It has been a long time since Granta last published literary criticism. In this issue, Christian Lorentzen confronts a specious new form of pseudo-materialist critique – colophonoscopy, in a word – that would have taken György Lukács to task for bothering to read Balzac when he should have been modeling the outputs of Moscow’s State Publishing House. The point is not that sociological readings of literature have no merit, but that, by abandoning the notion of literary value as anything other than elite consumerism, they are misguided, even on their own narrowly sociological grounds. In the Marxist tradition from Trotsky to Jameson, the phenomenon of individual genius – an idea currently under suspicion – is not just aesthetically but sociologically richer than more ordinary production: Daniel Deronda or A House for Mr Biswas tells us more, both symptomatically and in their own words, about their societies than most bestsellers of the time. But then who reads fiction for information?

What was my fantasy of John? Meeting him, pursuing our relationship – it all seemed preordained. I loved John and, most of the time, early on, felt that he loved me too. But the beginning of our relationship also felt like a negotiation, like a setting-out of terms, which, being young and in awe, I had eagerly agreed to. I did not yet know that their flouting was something that I could – and would – be pulled up on.

‘I never want to be one of those couples,’ he had said, ‘arguing on the corner.’ Meaning: Never dispute me in public.

‘I need my space, a lot of alone time.’ My needs will supersede yours.

I met his friends. I met Jude, his older sister. We went to dinner, to events: gallery openings, screenings, book launches. The adult life I had envisioned began to take shape, all at once. Being recognised as part of a couple thrilled me; I felt legitimised. John had a life, a full life. He had immediate and extended family, people he had known since childhood, school, university. I was surprised to discover that he found it all quite stifling. My own upbringing had been rootless, what with our various moves and my mother’s long and definitive estrangement from her relatives. I suppose you could say that I was unencumbered – I think that might have been John’s word.

I think I agree with John’s speculations on infidelity as a self-fulfilling prophecy, incidentally – only, it seemed to me that John had always been the one to accuse himself. He behaved as someone pinioned from the outset. He had the posture, from the moment I met him, of a man who viewed himself as terminally hard done by. Once his worries about the judgements of his ex Isobel had worn off, I’d inherited the position of arbiter as his self-generated need for condemnation tracked over to me. There was little I could have done to dodge it, to shirk the role I’d been attributed against my will. This desire for castigation was something John experienced both in his personal relationships and in the professional realm. ‘Of course, no one wants to hear what I think,’ he would often say, all evidence to the contrary, when we were discussing a catalogue introduction he’d just finished, an interview he’d given – ‘I’ was not a pronoun here but a name, and the name was his. This was, further, a clipped phrase that signalled the end of an exchange, and as such doubled as a notice that I had said the wrong thing, something to displease him. It might be more generous to say that I’d inadvertently grazed an insecurity, that John was, at the heart of it all, a deeply insecure person.

Over the years I’ve experimented with many types of men, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m only attracted to conventionally attractive men who are tall. Taller than me. I understand I’ve been conditioned to feel this way but so far this is something I’ve not been able to change. Conventionally attractive men who are tall only want to have sex with conventionally attractive men who are also tall, or at least the same height, because someone cannot always be taller. If the tall always sought the taller, where would it end?

‘Hold on,’ she said to Hal. She looked at Maps. ‘It says go straight.’ Danna looked up and ahead. ‘It’s a toll road here.’

‘I know,’ Hal said. ‘Which is why I got confused. We didn’t rent the – the thing, the whatever –’

‘What thing –’

‘The pass, the special pass that beeps. For tolls.’

‘They can bill by plate,’ Danna said. ‘There’s a whole bill-by-plate lane,’ she said, pointing to it, ‘right there.’

Hal followed her point, but he was making the face he made when he didn’t want to have things clarified or simplified, when he wanted to be confused, when he wanted to shame Danna with his confusion. ‘Where?’ he asked, squinting.

‘The – the far lane, there,’ Danna said. She pointed harder.

‘Fine,’ Hal said, pissed. He looked over his shoulder, disengaged the emergency brake and put the car in drive. He hung a hard left and floored the gas. The car rocketed across all four lanes. Lots of people honked.

In minutes they were kissing. Sometimes they got their wires all – it was stupid. Why was it so hard for them to hear each other? Sometimes it felt like they’d never met before.

‘Do you sometimes feel like you’ve never met me before?’ she asked him, breaking the kiss. He tried not to let her. ‘Do you ever feel like we don’t know each other and we’re strangers?’

‘No,’ Hal said, so simple. ‘Do you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Danna said. ‘I think it’s the driving.’

‘I made one fucking mistake. Because you weren’t navigating. Because you fell asleep. And I’d never begrudge you sleep. But I asked you to navigate.’

Danna knew Hal was right. Only babies could get away with falling asleep anywhere. ‘Two mistakes, right next to each other. Two bad mistakes.’

‘Nothing bad happened.’

But she felt like something bad had happened, even though it was, to be fair, objectively true that nothing had. In moments like this one Danna felt like something was growing out of her brain. Like she’d never know a moment of surety, or quiet. The might’ves were always branching, branching, carrying ugly blooms: the fear of missing something obvious, the fear of everyone but Danna knowing some great truth about what her life really was.

Corporate publishing is the channel through which literature happens to flow at this moment in history. The legal and political economic imperatives of the moment mean that the rights to backlist titles will tend to accumulate in a few hands to be exploited for as long as the copyright lasts. Most books will go out of print forever, as most deserve to. Those that last will retain trace impurities from the conglomerate system, but the presence of the corporate taint – I mean, the colophon – won’t be the reason we continue to read them, nor was it the reason we read them in the first place. Year after year our culture compels people to think of and understand themselves as consumers. This dreary view of life, which advertises itself as critical or at least conscious of commerce, capitalism and complicity, quickly becomes another form of marketing, and when applied to our reading habits it amounts to a distracting narcissism, looking in the mirror when our eyes should be on the page.

Bourdieu, Sinykin, and many of those he quotes view reading and writing primarily as social activities, inextricable from our relations with others. Anyone who has read a novel knows this is true and it would be pointless to deny it. One of the reasons we read literature is to experience the author’s purchase on society and to see how it corresponds with our own. Literature’s perennial advantage over sociology is that it can do this through the means of irony, paradox, and beauty. It is not restricted to the empirical, it is free to invent, it has recourse to fantasies that are truer than real life. It is less enamored with disclosing the obvious. The greater the novelist, the richer the picture of the world depicted within it, but also the more resistant the work becomes to being reduced to sociology. There is a reason why, when Thomas Piketty wants to add flourishes to his map of the economy in nineteenth-century France, he turns to Balzac, and why Lionel Trilling thought there was no better guide to property in Regency England than Jane Austen. But for the novelists themselves this sociological richness is a byproduct of their aesthetic ambition, never the main chance.

Pleasure is why we read literature, but the pleasures literature delivers are complex and not easily described, defined, or fixed in time and place. As Guillory writes, the pleasures of literature are often only gained at the expense of pains: the initial pain of learning to read, the pain of understanding difficult books, the pain of grasping the literary history from which books emerge, the pain of looking at something we can’t yet comprehend though we know we could, the pain of examining the nature of our own pleasure. Perhaps it’s these pains that turn our eyes away from the pleasures of literature to the disenchanted explanations of political economy, to the suspicions of paranoid reading, to the preening pondering about what the books we enjoy say about us rather than what they say to us.

Life is lonely, painful, and punishing. On behalf of the freelance book reviewer/London litmag office/Downtown Manhattan scene superorganism that speaks through me, I assert that reading and writing are best done in perfect solitude; that sometimes what you read and what you write should be kept a secret; that when you’re by yourself popularity doesn’t matter, nor does money, nor does fame, nor does status; that when you are a teenager and you have shut yourself into a room to read Kafka for the first time, your parents and your little sister should stop knocking on the door because you are turning into something else, something they will never understand.

Months later, I emailed her to ask her why she had said this. I asked what had made her so certain of her opinion. She didn’t answer. I emailed her again, and once again got no answer. I am embarrassed to say how terrible I felt about this; the combination of what had felt like profound care on the one hand and thoughtless, capricious unkindness on the other was devastating and in some primitive way familiar. I was bewildered that someone could be so gifted while at the same time so irresponsible and inconsiderate on such a fundamental level.

On reflection, I realized that it made a very banal kind of sense. It is precisely those who have exceptional gifts that are most likely to fall prey to the kind of egotism that makes them impervious to other people’s feelings. This is even more true of those who have naturally dominant personalities, as did Linda. It is most true for those who excel in areas of esoteric, subjective expertise – doctors, artists, writers, healers. This character flaw is really unpleasant when you are on the receiving end of it. But it is also very human. In the end, I could not consider Linda to be a wicked person; I believed that she sincerely wanted to help people, including me. But I did not want to see her again.