





Reading, like religion, can boast of this: If it gets you young it’s got you good. But both, as you know, have been singed by flashier pursuits: religion by celebrity, books by screens. “Book culture” indeed sounds more and more like a contradiction these days, a contradiction that kisses paradox, since there have never been so many books; in 2013, Forbes reported that between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books are published each year in the U.S. alone. The eyes, however, are elsewhere. Our current crop of high school students has never been without an illuminated gadget in their hands. Love of literature might be helped if we could choose our parents, or if our parents had better choices with our teachers.



Those of us fortunate to have been snagged early by reading know that teachers are a basal part of maintaining that fortune. High school might be the last chance to turn a low-level reader of pop into a lifelong reader of art: A sophomore in high school is in search of a selfhood; a sophomore in college is in search of a career. In Lit Up, David Denby delivers his bulletin from the messy trenches of high school English classes. He’s been hereabouts before: In 1996 he published Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World, his chronicle of returning to Columbia to gauge how first-year students were faring with the same classics he’d studied there 30 years earlier. Only so-so, it turned out. A vitalizing defense of the canon, with volleys of literary passion directed by a keen critical eye, Great Books appeared when we needed it most, during the nonsensical crescendo of the academic left’s confusion of literature for politics. Since the 1980s, the apostles of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault and their ilk had been busy costuming literature in the Mardi Gras beads and boas of theory. Denby’s return serve was to stress the “body and flavor” involved in the act of reading, its “stresses and pleasures” and “occasional euphoria.”

To point out that the world was an immeasurably different place in 1996 is to emphasize the obvious, but for Denby the fight remains the same: “To argue that reading is good seems as silly as arguing that sex, nature, and music are good. Who could disagree?” Hordes, apparently. Americans disagree every beeping, buzzing, dinging moment of our lives. Gore Vidal said it back in 1965, long before the online coup d’état of our culture: “Americans have never liked reading.” That hurts. Denby’s questions are urgent then: “How do you establish reading pleasure in busy, screen-loving teenagers—and in particular, pleasure in reading serious work? Is it still possible to raise teenagers who can’t live without reading something good?” He doesn’t spend any ink defining “serious” or “good” because he knows there’s no argument there: Time has been mercilessly exact in elevating the serious and good while discarding the frivolous and bad, the merely fashionable. Literature, I’m not sorry to say, isn’t a democracy. Literature is a tyranny—a tyranny of the talented. Here’s the thesis driving Lit Up (please type it out and hand it to your teen):

The liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people’s lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own.

LIT UP by David Denby Henry Holt and Co., 288 pp., $30

And here’s the clincher: “If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble.” There’s really no “if” about it, and so yes, we are all in trouble. The question is: How pernicious, how permanent is that trouble? Lit Up is no alarmist screed but a steadfast appeal by a writer who understands that without a devotion to literature, we’re a hamstrung bunch.

Denby sets up watch in tenth-grade classes at three high schools: the Beacon School in Manhattan, a middle-class dream where, according to its web page, students receive “a rigorous well-rounded liberal arts education based on the principle of shared exploration and problem solving”; Mamaroneck High School in Mamaroneck, New York, a Rockwellian suburb in Westchester County, where in 2013 the average property tax was $13,842, the highest in any county in the nation; and James Hillhouse High School in New Haven, Connecticut, where predominantly black students try to learn literature while being brutalized by their socioeconomic realities. Of Denby’s 15 chapters, two are given to Mamaroneck and only one to Hillhouse. It’s Beacon’s book, in other words.