Howard Jacobson writes on “bad boys’ books,” making a case for depressing and difficult literature.
He argues that all good books improve the character of the reader, even those that cast ugly characters or that offer the reader only the barest sense of uplift and resolution at the end:
“We read to extend our sympathies, to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves, to educate our imaginations, to find liberation from the prison of the self, to be made whole where we are broken, to be reconciled to the absurdity of existence, in short to be redeemed from flesh, the ego and despair…Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it’s literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What’s at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works.”
