Shot in the foot with his own canon

<i>How to Read and Why </i>by Harold Bloom (Fourth Estate, &pound;15.99)

Given his self-proclaimed love of irony, Harold Bloom will appreciate that a better cover for How to Read and Why would show the author, gun in hand, bleeding hole in foot. Like his fellow critical heavyweights George Steiner and Sven Birkerts, Bloom is worried about the fate of reading. Universities, which should nurture the habit, have regimented the study of literature into a form of narrow special pleading. Bloom, by contrast, puts his faith in the threatened "solitary reader" who wants to enrich his or her inner life. Quite right, too - but his book is inherently unsuited to its mission

Given his self-proclaimed love of irony, Harold Bloom will appreciate that a better cover for How to Read and Why would show the author, gun in hand, bleeding hole in foot. Like his fellow critical heavyweights George Steiner and Sven Birkerts, Bloom is worried about the fate of reading. Universities, which should nurture the habit, have regimented the study of literature into a form of narrow special pleading. Bloom, by contrast, puts his faith in the threatened "solitary reader" who wants to enrich his or her inner life. Quite right, too - but his book is inherently unsuited to its mission

In scale, it's a postscript to his weighty The Western Canon. In arrangement, it's a textbook, lining up stories, novels, poetry and plays and identifying the virtues of representative works in each genre. But Bloom is unsure whether his constituency has read the texts that he is commending. If you have, there's little to be learnt from this kind of survey; if you haven't, there is little to persuade you to do so.

Just as, on meeting a new person, "you are ill-advised to begin the acquaintance with condescension", so, the learned Bloom counsels, readers should not approach a writer such as Henry James with condescension. OK, but I don't want to be condescended to by someone urging me to "persevere" with Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian - a book I got through with a lot less trouble than Bloom did. The reason it is worth persevering with, incidentally, is because it is "the strongest imaginative work by any living American writer".

How to Read... is strewn with such "authoritative" pronouncements. Not for nothing is Bloom so keen on the aptly named Judge in Blood Meridian - and it's not the only time he shoots himself in the foot by identifying with a character under discussion. His reading of Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" is remarkable for its insensitivity to any of the subtle inflections that undermine the hero's affirmations. Constantly talking about the great things he will do (cf Bloom's many variants on "Later in this chapter I will quote and discuss..."), without making significant progress, the ageing Ulysses sounds less convincing the more vehemently he makes his heroic pronouncements. Such ambiguity adds to the poem's effect. The critical moment comes with the brag-lament: "I am become a name."

Quite so. Bloom, too, is become a name, sounding more anodyne the more he professes the virtues of readerly perseverance and writerly originality. The writers discussed all end up being "superb", "splendid", "astonishing", "wonderful". This banal style of exhortation shows how the acoustics of the auditorium have encroached on the inner life of Judge Ulysses Bloom. Appealing to the solitary reader, his writing assumes the tone of a public address.

One is persuaded to read something not by shrink-wrap superlatives but by felicity of observation. Consider the way that Michael Ondaatje, in The English Patient, suggests we take up Kipling: "read him slowly... He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do... Think about the speed of his pen." Or how Cheever alerts us to "the absolute taste of loneliness" in Hemingway. Or how Claudio Magris evokes Kafka in terms of characters "who live in rented rooms and cross their dimly-lit landings as nomads traverse the desert".

Those are writers confiding in their readers; such voices compel attention. Bloom is not so sure. If his prognosis is less optimistic, that is because he tends to think within what he is saying rather than think it through. Blood Meridian not only depicts our past and "gun-crazy present" but "doubtless prophesies our bloody future". Isn't one of the reasons for reading to bring a bit of doubt into that glibly apocalyptic scenario? If not, any amount of reading would seem to be in vain.

About one thing, however, Bloom is incontrovertibly right. Given a finite amount of time, we must try to read only the best books. Take him at his word. Don't waste yours on this one.