Soho, or Skye?

Another fascinating point that Linda Grant made in her Guardian piece, which I mentioned in Rogues and Vagabonds, is that

The writer sits alone in a room, writing. The reader sits alone in a room, reading. Neither is ever likely to meet the other. Literature is an act of solitude and privacy. Never mind if it's about me; is it about you? [my italics]

And though I know in the abstract that a novel is as much something that a reader puts together, from black marks on a page, as it is something a writer has made by setting black marks on a different page, I've never thought of it quite like that. A writing acquaintance with a totally harmless and nicely-written commercial-women's-fiction novel about pregnancy and small children was deeply hurt by a truly, elaborately, baroquely virulent review on Amazon from a reader, even though the other reviews were full of praise, and it hit the best-seller lists that week. However much everyone else said soothingly, 'It's just some idiot with their own problems.'  - which was manifestly true - it couldn't help but hurt. At a less painful level I know that reviewers - however hard they try, even if they think they should try - can't escape the subjective question, 'Does this book do it for me?' even when they try to answer the objective question 'Is this a Good Book?' At what makes a book do it for them is always going to be as much about them, as about the book.

So is reading and judging a book actually, at least partly, a subset of the process of projection so beloved of psychologists? It was years before I understood the basic mechanism of this process, and saw how fundamental it is to so much of our human interaction. If an author's happy with the sales of their novel they assume the people walking into the shop are looking for cards, or sci-fi, or children's. If the author's anxious about how good their book is, they watch anxiously for proof or denial that No One Wants to Buy My Book, and, there being however many thousands of books in your average bookshop, the probability is that they'll get the proof they'd say they don't want: they project their own conviction that the book's no good onto total strangers.

So maybe there's something in those silly online quizzes about whether Heathcliff or Darcy is the man for you. So much of our pleasure in a book is about what gets us in the gut (and real intellectual pleasure is an emotional excitement, don't forget), or even lower down. It's no more - though no less - subjective than what makes one person love Soho and another Skye, or Beethoven versus Bach, or Monet versus Mantegna. It's a part of our psyche as old and intractable as our selves. A writer, or reader, who maintains otherwise is fooling themselves.