How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

by Pierre Bayard, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman

185pp, Granta Books, £12

If, by way of an experiment, you set out to record the titles of all the books you read, you will soon find that "reading" is an elastic term. If you skim a non-fiction book for information that interests you, have you read it? Have you read a short story collection, if you've missed some stories out? If you pick up a favourite novel, how much of it must you revisit to count it as a re-reading? And in what sense have you read a book that you have almost totally forgotten?

Pierre Bayard's self-consciously clever little book begins in this perplexity, and goes on to examine the reader as a social being. We think of reading as a solitary activity, but it is not a matter of solitary choice. Someone else tells us what are good books, bad books, books every person should have read. Sometimes we have heard so much about a book that we think we have read it; consensus has substituted for personal opinion. Our prejudices and expectations create a "screen book" even before we begin. Out of our screen books we build a whole portable inner library. It is the accumulation of such inner books - which need not bear much resemblance to their originals - that makes us who we are. We should not reproach ourselves for forgetting what we have read. Montaigne forgot. We should be consoled by that, even if we have forgotten who Montaigne is. Reading is a process of erasure.

If we are put on the spot when discussion turns to an unread or forgotten book, ought we to be embarrassed? No, Bayard says; all we need to know is where that book is situated in "the interminable chain that links all books together". The cultural chatter of critics, teachers or colleagues will position the work for us. Received ideas are adequate to save us from humiliation. Three or four facts about James Joyce will be see us safely through a discussion of Ulysses. A text is validated by the accumulation of a communal meaning, which is essentially subjective and need be neither coherent nor exact.

Yet still, the prospect of humiliation preys upon his peace. As a professor of literature, Bayard is at more risk than most of us. A diligent student may show him up as a fraud. He spends his life in the shadow of books he hasn't read. To talk about them to his readers, he has devised a droll system of abbreviations: UB for "book unknown to me", SB for "book I have skimmed", HB for "book I have heard about" and FB for "book I have forgotten". There is also a system of plus and minus signs - so a book may be HB++, if what he has heard has disposed him to value it. There is some sneaky comfort to be had in his coding. Though hardly bowed under the shame of non-reading, I was soothed to find Steppenwolf marked SB and FB-. In my day, undergraduates had it on the shelf as an ornament, as Edwardian aunts had cake-stands, and I have never seen a copy that wasn't plumped out with dust.

Bayard's book is in fact denser than the early chapters suggest. It is possible to take issue with it on many points. His own description of himself as a man who does not like to read may be taken as mischievous, since this book could only have been written by someone who has examined and absorbed many texts, though it may be that he has retained more works of literary theory than literary practice. His practical advice is skimpy: if trapped in a discussion of a book you have not read, be vague; if the author is present, be congratulatory. Bayard is also a psychoanalyst, so it is not surprising that he believes that shame at our cultural insufficiency is "linked to scenarios about childhood". Perhaps it is also linked to scenarios about being French. Outside academe, the average Briton is inclined to boast about what he has not read. Faced with the author in person, the Briton says scathingly "Never heard of you", sometimes adding, "My wife reads - perhaps she's heard of you."

A more serious observation about the book is that it is a potboiler. Skipping nimbly between schools of thought, Bayard has set himself to recapitulate, in a playful way, theories about aesthetic response that have become familiar since the 1970s, though originating long before. Reading is a creative act; we transform the text in a way that reflects our cultural positioning and psychological realities; we merge the author's myths with our own. Meaning is negotiated, not fixed by the writer. My copy of Little Dorrit may be physically identical to yours, but by the time we have read them, or not-read them, they are not the same book. The author is not the best authority on his own book, nor is he able to control its reception. No text can be mastered in a way that abolishes its gaps and indeterminacies, so we can never read closely enough, or often enough, to arrive at any objective statement; the more we rub up against the text, the more we shape it. We seldom study a text in depth without finding that it miraculously reflects our preoccupations; inside every book, we are seeking and finding ourselves.

Much of the thinking that underlies Bayard's book is no longer particularly contentious; indeed it is little short of cliché, though this hardly spoils the enjoyment, as his style is so lively, his persona so outrageous and his flattery of the reader so skilful. Standing around chattering about books we have never read, we would rather think of ourselves as members of an interpretative community than as a bunch of bullshitters. But then so many of us would rather not think at all. The intellectual constraints from which Bayard seeks to free us actually bind only a tiny number of would-be writers, blocked because they are awe-struck by the canon. But reading less will not serve them; surely they need to read more. I doubt that he will persuade anyone that skimming a novel is equivalent to reading it (because in a novel a part does not stand for the whole), or convince us that not-reading is the path to greater creativity. But he is so charming when he tries.

We are sensitive to all the possibilities of a book we haven't read, and the brutally unnecessary process of reading it closes off some of them. Instead of seeking precision, he says, we should enhance the books we talk about by seeking to "welcome them in all their polyvalence". For Bayard, non-reading becomes a life-changing process, like psychoanalysis itself. We should seek "liberation from the burden of culture" as we seek liberation from our personal guilt; the two freedoms are allied. "All education should strive to help those receiving it to gain enough freedom in relation to works of art to themselves become writers and artists."

Is this a life-enhancing proposition, the impeccable end-point of the liberal humanist project; or is it intellectually mawkish? Is Bayard serious, or satirical? Is culture a "burden", or is it a shelter? If the path to creativity lies across the swamp of ignorance, we may founder in solipsism and end in silence: a silence bleaker than the one that prevails in the well-run library.

· Hilary Mantel's most recent novel is Beyond Black (Harper Perennial)