OpinionBooks This article is more than 17 years oldWhat is it about Albert Camus' The Outsider that makes it such an enduring favourite with men?
This article is more than 17 years oldMarcel BerlinsFor years, I have thought of myself as one of a small, discriminating group whose members, touched by a common emotional quirk, regarded Albert Camus's L'Etranger (The Outsider) as the most important and influential book they have read. Imagine my distress, on reading last Thursday's Guardian, to discover that a whole swathe of English male media types, academics and students were claiming similar intimacy with the book, and attesting to its significance for them.
Last year, academics Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins conducted a survey, among women only, to find out what "watershed" novel had most sustained and helped them through difficult times. Jane Eyre was, by far, the most frequently cited.
A similar survey of men, the results of which were revealed last week, had The Outsider as the book most often mentioned as having helped them get through life. This surprised and puzzled me. What kind of problems could the interviewees have had that would have been ameliorated by reading The Outsider?
I was, I admit, a little miffed by the patronising tone of Jardine and Watkins's article about the men's list (published here in G2). We men, it seems, are only influenced by books written by other men, the authors suggested.
The evidence for their conclusion? Only one of the men's top 20 novels was written by a woman - Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird - whereas in their 20 the women cited six books written by men. But even that single entry is suspect. The only reason Harper Lee got on to our list, they hinted, is that we assumed she was a man. The authors did not offer an explanation or analysis of why L'Etranger was so seductive to young men. They concluded that "men use fiction almost topographically, as a map" ( I'm not sure I know what that means) while many women used novels "metaphorically".
Well, all right: even accepting that men and women seek and find different things in novels, I'm still wondering why L'Etranger was the book, above all others, that had most sustained men through their times of crisis.
This is not the moment for a full discussion on existentialism, or to dissect the work to establish what the central character Meursault - who killed an Arab in the hot Algerian sun and was facing execution - really represented. In his own afterword to a 1955 edition of the book, Camus wrote: "A long time ago, I summed up The Outsider in a sentence which I realise is extremely paradoxical. 'In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.' I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn't play the game ... He refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But Meursault, contrary to appearances, doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him."
Jardine and Watkins discovered that the formative reading of the several hundred men they interviewed was done between the ages of 12 and 20, and especially around 15 and 16. "Fiction was a rite of passage into manhood during painful adolescence," they wrote. So we have to see Camus through the feelings of boys of that age. But the effect of having The Outsider as one's most helpful book at times of personal difficulty could not have lasted very long. Anyone seriously assuming Meursault's philosophy as a guide to adult existence would soon have ended up damaged and incapable of loving or living normally, though as far as I can judge, my admiration for Meursault did not leave me afflicted by any life disadvantages, even if my brief Outsider-inspired vow always to tell the truth and not care about the consequences spoiled my love life for a while. ("What do you think of my new dress?" "Awful. You've got terrible taste.")
But my puzzlement remains. What made these English media and academic chaps interviewed by Jardine and Watkins choose, as their watershed novel, a book written by a French-Algerian communist existentialist in 1942, read in translation, about a pied-noir who kills an Arab and seems indifferent to his fate?
I will shortly be telling you about my great ethical plan for restaurant critics but first, news that a great gastronomic wrong has been righted. Last year, the plush magazine Restaurant announced its top 50 restaurants in the world. Fourteen of them were British, and only 10 French. I laughed a lot at the absurdity of the list. There was a simple explanation; the judges for this exercise were predominantly British.
The embarrassing nonsense should soon have been forgotten, but I kept coming across articles and people using that list to claim, in all pompous seriousness, that British restaurant cuisine was better than French. Anyway, last Monday, this year's Restaurant top 50 came out and sanity was regained (by way of a change in the rules and more non-British judges), with English restaurants restored to more modest positions (six out of the top 50). But the whole affair left me with dented confidence in the judgment and fairness of our critics.
Anyway, on to my new scheme. I read a lot of reviews and go to quite a lot of restaurants, and I've become increasingly aware of the lottery aspect of food criticism. It works both ways. The critics go on a good night, often when the place is newly opened and trying very hard to impress them; by the time the punter gets there, standards have slipped. Or, more seriously because it can destroy the reputation and future of a good restaurant, the critic comes on an off night - the main chef is ill, a waiter hasn't turned up for work, whatever - and writes a scathing review when any other evening the meal would have been excellent.
This is my solution. No food critics of influential newspapers or magazines shall publish their reviews until they have been to the restaurant twice, with a reasonable space between visits.
· This week Marcel read four French weekly magazines: "Because they all had Ségolène Royal - who may be the next president - on the cover, and stories about her inside. I hoped one of them would have something interesting to say about her. No chance." Marcel listened to a play on the World Service: "Terrific, but I remember nothing about it."
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