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In these turbulent times, we take small joys where we can find them. And this week we’ll take this: the spectacle of various literary people at the Booker prize award ceremony jamming themselves into photos alongside Sarah Jessica Parker. The actor – if you missed the long piece about it in the New York Times, or the many social media posts promoting Parker’s involvement – served as a judge for the Booker this year, a process that required her to read 153 books, some of them on the New York subway while being followed by a film crew. “Oh let me try!!!!” Parker had posted to Booker organisers last year, and for reasons that became obvious this week, they did.
I know what you are going to say; that anything short of full-throated support for Parker’s adorable engagement with books in general and the Booker prize in particular is just unacceptable snobbery. There is nothing wrong with an actor involving herself in literary life or using her cultural weight to promote literacy. And – it goes without saying – we are all weepingly grateful to anyone with a platform bigger than that of the dowdy stay-at-home novelist who harnesses her glamour and spotlight for good. That celebrity book clubs have become the natural PR extension of taking up animal charities or becoming a UN goodwill ambassador is, surely, something to be celebrated. Who among us can fail to welcome Mindy Kaling, or Emma Watson, or Jenna Bush Hager in their fight against dwindling attention spans and addiction to screens?
And yet: come on. Really? Content generated by celebrities keen to position themselves as bookish has given rise to some images – Natalie Portman (has she mentioned she went to Harvard?) peering alluringly over a copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves; Emma Roberts, actor and niece of Julia Roberts, taking a well-groomed nap with her newborn under a Joan Didion anthology; Kaia Gerber, actor and daughter of Cindy Crawford, reassuring us via her social media feed that “reading is so sexy”; the phrase “Dakota Johnson’s immersive literary experience” – that, if they fail to make you snigger, makes you a much better person than me.
Some of how you regard this type of content may come down to a simple question of how your body reacts when you hear the words “Reese Witherspoon” – with a warm smile or an involuntary shudder. Witherspoon, whose book club is almost a decade old, is a grandee of celebrity book content and Oprah Winfrey’s natural heir, often presenting herself in a floral onesie, reclining on a sofa with a book in hand and a look on her face that says, “Yes, I’m cute; but I also read.” What Witherspoon is reading, inevitably, is a novel about an awkward girl who meets an oddball man and together they celebrate their mutual iconoclasm with a conventional wedding.
Of course, not all celebrity book clubs are equal, and a generation behind Witherspoon comes Dua Lipa, with a much more ambitious and literary book list – one that has, recently, included titles by Ocean Vuong, Patrick Radden Keefe and, toast of the hour, Helen Garner. (Actually, it was Sarah Jessica Parker who got to Garner first, depicting Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City with, variously, a copy of Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip, and her book This House of Grief, tucked modishly under her arm. The latter is the wrenching true story of a man who murders his children that every fashionable girl-about-town needs.)
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Since there is room for all types of literary taste, I suppose my quibble with a lot of this is stylistic. On the question of “reading is sexy” – an affirmation that most celebrities with book clubs take extremely literally, so that every promotional photo involves them pouting, red carpet-ready, over the top of the book – is it unbearably un-fun to wonder if sexy is the right word? There is something deeply condescending in this assumption that the only thing young, ignorant, non-book-reading people will respond to is “hotness”, or that the definition of hotness is reading a book in a bikini.
As for the authors themselves, many are, of course, thrilled to be involved with hotter, younger, richer people from the popular end of the entertainment spectrum, thus entering the tradition of otherwise cranky and uncooperative literary people meeting an actor and becoming suddenly cheerful. In the New York Times story of how Sarah Jessica Parker managed to pull off being a famous actor while also reading some books, the TV star said: “I would reach out to Roddy [Doyle, the judging panel chair] and say, ‘Have you touched on this book yet? Here are my feelings about it, but it’s possible I’m spot-on wrong.’” Spoiler alert: the Irish novelist absolutely 100% agreed with the Golden Globe and Emmy winner’s judgment call on that particular book.
I don’t mean to be too much of a downer. No one wants to be the Jonathan Franzen at this particular party (although, I will say that as Oprah’s book picks become increasingly dodgy, I find myself having more sympathy with his priggish refusal to be involved with her). But perhaps we can say yay to celebrity book clubs, while reserving the right to find them faintly ludicrous – examples of people who insist on letting us know what they think about everything, with a confidence entirely untainted by expertise.
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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