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Zoë Heller and Siddhartha Deb discuss how what we know about a writer changes our reading.

By Zoë Heller

When deprived of contextual clues, students ended up making embarrassingly “wrong” judgments about what was good and bad.

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Zoë HellerCredit...Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

My 16-year-old goddaughter tells me that whenever she hears that a book is “a classic” or “a great work,” she assumes that it’s going to be dull. I shake my head and express dismay, but secretly, I am rather impressed. I was often bored by the World’s Best Books at her age, but I was far too much of a suck-up — far too keen to be thought of as clever — to ever have admitted it. In high school English class, when everyone else was complaining about the longueurs in “Paradise Lost,” I was the lone creep who refused to acknowledge the tedium. I thought that doing so would be tantamount to declaring my philistinism, that it would result in my being blackballed from the great club of Cultured People to which I desperately aspired.

This craven deference to received literary opinion lasted well into adulthood. In my 20s, I worked for a brief period as an editorial assistant at a publishing house in London, where my duties included overseeing “the slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. The task entailed glancing over each submission and either returning it to the author with a snotty form letter regretting that the work was “not right for us,” or (if I detected a glimmer of something remotely publishable) sending it upstairs for further consideration by one of the in-house readers. The important thing was to send back manuscripts at a steady rate and to keep the slush pile low. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Under my supervision, the slush pile grew and grew until it became several tottering ziggurats of slush. I’d like to say that it was the thought of dashing writers’ hopes that paralyzed me. But I was quite heartless about that. What stopped me in my tracks was the dread of having to make independent literary judgments. I had never before been asked to evaluate writing that was utterly ­reputation-less and imprimatur-less. In college I had read I.A. Richards’s famous study, “Practical Criticism,” in which Richards asked Cambridge undergraduates to assess poems without telling the students who had written them. The point of the experiment was to show how, when deprived of contextual clues, students ended up making embarrassingly “wrong” judgments about what was good and bad. I was convinced that the slush pile was my own “Practical Criticism” challenge and that I was going to be revealed as a fraud, with no real powers of literary discrimination.

I’m not sure how or when exactly the change occurred, but at some point, I became slightly less cringing and pathetic. I found myself finally able to say what I really liked and what I didn’t. I remember the first time I shyly confessed to a friend that I found Montaigne’s essays a bit pompous and slow-moving. To my amazement, the sky did not fall in on my head, and the shade of I.A. Richards did not appear to reproach me. My friend only sighed and noted, in the relieved manner of someone spilling a long-kept secret, that she had never much cared for Montaigne either.

It’s possible, of course, to get a little drunk on the pleasures of having unfashionable views. Contrarianism is a species of vanity and just as much of a bore, in its way, as unquestioning obeisance to prevailing opinion. (Every now and then, I have to check myself and ask, Do I really not rate Elena Ferrante, or do I just enjoy upsetting her cultish fans?) Still, it is better, by and large, to be a conceited skeptic than to spend one’s life sitting meekly on the critical bandwagon.

Zoë Heller is the author of three novels: “Everything You Know”; “Notes on a Scandal,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and “The Believers.” She has written feature articles and criticism for a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

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By Siddhartha Deb

Why spend time, the thinking goes, with books that will trouble us when we can go instead to a work we agree with?

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Siddhartha DebCredit...Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Before I read a word of his, I watched the film on Yukio Mishima’s life. At the beginning, it displayed the words “Yukio Mishima was Japan’s most celebrated author. . . . On Nov. 25, 1970, Mishima and four cadets from his private army entered the Eastern Army Headquarters, forcibly detained the commander and addressed the garrison.” What followed, in Paul Schrader’s hypnotic “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” was the strange trajectory that led from a cloistered childhood with a neurotic, aristocratic grandmother to that November day when Mishima’s failed coup ended with him slicing open his stomach in the manner of the samurai he so admired.

There are reputations that appear to be the result of canny marketing, and there are those that seem to be sheer aura. Even if there was a great deal of self-promotion behind his public image, Mishima — like Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett or Roberto Bolaño — dazzled with his aura. Regardless, how do you read an author after you’ve first encountered the reputation, especially when it involves, in Mishima’s case, an obsession with violent death and militaristic right-wing politics in a nation that caused and suffered much devastation precisely because of such impulses?

One response, when faced with an author who spills over the boundaries of his or her writing in a disturbing way, is to shy away from the work entirely. In this mode, we let the reputation do the talking, choosing to reject the books attached to the reputation because they might contain ideas repellent to us. That is the position taken by some of those who favor flagging and avoiding books likely to offend the reader’s sensibility. Why spend time, the thinking goes, with books that will trouble us when we can go instead to a work we agree with, written by one who might almost be a friend in the way the work seems to resonate with our deepest selves?

Such an approach can lead us sometimes to writers who have much to say in their agreement with us. It can also, in this distracted, superficial age, take us only to those with carefully constructed reputations that are vetted, marketable and safe — a writer as tailored to the reader’s demographic as a cellphone plan. Quarrel is essential, W.B. Yeats knew, writing, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” How will we find either rhetoric or poetry unless we are ready to test books for ourselves, to see if the writers we disagree with, those who came up with the wrong answers, at least struggled with the right questions?

That can be determined only by the work, not by the reputation, as I discovered when I read Mishima’s Sea of Fertility quartet, beginning with “Spring Snow” and coming eventually to the last novel, “The Decay of the Angel,” the one Mishima dispatched to his publisher before setting out on his failed coup. Before I read the books, I might have thought that Mishima’s reputation exceeded his works. Having read his writing, it is hard to think so. The books indeed contain the violence and militarism I expected to find from the outer shell of his reputation, but they also include reflection, anguish, delight and a keen sense of the ways in which ritual and tradition clash with the heady rush of modernity, a question that has been renewed for us urgently in recent years. The reputation alone might have left me with the image of Mishima kneeling down to kill himself. The novels gave me much more, and when I cast my mind back, I see not the sad repetition of an old, violent ritual, but two characters from the quartet, Kiyoaki Matsugae and Satoko Ayakura, taking a ride together in a rickshaw in Kyoto, clandestine lovers surrounded by fresh spring snow.

Siddhartha Deb was born in northeastern India. He is the author of two novels and “The Beautiful and the Damned,” a work of narrative nonfiction that was a finalist for the Orwell Prize and the winner of the PEN Open award. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Society of Authors in the UK, the Nation Institute, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University, and the Howard Foundation at Brown University. His journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Baffler, The Nation, n+1, and The Times Literary Supplement.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 31 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: How Does an Author’s Reputation Shape Your Response to a Book?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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