Connor traces the fading tie between cigarette and serious literature as he reviews Gregor Hens’ Nicotine.

In an article for Slate, Troy Patterson offers up his literary ‘Stop Smoking Plan’. The first step? A visit to the New York Public Library to skim the history of anti-tobacconist literature, followed by a stop to a mass-market bookstore to pick up Allen Carr’s The Easy Way To Stop Smoking, then to a second-hand bookstore for Richard Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime.

By the end of Patterson’s ten-step program, it’s unclear whether endless reading about addiction might be enough to utterly exhaust a reader’s desire for another cigarette – or to stimulate them to light up again immediately.

There’s a long history of books and stories about tobacco, which is fitting considering the tight associations that have been drawn, over the course of the twentieth century, between smoking and serious literary production.

The reality of chain-smoking is rarely glamorous, after all, except when the chain-smoker happens to be a novelist, and nicotine is elevated in our minds from its regular position as a sad, habit-forming stimulant to an otherworldly muse. By 2016, though, even this uniquely-celebrated relationship has lost its glamour. The last touchstone image of a writer at her desk, lazily chain-smoking while waiting for inspiration to strike, is almost certainly Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw – and even that was stubbed out in a single season.

Its somewhere in this context that Gregor Hens’ Nicotine finds its foothold, as an ambivalent personal history of a writer’s now-severed relationship with cigarettes and an elegy for tobacco, which Hens recognises is no longer a drug especially close to the centre of Western culture.

The book is definitively not intended to persuade the reader to quit smoking, if they’re a current smoker – or to take up the habit if they’re not. Instead, Hens argues that there is much to be learnt from an honest account of nicotine addiction, which is always complicated by a co-mingling of repulsion and joy. In some ways, he suggests, nicotine dependence is the same as any addiction – and Hens reminds us that every one of us is addicted to something, “affected by a simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar inner compulsion that seems to act within us as if of its own accord”.

In other ways, though, nicotine is very peculiar indeed, encouraging its most dedicated users to irrevocably reconfigure their lives, thoughts and identities around the promise of endless self-administered dopamine hits on demand.

The struggle that motivates Nicotine is not how to quit smoking, as the work picks up months after Hens’ final cigarette. Rather, Hens’ challenge is discovering how to understand himself, and the world, from the perspective of somebody who no longer smokes, but can’t forget what it’s like to do so.

There is, of course, a chance that nicotine will make a comeback – even if tobacco almost certainly will not. If we’re at a cultural juncture where the value of nicotine sans tobacco is up for debate, this work offers an elegantly-constructed tangle of arguments – both for and against.