I was once told a story concerning Basil Boothroyd, a famous editor of Punch; he was on a train one day and happened to notice a fellow passenger sighing over a book. “Something wrong?” he inquired. “Oh, it’s nothing. I just can’t get on with this,” the woman admitted ruefully. “I’ve been struggling with it for hours!” Boothroyd asked politely if he could look at the book. He took it, peered at it and turned it in his hands — and then, with one swift action, hurled it out of the train window. “There,” he said. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

Pierre Bayard would, I feel, approve of this story. Being an ironical and playful kind of clever French academic and psychoanalyst, he would even approve of the way I have embellished a half-remembered apocryphal tale and made it serve my own purposes. His new book, which originally appeared in French with the significantly interrogative title, How Does One Talk About Books One Hasn’t Read?, grants absolution to the guilt-ridden “non-reader” in more subtle ways than Boothroyd, but the ultimate effect is similar.

The only thing wrong with this volume is its anglicised “How to” title, suggestive of an airy bluffer’s guide. In fact, this is a rich, meaty and immensely enjoyable essay that challenges the “artificial distinction” between “I have read that book” and “I have not read that book”. It is about where legitimate critical opinions really come from — both in the world about us and the world within.

The headline news that accompanies the book is that Bayard, a professor of French literature, has confessed to gaps in his own reading. Zut alors. One remembers the universal clamour of disapproval when the historian Richard Cobb, as the chairman of the 1984 Booker prize, admitted he hadn’t read Proust or Joyce. But Bayard is prepared for this; he is unconcerned; his shoulders are broad; there is a purpose to his provocative stance. In his Even Hamlet, on which Bayard once wrote a whole scholarly book, gets only SB and HB++ because the point is not that Bayard is a lazy fraud who is blowing the whistle on professional incompetence and/or perversely angling for the sack. The point is that, between reading a book cover to cover and not picking it up at all, there are umpteen normal and valid critical responses to books, and we are daft to feel bad about ourselves for not having “read” Joyce or Proust when we probably know a significant amount about both writers. Bayard’s message is that a person who has literally “read” the book has, in any case, arguably no advantage in understanding it over someone who hasn’t. Even having read a book with great care and enjoyment, one emerges with a highly partial recollection of it which rarely coincides with anyone else’s memory of it because every reader’s appreciation of a book is filtered through personal interests (and knowledge of other books).

This accounts for a) the universally disappointing standard of discussion at book groups, and b) the universally ghastly experience of writers in the presence of fans when “they realise that what is said about their books does not correspond to what they believe they have written”. In his chapter Encounters with the Writer, Bayard urges fans never to go into detail when praising a book to its author’s face, because any description of his text will cause him only dismay and disillusionment. A reader’s interpretation of his book will, you see, merely remind him of the pointlessness of the entire writing enterprise, when so little of his actual thought has, apparently, been effectively communicated. Bayard stops short of taking this thought to its proper conclusion, which is that, if you bang on and on to an author about what you loved in his book (which wasn’t there), he might even go home and blow his brains out.

This is actually an extremely funny book, and, of course, it is full of enthusiastic examples from interesting texts that Bayard evidently knows well, even if they are essentially SB++. He uses Paul Valéry’s tributes to Proust and Anatole France as examples of how a shameless nonreader can arguably know more about a text than someone who has read it; he recalls the hilarious scene in Graham Greene’s The Third Man in which the hero, a writer of westerns, is grilled by an audience in Vienna that believes he is a much grander “literary” author. They ask him where he would “put” James Joyce, and he replies, aggressively (but reasonably), “What do you mean, ‘put’?”

Bayard also uses the film Groundhog Day to discuss the concept of our “inner libraries” – although oddly the anglicisers of the book failed to check the original script, in which Andie MacDowell says she read 19th-century French poetry at college, to which Bill Murray memorably explodes, “What a waste of time!” (In the French version of the film, it seems, she says she read 19th-century Italian poetry, and he retorts, “You must have had a lot of time on your hands!”) Where do our critical opinions come from, if not from reading a book for ourselves? Partly, of course, from reading reviews. So I’d better protect myself by declaring here and now that I have wilfully misrepresented this book, have already forgotten most of it, have glossed over the bits I didn’t understand, and moreover missed the point entirely. I have to confess that I certainly did not anticipate the way it was going: I assumed throughout that Bayard was building up to a heart-warming defence of reading, so was quite shocked by the book’s passionate (but irresponsible) conclusion, which argues for people to write instead. But, on the whole, Bayard does usefully demolish a mindless and unhelpful “artificial distinction”, and makes a great case for chucking that book out of that window when the going gets tough. He also incidentally proves that French literary criticism is sometimes absolutely penetrable if it really makes the effort. I would scrupulously rate his book SB and FB++, and I urge you to rate it, equally scrupulously, HB++ when discussing it with all your friends.

How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read

by Pierre Bayard, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman (Granta £12 pp185)

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £10.80 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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