16. READING IS A VIRTUE

Bella Suckling on the novel and the internet

Lately, I find myself more attached to my phone than ever before. Not an original or rare experience. But the attachment is extreme enough for me to feel some concern. My relationship to the phone has surpassed anything in the category of addiction. Addiction would imply some separation between the phone and I. Instead, the phone and I are one, cyborgian. It isn’t just that the phone is attached to my hand near-permanently, it’s that my interactions with the phone take place before cognition, before thought. I open it without realising I have done so. I hear it, even when it doesn’t make a sound. It circumvents my awareness, takes charge of my gestures and movements. My thumb (our thumb?) moves without me asking it to. The phone thinks with me, thinks for me. It is an extension of my regular functioning, rather than a hindrance to otherwise normal functioning. In my cyborgian state, my body works differently: quicker heart-rate, constant hunger for stimulation, half-distracted all the time, flighty. I look for ways out. Instead of the phone distracting me from my life, I try to distract myself from the phone. Aside from the inevitable disruption of work, the most fruitful of my attempts are usually: taking part in a good conversation, watching a film in the cinema or reading a book, especially a book of fiction.

Earlier this year, over coffee on Elgin Street, a particularly bro-ey friend of mine asked me why I read fiction at all, seeing as it is “made-up”. It was a few days after New Years. I gave him a pretty formulaic response, alluding to imagination, empathy, narrative and entertainment. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier and more immersive,’ he asked, ‘to just wear an AI headset?’ I work in books, at both the beginning and the end of the production line. And perhaps for that reason – although I suspect he was being contrarian rather than sincere – his bullshit question seemed to me an existential one.

He might have been more satisfied with my response had I listed a bunch of metrics that could be optimised by reading. But I’ve come to resent the austere, vaguely Protestant way people talk about reading, as if it is akin to, say, broccoli. It’s good for you! It increases your vocabulary! It makes you more empathetic! In the viral ‘mental toughness’ program of self-optimisation called 75 Hard, one of the daily instructions – aside from two workouts, a gallon of water and a progress picture – is that the participant read 10 pages of a book, ideally a self-help book. I think we know, intuitively, that reading is therapeutic. But isn’t it a great deal more than that too?

I read to interrupt myself. I read to experiment with a different kind of time, to modulate my perception so it enters a mode increasingly distinct from its fluttery phone-attached norm, to slow my heart rate, to return myself to a different yet familiar experience of being. But I also do it for those almost inarticulable reasons which concern the soul, for a kind of edification that isn’t moralistic or self-optimising but a worthy end in and of itself. I’m not always entirely focused when I read, I get distracted – read forward and then back, reread, think of things other than the book itself. The images that come to me when I read fiction are half-formed, a patchwork of memory and make-believe, a sketchy montage of impressionistic representations of the work in front of me. Reading, especially reading fiction, is an act of co-creation, the melding of two consciousnesses. Fiction requires the imaginative power of both the writer and the reader.

It is easy to sentimentalise about reading, especially early experiences of reading, which feel so special and formative, so entwined with our experiences of first constructing the world. I read pretty hungrily as a young person. By the time I was nine or ten, I was reading two or three books a week (not to flex…). When I first thought about this obsessive habit – which I have not since replicated at the same rate as my ten-year-old self – I felt inclined to nostalgically write ‘these are my most vivid reading memories’. But I quickly realised I couldn’t “vividly” remember a single book I had read for the first decade or so of my life, except Harry Potter (lol). What I do remember is that my parents never stopped me from reading, no matter the hour. My compulsion to read at such a ferocious rate halted when I was 12 or 13. The reason might be obvious: when I was 12 or 13, I received my first smartphone. The chain of causation was linear.

So, back to the phone… again! There are well-trodden ethical and political questions here about labor and power, so well-trodden that to even mention them feels a little passé. But I don’t think I can untangle my aforementioned phone-attached state – the flightiness, the overflow of energy, the elevated cortisol – from the conditions that support or (perhaps more accurately) create it. The mechanisms of the digital sphere we inhabit work intentionally to surveil, analyse, harness and predict the informational data we produce. These mechanisms then aggravate that data towards profit. The sacrifice is our time and attention. As Zadie Smith writes in her most recent collection of essays, ‘The novelty this time is that we pay the cost existentially. We are the product. Every kid on the train is in their private, monetized dream, giving up their human attention to the algorithm, which at some point down the line will be turned for somebody else’s profit.’

I like the way that Zadie Smith writes about technology and believe her to be a necessary voice in its discussion. But sometimes, when I read her sombre, often elegiac writing about algorithms, tech billionaires and attention capture, I think: but she doesn’t know what it feels like to post a really great selfie on your story on a night out and receive a bunch of replies. She doesn’t know the rush of watching five excellent reels in a row and sending them all to your best friend. She might not agree with me if I told her that some girls really do have a talent for… posting. Some girls post in a way that both halts and animates their audience, just as a great film or painting might. How can I reconcile that with everything else, all the evil? I don’t know.

It obviously isn’t a binary of books = good, internet = bad. The internet is not a totality of evil. I’m writing and publishing this very essay…on the internet. And the idea that a novel must always be good and virtuous doesn’t seem so helpful either. It puts me in a mind of something Ottessa Moshfegh quipped to Bookforum in 2019:

I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an “afternoon special” or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. A novel is not BuzzFeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let’s get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitive industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?

When I think about the excess of time I spend on my phone, which could be spent reading, I feel a little bit of shame and self-reproach. Mostly the thought makes me melancholy. The problem is not that I don’t read as much as I “should”, for some moralistic reason. It’s that I don’t read as much as I want to. The compulsion of my technology use keeps me from a something that feels better, closer and more true. I like to spend time in the company of imaginary characters. I like to interface with the consciousness of another person. When fiction is good, really good, I have a feeling of more life, of expansion. It’s not a habit I’m likely to replace with an AI headset.