Reading between the lines

If you were asked to describe, in less than three words, what sort of books you enjoy read­ing, would you be able to answer? I proudly thought that this would be an impossible task for me, as I genu­inely love such a wide vari­ety of books. It seems not. Accord­ing to two art­icles — Tales of the Unex­pec­ted and Stranger than fic­tion — my fic­tion and non-fiction read­ing tastes should be termed “exper­i­mental” or, gulp, even “avant garde.”

I can’t dis­agree with the fact that the first art­icle begins its whole argu­ment by cit­ing two of my favour­ite recent nov­els — James Kelman’s Trans­lated Accounts and Jonathan Coe’s The Rot­ters’ Club. Mean­while, the second art­icle, about exper­i­mental writ­ing in non-fiction, begins by refer­ring to Dave Eggers’ book with the ubi­quit­ous title (if you don’t by now how much I loved it, then you haven’t been pay­ing atten­tion), and Edward Platt’s Lead­ville, which I’m still in the middle of reading.

But exper­i­mental? Avant garde? I don’t think so. I’ve always had a prob­lem with those terms, no mat­ter what sort of art form they are used to describe. They smack slightly of snob­bery, a sug­ges­tion that some­thing isn’t meant to be under­stood by just any­one. Exper­i­mental and avant garde can also give an often wrong impres­sion that the res­ult is going to be self-consciously “weird.” This is espe­cially the case in theatre and in music — the imme­di­ate reac­tion of hear­ing that a theatre per­form­ance is being described as avant garde is to ima­gine a naked man stand­ing in the middle of the stage for half an hour, mak­ing strange gut­tural noises whilst wear­ing a plant pot on his head. Or something.

Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t think of any less ali­en­at­ing terms for describ­ing such work. All I know is that I don’t regard my read­ing tastes as par­tic­u­larly exper­i­mental, and espe­cially not avant garde. I can’t think of any­thing more ridicu­lous, in fact. If I’m able to identify sim­ilar char­ac­ter­ist­ics in the books I read (and also the films and plays I enjoy), it is that they play with the accep­ted form of doing things. So Trans­lated Accounts is a series of state­ments from a police state that have been inac­cur­ately recor­ded and pos­sibly cen­sored, Lead­ville is a humor­ous social study of West London’s truly mag­ni­fi­cent A40, and A Heart­break­ing Work of Stag­ger­ing Genius is … oh no, you’re not going to get me star­ted; you should know about that one by now. And I don’t stroke my chin in a thought­ful way when read­ing any of them. So there.