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At any point in time, we're continuously being encouraged to pick up some novel or
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other. Reviews, the recommendations of friends and the windows of bookstores edge us towards
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certain titles that, we're promised, will definitively answer the deepest needs that
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we bring to literature. Imagine that we have picked up some such title. It's late in
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the evening and we're just starting out, our volume releasing the characteristic sweet
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smell of newly opened work. The author is going to great lengths to get us interested
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in the life of someone living in Edinburgh in the 1930s; it's raining a lot and their
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car breaks down; they've got a friend in Budapest who is pregnant; there's a robbery
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at a department store. There's a reference to Dundas Street and we flick back thirty
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pages and realise that's where the main character's sister used to live. There's
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a retired engineer with very bushy eyebrows who must be important in some way we don't
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know yet. Immense effort and intelligence are being devoted to exploring the existence
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of a fictional individual. But at this point, an incidental yet rather major thought strikes
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us: no one, we realise, has ever looked at our life – our habits, our friends, our
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past, our dilemmas and problems – with such sustained curiosity or in such detail. In
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the novel on our lap, there seem to be plenty of pithy insights, clever summations, striking
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observations and astute analyses, but all for the sake of the workings of the mind of
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someone else, who's not really very much like us. It's a familiar situation we've
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been educated politely to take for granted. But now it hits us with particular force:
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we're reading the wrong book. What we should really be doing is reading a book about us
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– written with the same elegance and wisdom, but placing the raw material of our life in
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a lucid order, selecting and joining up diverse events in our chaotic stream of consciousness
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and turning them into a coherent story. We're politely interested in the stories of others,
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but the story we really need to hear about is our own. What we really crave is for someone
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to make loving sense of us. We want them to write us, with all our complexity and obscurity,
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down in crisply phrased and clear sentences. Our reading of someone else's novel is dutiful
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and well-educated no doubt, but it is as if we went to the doctor and they made a very
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accurate diagnosis of someone else's earache, or if a financial advisor went to great lengths
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to present us with a solution to the money troubles of a stranger, from which we could
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at best extract the occasional fleeting hint of what might possibly be useful in our own
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case. In the 1690s, one of the greatest of French writers, François Fénelon, was appointed
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tutor to the young Duke of Burgundy. To assist with his education, Fénelon wrote a long
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and fascinating novel called The Adventures of Telemachus in which the Duke, lightly disguised,
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was the central character. The problems the character in the novel faces were exactly
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the problems the Duke was actually facing; the strengths and weakness of the central
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character – carefully understood by the writer – were his. It sounded like the rarest
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and most cultivated luxury to have someone write a novel about you. But it is a treat
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we should all be granted – and perhaps secretly crave. We don't need to give up our jobs
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and become writers – because this book of ourselves is one we're writing already;
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we're at work on it in the early hours, when we can't sleep, when we daydream, make
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plans, go over the past – and give ourselves over to retelling, as best we can, what has
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really happened to us and what it all could mean. It's simply a pity we don't devote
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as much energy as we should to this emerging, critically important work. It is hugely noble
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that we spend so much time reading the novels of others. It is life-saving and properly
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generous to ourselves when we learn to order and make sense of the experiences of our own
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troubled days and nights. There is no risk in reading plenty of novels, but on a regular
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basis, we should carve the time to write and then read back to ourselves the nascent, unfolding novel of
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the story of our own lives.
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