But it’s very unhealthy to try to like everything, and writers in particular have a tendency to discard quite ruthlessly something that they have no use for.Shakespeare, for instance, has a more or less unassailable reputation But only an academic will profess interest in all his plays. There are certainly quite a lot – such as a minor one like Love’s Labours Lost, or a major one like Othello – which personally I can’t stand and would never willingly go to see. And disliking a lot of Shakespeare, you find yourself in very distinguished company: George Bernard Shaw and Tolstoy both had a very well-documented dislike of much or all of Shakespeare, and not in a frivolous way, either. Tolstoy disliked King Lear so much because it was quite opposed to everything he wanted to do through art; and many artists, like Tolstoy, believe so strongly in their own vision of art that they can hardly envisage any plausible alternative.But this negative aspect to the artist’s way of reading goes alongside powerful enthusiasms, which to the outside world may seem slightly eccentric. In many ways, when a writer like Roddy Doyle reads a book, what he is looking for is something that resembles the sort of artist he wants to be. Writers often describe a book as magnificent when what they actually mean is “Reading this book, I saw a glimpse of a book which I would like to write.”From any normal position – the academic’s, the ordinary reader’s – Roddy Doyle is wildly eccentric to say that Jennifer Johnstone is a better writer than Joyce. She is a very good writer indeed, but very few people would place her books above Ulysses.

What Doyle really means is that he would himself like to write a book like Johnstone’s: domestic, tender, full of undisclosed pain. He has no desire whatever to write an enormous book full of allusions to myth and arcane knowledge, and for the sake of his own books cannot afford to understand why anyone at all should want to do such a thing.It is a perfectly respectable and, indeed, inevitable attitude for a good writer to take. Wrestling with forebears is at the heart of what it means to write fiction in an ambitious way. In this case, everything is made more complex because Joyce has, quite unfairly and almost inexplicably, come to take on an emblematic and suffocating status in Irish writing.

With fetes, sponsored readings, and the endorsement of the Irish government, he has stopped being just another writer, and become a monument.But all writers are just another writer, and if we ever stop disagreeing about them, or ever lose the right to call even the greatest of them useless unreadable rubbish, then it will be because we have stopped reading them. One of the telling things Doyle said was that it was hard to write a passage of Irish dialogue without someone assuming you’d stolen it from Ulysses. Of course, if they’d read Ulysses, they’d know whether it was stolen or not, with no assuming necessary
More from Philip Hensher. Senator John Kerry’s seemingly unstoppable progress towards the Democratic presidential nomination will not have taken the British government wholly by surprise. In their own way, those forces represent a similar kind of triumph for pragmatism over sentiment to those that propelled Tony Blair to the leadership of the Labour Party nearly a decade ago. Kerry’s single most important merit is his perceived capacity to beat the incumbent, just as Blair’s was in 1994.Only a fool, of course, would treat Kerry as the kind of shoo-in Blair had already looked to be well before 1997.