Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby

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СКАЧАТЬ the zealous gleam in someone’s eye catches the attention, and anyway Joanna, jaded as she is by her work, doesn’t make loose or unnecessary recommendations. She keeps her powder dry.

      She was right, luckily for her: How to Breathe Underwater is an outstanding collection of stories. Orringer writes about the things that everyone writes about—youth, friendship, death, grief, etc.—but her narrative settings are fresh and wonderfully knotty. So while her themes are as solid and as recognizable as oak trees, the stuff growing on the bark you’ve never seen before. If you wanted to be reductive, “The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones” would collapse neatly into a coming-of-age story, with a conventional two-girls-and-a-guy triangle at its core. But one of the girls comes from a ferociously orthodox Jewish family, and the other one has a mother who’s in the hospital after the loss of a baby, and the boy has this pornographic book stashed away, and the whole thing is so beautifully and complicatedly imagined that you don’t want to boil it down to its essence. “Pilgrims,” the first story in the book, makes you feel panicky and breathless, and is destined, I suspect, to be taught in creative writing classes everywhere. The moment I’d finished I bought myself a first edition, and then another, for a friend’s birthday. It’s that sort of book. I’ll tell you how much I liked it: one paragraph in the story “When She Is Old and I Am Famous” contained the words “gowns,” “pumps,” “diva hairdos,” “pink chiffon,” “silk roses,” “couture,” and “Vogue,” and, after the briefest shudder, I read on anyway.

      I’m a couple of hundred pages into No Name, and so far it’s everything I’d hoped it would be. It was sold to me—or given to me free, anyway—as a lost Victorian classic (and I’d never even heard of it), and it really hits the spot: an engrossing, tortuous plot, quirky characters, pathos, the works. If you pick up the Penguin Classics edition, however, don’t read the blurb on the back. It more or less blows the first (fantastic) plot twist, on the grounds that it’s “revealed early on”—but “early on” turns out to be page ninety-six, not, say, page eight. Note to publishers: Some people read nineteenth-century novels for fun, and a lot of them were written to be read that way too.

      I should, perhaps, attempt to explain away the ludicrous number of books bought this month. Most of them were secondhand paperbacks; I bought the Pete Dexter, the Murakami, and The Poet and the Murderer on a Saturday afternoon spent wandering up and down Stoke Newington Church Street with the baby, and I bought Leadville and Master Georgie from a bookstall at a local community festival. Leadville is a biography of the A40, one of London’s dreariest arterial roads, and the desperately unpromising nature of the material somehow persuades me that the book has to be great. And I’d like to point out that The Poet and the Murderer is the second cheap paperback about a literary hoax that I’ve bought since I started writing this column. I cannot really explain why I keep buying books about literary hoaxes that I never seriously intend to read. It’s a quirk of character that had remained hitherto unrevealed to me.

      I picked up the Styron in a remainder shop while I was reading the Yates biography—Yates spent years adapting it for a film that was never made. Genome and Six Days of War I bought on a visit to the London Review of Books’ slightly scary new shop near the British Museum. I’m not entirely sure why I chose those two in particular, beyond the usual attempts at reinvention that periodically seize one in a bookstore. (When I’m arguing with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, I’m going to tell him to ignore the Books Read column, and focus on the Books Bought instead. “This is really who I am,” I’ll tell him. “I’m actually much more of a Genome guy than an Arsene Wenger guy. And if you let me in, I’m going to prove it, honest.”) I got the CDs at the LRB shop, too. They’re actually pretty amazing: the recordings are taken from the British Library Sound Archive, and all the writers featured were born in the nineteenth century—Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Yeats, Kipling, Wodehouse, Tolkien, and, astonishingly, Browning and Tennyson, although to be honest you can’t really hear Browning, who was recorded at a dinner party in 1889, trying and failing to remember the words of “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” Weirdly, everyone sounds the same, very posh and slightly mad.

      I read about a third of Bush at War, and I may well return to it at some stage, but the mood that compelled me to begin it passed quickly, and in any case it wasn’t quite what I wanted: Woodward’s tone is way too matey and sympathetic for me. I did, however, learn that George W. Bush was woken up by the Secret Service at 11:08 p.m. on 9/11. Woken up! He didn’t work late that night? And he wasn’t too buzzy to get off to sleep? See, if that had been me, I would have been up until about six, drinking and smoking and watching TV, and I would have been useless the next day. It can’t be right, can it, that world leaders emerge not through their ability to solve global problems, but to nod off at the drop of a hat? Most decent people can’t sleep easily at night, and that, apparently, is precisely why the world is in such a mess.

       November 2003 / January 2004

      BOOKS BOUGHT:

       Moneyball—Michael Lewis

       Saul and Patsy—Charles Baxter

       Winner of the National Book Award—Jincy Willett

       Jenny and the Jaws of Life—Jincy Willett

       The Sirens of Titan—Kurt Vonnegut

       True Notebooks—Mark Salzman

      BOOKS READ:

       No Name—Wilkie Collins

       Moneyball—Michael Lewis

       George and Sam: Autism in the Family—Charlotte Moore

       The Sirens of Titan—Kurt СКАЧАТЬ