Over at The Guardian, Adam Thirlwell wonders whether novelists hate their readers.

Only a very few readers, thought Stendhal, and probably only in the distance of about 150 years, would find pleasure in his art.

“Allow me one obscenity,” he once wrote: “I don’t want to jerk off the reader’s soul.”

Coincidentally, Charles Mudede writes about Adam Thirlwell’s newest book, The Delighted States, in the books section this week. The Delighted States is one of those high-concept books that you really want to like. On one side, it’s a collection of thoughts, trivia, and quotes about authors, written in a kind of narrative style, and on the other side, it’s a new translation of “Mademoiselle O,” which is a short story by Nabokov that was later integrated into Speak, Memory.

Mudede writes:

Kingsley Amis once compared Vladimir Nabokov’s writing style to a useless muscleman, the sort who likes to flex for girls and kick sand into the faces of thin men. Thirlwell is the sort of writer who gets sand kicked in his face. He has no literary or theoretical muscles, and the critics of his book have been hard on him for lacking any real strength.

It’s my favorite image in the whole paper this week.