By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini
‘Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself’ – Kingsley Amis on Martin Amis
My biggest disappointment with my English Literature BA at Durham is that I never got to talk to people about Nabokov’s Lolita as promised in my third year sexology module. It’s not a particularly challenging or niche text, most people are at least familiar with that lip lickingly good first paragraph, but christ it is a can of worms in a seminar room of people who still covet Jane Eyre aged 21. How could you like a text about something like that! Why would someone write that! The clamours of condemning cries ringing through the room, all of us ultimately missing the point. To say it’s a beautiful novel is not very tasteful, but I certainly think it’s true. It’s a reading exercise in taste and tolerance. Nabokov toys with his reader and uses voice to sugarcoat the hardest pill to swallow, but ultimately it will always be unfairly known as the noncey novel. We are apprehensive about its taste, and more frequently we have become a population of readers who spit out challenges to our tastes on the mediocre grounds.
This month The Guardian, short on change for an idea of their Saturday magazine, ran ‘The 100 Best Novels of All Time’: an updated version of their 2003 list. The Pilgrims’ Progress has been dethroned and completely denounced from the list (thankfully), Money by Martin Amis is nowhere to be seen, replaced by another theoretical hinterland from Italo Calvino, and for some reason we are continuing to pretend that Elena Ferrante is better than Virginia Woolf (che schifo!). The only hope is that Lolita has climbed the ranks to 25. In 20 years, can ‘The Best Novels of All Time’™ really change that much? Apparently so. Our new list is, dare I say, tame. There is nothing shocking or unexpected held in the ranks: it looks like a list of the most name-dropped titles in a y13’s UCAS personal statement. What happened! Why have we become so ubiquitous, so agreeable, so inoffensive? I blame taste.
Enter Evelyn Waugh, in all his snobbish forgery. Almost a century ago Waugh, in his usual arrogance, decried good taste as a psy-op, made by the British Wartime government to interfere with people’s lives. He rallied his readers to fill their homes with what they liked and bollocks to your neighbours opinions. While he did base his dislike for taste in an typically elitist colour (oh, Evelyn), blaming the ‘plague’ of taste on some upstart at a polytechnic, his snarky observations ring true: ‘it seems odd that Colonel Brown’s wife who disagrees with you about politics and religion and how to bring up her daughters should see eye to eye with you[r taste]’. Surely the point in curating individual taste is to be, well, individual. To like things that others do, yes, but for differing reasons, and to let yourself disagree with people’s takes. Can we really say someone has the ‘best’ taste in books if they have read the majority on that list? Or do they just have the most acceptable and agreeable? Waugh took his anti-taste agenda further, animating his cir-de-coeur in the form of A Handful of Dust’s Mrs Beaver: a modern woman (bad) who likes chromium plating (worse) and fills her home with other people’s furniture (criminal). Mrs Beaver’s yoghurt gobbling habits are scorned by Waugh, perceiving her role as a tastemaker as a detriment to society as she refuses to let eccentrics be eccentrics when there are tasteful, fashionable interiors to sell. Whatever, I wonder, would he make of the hoards of people now telling us to run into corporation backed trends. To give up whatever quest of personal taste cultivation they could have embarked on to run head first into the new popular thing that won’t give them odd looks on the Tube. I wonder what he would make of Martin Amis…
Opening a Martin Amis novel is opening a can of grotesque, extreme, bravadoing worms. His novels spiral and debauch, with his most canonical work Money being a novel where characters ingest their sexuality savagely while guzzling on grease and nursing a neverending cigarette. Despite the amount of ingesting within this novel, purging is its driver, as John Self spills his high cholesterol guts on every facet of his life to the reader. He is truly unbearable, and considerably unlikeable. And yet, it is fantastic. Amis’ novel of voice aims to make us wince and recoil, recalling his inspiration from Nabokov. Nabokov and Amis’s novels are testing, not for their writing style or themes, but because they aim to test our patience and practice. You get the sense that Amis had good fun playing about with what Money could be – so much so he includes moments of self-insertion just to get even more in on the action. The rules were altogether ignored, Self doesn’t give a toss – or at least superficially does -about how he comes across, and it is an unpleasant novel – read it!
Reading isn’t meant to be tasteful, it is supposed to be taste making. Push your senses to the extreme and heighten your taste, man. Upon the publication of a paperback edition of Lynch’s 2024 Booker Prize winner Prophet Song, my grandma sent me a copy. Shortly followed by a postcard, her preferred mode of communication for all forms of message, stating ‘DO NOT READ. UTTERLY MISERABLE BOOK!’ I read it. Every minute spent with it felt like a panic attack. And yet I recommend it for such a reason. Being brought to panic attack levels of stress from words is truly fantastic – art can do that! It’s not safe, it’s not fun, and it’s certainly not tasteful, but it helped make my taste. Sod what Waterstones tell you, or some corporate plug online, or even an author – read what YOU like and make your own taste. If the taste is good, you relish it. Be opinionated, break the rules, and be original. And if we are going to start curating our reading avenues based on universal taste, then call me the filthiest reader alive.