Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Here is some data from the land of Shakespeare and Milton. More than a quarter of readers of young adult fiction, such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, are aged 28 or above. About three-quarters are over 18, which is the unofficial cut-off point for YA. Some 9 per cent are 45-plus.
If one’s first reaction to these findings lacks something in tolerance and composure (“Would a Sino-Russian rout of the west be so undeserved?”), take a moment. It isn’t all that hard to see what people get from teenage books or from romance novels or from Dan Brown thrillers. They get comfort and diversion. As for the other end of literature’s continuum, the George Eliot and Thomas Mann end, the case for it scarcely needs stating.
The problem is somewhere equidistant. It is rude to name names. But if we imagine a writer called something like Elena Murakami or Patrick O’ Le Carré, someone whose prose is neither the most expeditious nor all that deep, who doesn’t trade in incident-driven high jinks or profound digression, someone who is challenging enough, doesn’t the reader lose twice over?
This is the middlebrow trap. It catches educated liberals all the time. Consider their viewing habits. The Turin Horse is an ordeal to watch: art house cinema at its least hospitable. But it, and in fact its score alone, will gnaw at you for years after. Against this, a superhero film offers honest fun or just sensory annihilation. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein watched cowboy movies as a mental “shower bath” after a hard day at the coalface of metaphysics. What won’t do, however, is the Triangle of Sadness level of cinema, with its veneer of wisdom. The woo-woo therapy-speak of Past Lives (“You dream in a language I can’t understand”) is another case of art having intellectual aspirations it can’t honour.
Anyone can knock the middlebrow from above. But it is no less vulnerable from below. Most 35-year-old YA readers don’t presume to be stretching themselves to their limits (and might therefore be getting their aesthetic challenges from other sources). Whereas I fear much of the Succession audience really has bought the journalistic conceit that it is what Shakespeare would be writing now instead of King Lear.
Critics of the middlebrow are asked to define it with rigour and exactitude. Granted, that can’t be done. Asking around for suggestions, I got specific examples instead, such as “Bowie” and “Ordering padron peppers for the table”. Still, there is something in the Virginia Woolf line that, while the high and low brow audiences have confidence in their tastes, the middle takes its cues from others. It is a watch-the-Oscar-winner-for-Best-International-Feature-Film-each-year kind of approach.
A week on from its announcement, the Oasis détente is starting to provoke the middlebrow backlash that was always coming. The “low” elements of the band — the melodic crudity, the doggerel rhymes — are undeniable. But it is clear now that a dozen or so of their songs have lasted. So, on a rather different plane, has Schubert. You know what hasn’t? REM. Suede. The notion that Morrissey is a thinker. Most instances of 1990s Smart Rock, most efforts to bridge raucous entertainment and high culture, are, if not bad as such, then of their time.
Oasis should remind us of one thing: the so-called low is much closer to the middle than the middle is to the high. I sense that what needles art school bands, or rather their fans, about the Gallaghers is precisely their unforced intelligence, and the ease in their own skin that comes with it. Noel is third to Christopher Hitchens and Orson Welles as the best interviewee I have read or seen. In 30 years of being invited to “do” politics, neither brother strayed into either the undergraduate leftism or the blood-and-soil weirdness that often captures British rock stars who have their moderately smart music flattered.
If I am vigilant to these and other hazards of the middlebrow, it is because that is my natural level, and I have to fight it. No longer having endless time helps. Now that I am the age that Elvis made it to — a memento mori of sorts — I am impatient with any claims on my spare hours that are anywhere between Buddenbrooks and Dr No, between the canonical and the fun. Their creators have distinct but precious talents: actual genius, and the genius of knowing what one doesn’t know.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
Read the full article here
