What we talk about when we talk about books
My mother always lied about the suburb we lived in. To an uninformed eye, Wierda Park was identical to its neighbour Eldoraigne. Single-floor tin-roof houses, dry red earth instead of lawns, broken cars in front of garages, KFCs and churches on every alternate street corner. But in the subtle hierarchy of the middle class, the difference meant everything. Wierda Park was plumbers and tradesmen; Eldoraigne was sales reps and office jobs.
My mother always gave our address as Eldoraigne. Everyone who came to visit us got horribly lost.
We had more books in our house than anyone else we knew. Having books in our house was one of those things that made us more Eldoraigne people than Wierda Park people, my mother insisted. The bookshelves always had to be in the living room where they could be seen: James Patterson, Wilbur Smith and Jackie Collins lined up proudly next to our 52 inch television, all bought on credit.
Books, I understood, were things that made you different. Things that made you better, more worldly than your neighbours. It didn’t matter how much American Idol you watched because you read a book for a few minutes before bedtime. Whether these books were any good was irrelevant. You read, which made you a reader, which elevated you from where you were.
I internalised these lessons early. Books were the way out, I understood. Of what? Of middle class suburban life. Of spending every Saturday on the couch doing nothing. Of children and cleaning up dog shit from the carpets. Of endless tearful fights about money. Of regretting not doing anything with your life. Of the most basic types of ignorance.
Books could show me the world, I believed, so that I could find a more interesting corner of it to live in.
I had no idea then, of the hierarchy of genre, of the canon, of what one read in public and what one read at home. I was sick with reading. I would do it everywhere: in the bath, at the dinner table (to my Dad’s grumbling), under my desk at school, in the car, though it made me carsick. I read at aftercare instead of learning to make friends. When the adults would get grumpy and tell me to go bloody play outside for once, I’d hide under a side table that had a draped tablecloth and read there, in the dark.
I finished all the books in my primary school library, then all the books in the Teens, Romance and Fantasy sections of our public library (neither of which were very big). I read every single one of my parent’s Popular Mechanics books and learned how to rethread bolts. I found and tore through my Dad’s enormous stash of Playboy magazines and learned about the short story, and what a blowjob was. I discovered my first true love, Stephen King, at age 11 and systematically tracked down every single one of his novels I could find. I would find all the sex bits and read them out loud to the other girls at aftercare.
Books made me grow up even more English than I should have. I went to English boarding schools with Enid Blyton. I blame my unhealthy obsession with book reading for my encyclopaedic knowledge of the economics of rural British life in the late 1800s and the fact that I know almost nothing about hip-hop.
I wonder, now, why books captured me so completely. Yes, I was a lonely kid. But I was also a snob at the age of ten, having never actually left the province I was born in. How could I be from these Wierda Park people, who didn’t read, who didn’t know anything about plumb squares, or the Amazon river, or the lives of Neanderthals, or of courting rituals of the nineteenth century?
Cultural capital
“Poverty was not just wretchedness, as Dr. Henshawe seemed to think, it was not just deprivation. It meant having those ugly tube lights and being proud of them.” — Alice Munro, “The Beggar Maid”
Although he certainly wasn’t the first person to describe it, Max Weber may have been the first person to formally build a theory of how taste inscribes power in a society. Weber differentiated between three types of social stratification: class (which Weber defines as pure economic power, or money), political power (party), and something he called “Stände”, or social power. Social power is about culture, and the practices of food, fashion, language and lifestyle. Really, these things are about preserving endogamy, making sure we keep our bloodlines pure. Have some class, we tell each other, and we aren’t talking about money.
Weber spoke about how, in the America of the early 20th Century, capitalists would deliberately relinquish social power in favour of a raw display of their economic power. South Africa in 2015 might be the opposite: a place of faking it till you make it, of izikhothane and champagne and Mercedes Benzes you can’t afford. In a place like this, a private school accent can get you far.
Taste isn’t subjective, Weber reminds us. It’s not only about aesthetics. It’s a code designed to not be understood. It’s a way to keep people out.
In my own little corner of white South Africa, the question of what you read is one of those questions that quickly sizes you up and places you on a class ladder. Where do you live, is still an important question, of course. But when you’re white in South Africa, there is no question about economic power. Only of whether you’re a person of taste. Did you have a piano in your house or a TV? Did you have Wilbur Smith or André Brink? The differences get more and more subtle the deeper into these closed communities you go. Do you read fiction or non-fiction? Naipul or McEwan? Did you secretly read The Hunger Games?
Why do these tiny class details matter? Perhaps it’s because of the strange two-ness of our country. The lack of a middle, a mass market for books.
Or maybe this applies only to the white aristocracies of Cape Town and Durban. In Joburg, everyone is a mongrel anyway. There, people just greet you with a hand job and a question about whether you’re buying the cocaine tonight.
It’s not just the literary snobs that size you up by your books. Book reading is a complex hierarchy in the 20-something geek circles I work in, too. Almost every software developer I know reads more books in a month than my academic, literary-type friends, but strictly within the genres they very seriously call “speculative fiction”. They take fiction seriously, my fellow geeks. I observe intense debates about whether the new David Brin was too directly derivative of Robert Heinlein. Saying your favourite book is Dune is treated with the same suspicion as saying your favourite book is The Great Gatsby. I know that many of them have the first chapter of a novel saved in a folder on their hard drive.
Sometimes there are strange overlaps: a few weeks ago, some tech friends of mine were having a long conversation about the similarity between McCarthy’s The Road and the hit video game, The Last of Us. “I liked The Road,” I interjected, “but has anyone read Blood Meridian?”
“Is it about vampires?” asked one of the engineers, blinking.
