Last summer, my brother and I began to argue over the merits and demerits of reading contemporary fiction. It wasn't the usual wringing-hands, woe-is-the-industry, books-were-so-much-better-when-me-granddad-were-a-lad debate; it was, as sibling arguments often are, a rather more heated and vitriolic affair than that.
Reading too much, my brother explained in his English-teacherly way, is a disaster for a writer. To immerse yourself in literature - particularly those of your contemporaries - makes your work derivative at worst, and unoriginal at best. To keep your voice pure, he suggested, you must retreat, Kasper Hauser-like, only to emerge later with a voice as clear as God intended. It was an argument that almost culminated in our first exchange of blows since 1994.
My brother is far from alone in his opinion - though few of his supporters would use such profanity and reference so many embarrassing childhood memories. Over the years, I've met many published and unpublished writers who profess a queasiness about modern fiction. They might produce it, but they sure don't like to read it. While some of these neophobics are scared, as my brother, of the ogre of influence, many other writers simply don't believe that they can learn anything from recently published novels. Both positions to me seem wrongheaded.
I can't imagine being a fiction writer without being a fiction reader; nor can I imagine any writer being better for not having read Being Dead, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Gilead, or any other great novel of the last twenty years. Yet I can understand the anxiety of influence, in Harold Bloom's famous phrase. In Model Behaviour, Jay McInerney's piece of writerly advice is "never read Nabokov" - an exhortation which makes sense when you've read as many prolix and pompous unpublished novels as I have. To that, I could add "never read Carver", whose pared-down prose has spawned so many imitators that parody is unavoidable. Yet, Lolita and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love are both such generous, important and instructive books that it's crazy not to experience them, and subsequently the writers they have influenced. By not reading your peers, you're missing out on the opportunity to see how things are done well, or done badly, or (if you're that way inclined) commercially.
If you're a writer of contemporary literary fiction, published or otherwise, you have to support the industry. I don't mean waving scarves outside Faber or starting chants at Jonathan Cape, but by supporting your fellow writers. Go beyond the 3for2s and the discounts, seek out the unusual and inspired. Take risks, but most of all take an interest; if all of us who write and wish to be published bought a new book every month, from an author we didn't know, publishers would have to sit up and take notice. Reading your contemporaries should both be a delight and a duty - and while my brother still clings to his beliefs, he also left my house last month with a copy of Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You.
