At more than one point in this novel I found myself asking: could this be any more French? Early on we meet a character described thus: “She used to be incredibly good-looking and now at thirtysomething she is creditably handsome.” Sorry? What the narrator, an ageing male publisher, looks like, or how creditably or uncreditably good-looking he is, we don’t find out. Another woman leaves the room “in a wiggle of buttock” – I dropped my annotating pencil when I read that line. “Artichokes require a degree of elegance” – there’s another drop of essence of Gallic for you.

But there is more to Dear Reader, and what kept me going was that one of the subjects exercising our narrator is the issue of electronic readers – Kindles or, as our hero Robert Dubois has it, the “dear reader” of the title. This book is an elegy for a dying world: that of the printed book and, that death’s darker corollary, the reader who is still interested in, or has the attention span for, the long-form narrative. (I always thought these things were arranged better in France, with no Net Book Agreement and tax breaks for bookshops, but apparently not.) In the world of Dear Reader, there has been a general collapse of cultural understanding: the interns point out to Dubois the remarkable coincidence that the publishing house they have landed in has the same name as him. Meanwhile, Dubois cannot quite get to grips with his reader: it won’t fit into his pocket; if he falls asleep while reading it, it slams into his nose. He also has this to say:

Note-taking on a reader is a disaster. I hate it. I can manage the keyboard perfectly well, but what I can do with it doesn’t suit me. What I like about notes in the margin is the gulf between the text and the note. I use a pencil and scribble away at speed, so my notes are the polar opposite of print. They don’t constrain the text in any way, they aren’t in competition with it ... but on the reader these fully formed inserts scare me, they look like imperial commands.

At which point – I’d found my pencil again – what could I do but draw an assenting vertical line down the left-hand side of that paragraph?

Paul Fournel knows whereof he speaks. He has been a publisher, and so knows a lot about elements of the trade that escape the general reader (and the critic): the physical business of paper, its weight and quality, even its sound-absorbing properties. Dear Reader pays respect to these, and to other quietly essential aspects of the publishing world, such as a decent lunch, or the reps who go round the country plugging books to bookshops, the very definition of a thankless task (“they could perfectly well be hitting the road to sell something else, for instance, something that people need and that doesn’t have to be explained”).

Fournel also rejoices in the title of provisionally definitive secretary and president of Oulipo, the literary collective who dream up constraints under which to write, in order to seek liberation through the back door, as it were (most famous example: Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel in which the letter “e” never appears).

I wondered what the constraint in Dear Reader was, while reading it. We are told in two afterwords, by Fournel and David Bellos, the translator; you can find out for yourself. But what chiefly makes this book so charming is the voice Fournel uses for Dubois: tolerant, amused and generous. An intern invited to vet a manuscript protests that she is not a reader. “Something tells me nonetheless you have learned the alphabet,” he replies, without sarcasm, and with a nod to the idea that as long as we have that knowledge under our belts, this business of creating and then passing on books isn’t quite as finished as some people say it is.

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