The complaint that cynics often make about modern art is that most of it looks as though it were made by children. (If your 10-year-old is pulling out crumpled Kandinskys from their schoolbags on a regular basis then lucky you, I say.) But what about art criticism? Could a child’s understanding of art be as radical as John Berger’s or as wise as Sister Wendy’s, for instance? Art historian Thomas Schlesser thinks so. His debut novel, a bestseller in France, has been translated into 38 languages. Perhaps in one of them it lives up to the hype.

In Mona’s Eyes, a 10-year-old girl embarks on an artistic adventure with her grandfather, visiting the most famous works in Paris museums over the course of a year. They pledge to gaze at these works intently and to discuss them deeply. The resulting conversations are intended to be charming and moving. The kindest observation to be made about this book is that they are not.

Pitched as a kind of Sophie’s World for art history, with the fabular shades of The Little Prince, the story begins with Mona struck by a sudden and mysterious episode of blindness. Although Mona recovers quickly, her parents fear she may lose her sight permanently and consult with a doctor. Enter Henry, Mona’s maternal grandfather, otherwise known as Dadé. Instead of taking Mona to appointments with a psychiatrist as instructed, he unilaterally decides that what Mona really requires is a treatment of his own devising. Every Wednesday Mona and Dadé will inspect one great work of art, making their way through the Louvre, the Musée D’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou. As an educational scheme, it’s not a terrible idea. The trouble is that Dadé is a terrible person and Schlesser seems entirely oblivious to it.

Schlesser dedicates his novel “to all the grandparents of the world”, and yet the grandparent he imagines here behaves in a deeply objectionable way. Schlesser depicts him flatteringly: a dashing octogenarian, a former photojournalist, a figure of towering intellect and worldly experience. But without the consent of Mona’s parents, he acts with alarming impunity and irresponsibility. He deems that Mona’s childhood lacks beauty and intends to aid her in “the refinement of taste, the development of sensibility”, but only after inwardly sneering at the things she loves, her bedroom with its “plastic jewellery, that cartoon-princess-style furniture … The acidic colours of all this clutter choked him.”

Partway through the novel, an eavesdropping art curator interrupts them on their way to see Monet’s Saint-Lazare station paintings. She fulsomely celebrates their insights, bewilderingly declaring their interaction “the reward of an entire career”, but Mona and Dadé’s exchanges during these excursions are uniformly pedestrian. Grandeur poses as profundity. “This painting tells us,” Dadé intones, “about the wonderful thrill of imagining things, ever more deeply, and invites us to trust this prodigious faculty, which allows the invisible to become visible and the improbable possible.”

In between the gnomic phrases and metaphysical abstraction, Dadé marvels at Mona’s apparently unique child’s-eye view. In reality, her contributions are largely limited to exclamations such as “Got it, Dadé!” or clumsy prompts: “Tell me more about that luminosity, Dadé”. Dadé’s analysis of the works, instead of being enriching and enlarging, feels mechanistic. Chiaroscuro in a self-portrait by Rembrandt, he decides, is the ideal way to teach Mona how to challenge “binary concepts of good and evil”.

These are ideas understandably beyond poor Mona, who on seeing a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron observes: “That sure is different to a photo taken on a phone.” The problem is that Schlesser seems to be working with a diminished idea of anything a child might do, imagine or desire. Minor plotlines involving Mona’s schoolfriends, her alcoholic father, the frankly weird doctor who is directing her treatment and a mystery about her dead grandmother reduce her to a vehicle for a tedious plot, rather than investing her with interiority. As a child muse, she is puzzlingly charmless, unequal to the weight she is tasked to carry in this novel.

Schlesser seems like a decent art critic and he has sensible, informative things to share about the works he has selected here, but his clunky novel is mostly concerned with affixing life-affirming lessons to masterpieces rather than exploring any real intellectual stakes. And in an age of brilliantly intelligent art writing (TJ Clark, Laura Cumming) and stirring meditations on seeing (Ann Wroe, Lavinia Greenlaw), Schlesser’s prose and Dadé’s sermons are disappointingly didactic.

Hildegarde Serle’s English translation adds to the problem. “Holy smokes,” the elderly Dadé improbably exclaims at one point; Manet is awkwardly described as coming from “a swanky social milieu”; towards the end of the novel, “the music of spring wafted in the air”. An undeniable strain of sentimentalism runs throughout, manifest in the prose and the sensibility. It may seem cruel to be critical about a book that is so transparently well-meaning, but this is not to deny the redemptive power of art. Cynicism is an attitude that isn’t inherently cool or wise, but neither does sincerity have to be as unsophisticated and simple-minded as it is here. Do take a child to a gallery. But go for the cake and the chaos rather than lessons in chiaroscuro.

The efflorescence of men’s magazines in the UK lasted from about 1985 to 2010. You may recall their titles on newsagents’ shelves – Arena, GQ, Maxim, Esquire – near in time but now as defunct as the clay tablets of Babylon. They are gone, mostly, along with those newsagents’ shelves. It was a short-lived, almost parenthetical age. To revisit it in this new memoir by Dylan Jones, former editor of GQ, is to be transported to a world of scarcely imaginable glamour, of expense-account carelessness, of sybaritic indulgence unrivalled since the days of Rome. You can barely make it out through the rain of rose petals.

And squarely at the centre is Jones, scene-maker, master of the revels, and friend to the stars. Quite an irony today to read of his editorial perfectionism, and his insistence that every issue of his magazine should be an “art object”. This from the man who has just helped oversee the death warrant for the print edition of the 200-year-old London Evening Standard, having admitted to never reading a paper version of it himself. I wonder if it was not sufficiently “iconic” for him.

His was not a happy upbringing. Beaten and sworn at daily by his brutish RAF veteran father, Jones developed a stammer and a longing to get away from the family home in High Wycombe. St Martin’s School of Art in London was his refuge, where a lifelong passion for design was born. After college he worked as a barman, a model, a DJ and a film extra before finding his métier in the inky environs of style journalism. As his teenage years had been guided by the lodestars of Bowie and the Beatles, in the 1980s he succumbed to the spell of fashion and London nightlife, or as Jones calls it, “a vortex of entrepreneurial hedonism” swirling around the 100 Club, the Marquee, Soho Brasserie and the Groucho. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be on the club guest list was very heaven.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

These Foolish Things makes for an interesting case study, though interesting in ways its author probably didn’t intend. The parental abuse he deals with so briskly and unselfpityingly finds an outlet in a profound insecurity that imprints itself on every page. It becomes a precarious balancing act between self-concealment and a needy, low-level boastfulness. Because Jones isn’t a great writer (he admits as much) he tends to grout the gaps in his account with lists of the great and good with whom he has hobnobbed. It is a narrative leprous with names – of bands, celebrities, writers, movers, shakers – and yet wholly unilluminating about any of them. He could be talking about brands of marmalade, or loo rolls. Even when he zooms in on one of his famous friends, such as Bowie or Bryan Ferry, we get no indication of a noticing eye or sympathetic mirroring. At times he seems faintly inhuman. “I wasn’t overburdened with empathy,” he writes, remembering how as a child he received news of human-loss catastrophes quite equably. Why? “Because there would be fewer people in the world.” Smiley-face emojis all round!

In the meantime the years roll on and Jones hops from magazines to newspapers and back, vaunting his latest pay rise, freebie holiday or celebrity catch. He calls these VIPs “boldface names”, and while he doesn’t seem to like many of them he arranges their private jets and financial sweeteners without demur. Name-dropping, a pathology for him, needn’t be fatal in itself. In this kind of memoir it doesn’t necessarily matter if the prose doesn’t shine so long as you convey a sense of energy, or fun, or charm (this last the most elusive of the three). I’m thinking here of Robert Evans’s The Kid Stays in the Picture, which positively ached with self-aggrandisement and yet jollied the reader along with its chutzpah and its delight in the folly of the world. Jones already has his work cut out for him in dallying with people – Piers Morgan, Philip Green, David Cameron (with whom he wrote a book) – that very few writers could humanise, and even the famous people you’d quite like to know about end up flattened by his affectlessness. And worse. He doesn’t seem to hear himself when he illustrates how “extraordinarily funny” Elton John can be with a version of a remark of such repulsive misogyny in my view that I’m surprised his editor (if he had one) didn’t advise him to cut it

Towards the end the book springs a shock revelation, which may partially explain why Jones ended up the way he did. It happened when he was 17, still in High Wycombe, and someone he “sort of knew” drove him back to his flat and got him drunk. He woke some hours later to find himself being raped. He describes feelings of self-hatred and disgust that followed in the wake of the assault, and how he then opted to do something perfectly comprehensible – namely, bury it. The trauma of what happened crashed in on him years later when he did therapy. The reader may find himself in hindsight recalibrating his view of the author’s arrogant dismissiveness, his absence of charm, his tin ear for the vile joke or tasteless remark. Humanity’s crooked timber and all that. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. Whether you can pardon him this book is another matter.

I used to knock on people’s doors and tell them the end of the world was coming. We were born imperfect, I would say, and soon will come the day of Armageddon when we will all be tested. Be good and you could win life in Paradise. Be bad, and your reward is annihilation. No wonder people would see us coming and turn off the lights.

Stories have always been in my blood. Until a few years ago, I based my life on their outcome. Raised in the UK as a Jehovah’s Witness, I was told we were in “the time of the end”, which meant we were in the third act of Life’s story, when I would soon be rewarded with eternal life on a paradise Earth.

Every Witness child was given a copy of My Book of Bible Stories, a heavy yellow hardback. From the moment I could listen, I was taught the story of Abraham, who almost murdered his son after God commanded him as a test. The accompanying illustration of Isaac tied up on a sacrificial altar as his father looms over him with a knife was terrifying. Then there was Lot’s wife, who was turned to salt for daring to look back at the fire God was raining down on her hometown. I never questioned these stories or their morals. Why would I? They were taught to me at the same time as my ABC. They were my version of “normal”.

My entertainment was heavily vetted. Anything with ghosts or witches was banned. Christmas and birthday colouring pages were ripped out. Looking back, I struggle to think of books that would have been more shocking than the Bible. Babies’ heads dashed against rocks, entire nations murdered by an angry God, an upcoming worldwide genocide of billions … yet it is a tree with coloured lights that was deemed offensive.

I was allowed to choose my own books, but reading was a pastime that came second to religious activities. I attended a mainstream school, leaving after A-levels, but usually Witnesses attain only the most basic education, and are instead encouraged to direct all effort towards preaching. University is frowned upon. Although I was never forced into full-time preaching, there was little encouragement to take my education seriously. Books have always been the easiest way to travel.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four gave a label to the “doublethink” and “thoughtcrime” that I accepted as normal. When I read it in my early 20s, I had a genuine watershed moment. The way that “The Party” alters beliefs and insists followers accept these changes without dispute mirrored my community. The story of Winston, who knows the truth and yet must conform for his own survival, opened a door I had never dared to touch.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale opened my eyes to the danger of a patriarchy that positions itself as beneficial to women. I had recently become a mother and so the themes of suppression of women and loss of agency in the name of religion inspired a visceral reaction. I was already having doubts about my faith, and this book made them snowball.

Perhaps because my imagination was forged in such bloodthirsty fire, stories have always felt more alive and memorable than nonfiction. What could be a more devastating teacher on the subject of slavery and its subsequent trauma than Toni Morrison’s Beloved? Parts of the story left me so angry that I had to keep putting down the book to compose myself. I read it after I had stepped away from my community, but it only confirmed my doubts. How could a powerful god stand by and watch this happen and not feel compelled to intervene?

A rule I had always struggled to accept was disfellowshipping, when wrongdoers are cut off and even their family are not to have any contact. Shunning those who simply no longer want to be a member is also normal among Jehovah’s Witnesses. Classics such as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, which feature characters cast out for allegedly going against the accepted morals of their day, helped me realise the unfairness of such a practice.

In my community, shunning was viewed as a loving action that would bring the shamed one to their senses. This is not love, I realised. It is like what a wicked stepmother in stories would do, locking up a child until they begged to be released. Anything, the child would scream, I’ll do anything if you just let me out of this dark and lonely room.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

In my first novel, Another Life, written soon after I stepped away from my community in my 30s and lost many friendships, the character of Anna is cast out of her religion for the sin of no longer believing. In my second, Oh, Sister, I explore the struggles of three women within the confines of a doomsday patriarchal religion based heavily on the Witnesses. Their names – Jen, Zelda and Isobel – form a loose anagram of Jezebel, perhaps the most reviled biblical woman, who was pushed from a window to her death, trampled by horses then eaten by dogs.

In the real-life story of my former community, female characters are not allowed a voice. The elders in charge are men. They make the decisions, and the women (“sisters”) must abide by them. I was often labelled “a sister with opinions” and remained an active member until several years ago, when my doubts became too large to ignore. Despite my ability to speak up, talking about myself and being the centre of attention have never come easily. If you are taught all your life that you are not equal to any man, even the most stubborn must absorb a little of that narrative. Perhaps this is why I wrote these women, so that through their stories, I could process the strangeness of the world that was once my home.

Reviews of Oh, Sister call it “a horror story” and “a dystopian fairytale”, which has been surprising because the world in which these women live was my definition of normal. If not for the power of fiction, perhaps I would still be there now.