An edited version of this review was published in the TLS in September 2024. A full version is given here.

SOPHIE RATCLIFFE

ON PURPOSE: TEN LESSONS ON THE MEANING OF LIFE

BEN HUTCHINSON

2208pp. Fourth Estate, 2023 £12.99

Ben Hutchinson has ‘long believed in the edifying powers of “great writing” ’ to give life ‘purpose’. ‘In truth, though’, he admits, ‘this belief… has long lain unexamined’. His latest book wrestles it into something more manageable:

“In reducing it to ten precepts…capturing it in ten commandments, I am attempting to hold my vague humanist credo up to the light… to convey the power of literature to power our lives.”

The book is very much of its time, neatly riding the self-help wave (‘Self improvement is big business’, he notes). But as the Leavisite strains imply, its content is curiously retro. Hutchinson’s ‘precepts’ would land well with a turn of last-century reader. His survey includes the idea of literature as pleasure-giving; its capacity for developing narrative selfhood; its potential for imagining alternative futures. The argument is briskly ballasted by numerous quotations from authors and philosophers, and first-person reflections on the author’s ‘mis-adventures’ – dope smoking; fatherhood; existential angst, running clubs and a wife who ‘gets irritated’ by his literary name-dropping. This is not a tell-all affair. But those disappointed will learn - as Hutchinson puts it in in ‘Lesson Three’ (on empathy ) – ‘It’s not about you’:

“I’m limited to the life that I have had – in my case, white, middle class, male, the epitome of Western privilege…I can’t change these basic facts …but I can be curious about the perspective of others.”

Despite this curiosity, Hutchinson plays the theoretical lone ranger. There’s almost no mention of any literary theorist in the field post 1940, save Roland Barthes and Edward Said. Maybe this is part of the plan. Hutchinson makes a good case for thinking through the past to avoid ‘recency bias’. In doing so, he notes the fact that ‘tradition’ comes with its problems: ‘Cultural capital, like its financial counterpart, accrues inexorably to the winner: the 1 per cent unwittingly – or wittingly? – excludes the rest.’ 

                On reading, it struck me that the author’s chosen quotations seemed to come primarily from tradition’s ‘winning’ side. Given the title’s numerical bent, I began to count. Wittingly – or unwittingly, Hutchinson has managed to produce a book in which 85% of his book’s citations are from male writers. His section on ‘Further reading’ generously lists 104 writers. Eight of these are female. Very few writers of colour are cited. As Hutchinson’s himself asks: ‘if we merely read the usual litany of white Western men, how will we ever develop any new perspectives? ’. 

 The book is characterised by this breezy carelessness. ‘Reading can be a sensual experience’, he writes:

“Nabokov, one of the great stylists of both writing and reading, used to encourage his students to ‘fondle the details’. In the words of the contemporary poet David Constantine: ‘the poem, like the clitoris, is there / for pleasure’. Arresting though it undoubtedly is, Constantine’s image distracts from what his syntax is saying, which is that poetry – as well, we may take it, as literature more generally – is there for something …. for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of it.” 

The Constantine quotation, with its tacit sarcasm about the difficulties/victories of locating female sexual pleasure, hovering ‘there’ around the line break, is presumably intended to add an ‘arresting’ touch of clitoral glitter to a page otherwise steeped in Kant. It’s a poor choice. If one looks at what Hutchinson’s own ‘syntax is saying’, it is wearying to note that he has lined ‘the details’ and ‘the clitoris’ up – as if to imply some kind of analogous relationship. (For those interested in either, recent research suggests that the clitoris also serves a reproductive purpose). 

                For Hutchinson, ‘the texture of language shows us a microcosm of meaning’. His own writing has something of a hazy texture - repeatedly generalising his experience outwards or rhetorical effect, without checking for sense or difference: ‘Don Quixote …tells the salutatory tale of a man who has read too much … Which of us doesn’t occasionally feel this way?’; or ‘The major milestones of my life –childhood, college, children – are the major milestones of your life.’ 

The book closes with a plea that reading well may make us ‘fit for purpose.’ Such cliché-flipping is one of the book’s stylistic tics – signalling, perhaps, a self-consciousness about its own proximity to platitude. Indeed, there are many works – both theoretical or literary (the distinction is often moot) – which reflect more carefully and engagingly on the question of purpose and meaning. As the great poet-theorist, Denise Levertov has it, the things we read have ‘meant’ and go ‘on meaning, can’t be trapped/into closed definition.’ ‘But’ (and her hesitation is crucial):

“But it has to do

not with failure, defeat, frustration, Moscows never set out for, 

But with love.”