Название: Ten Years in the Tub
Автор: Nick Hornby
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9781944211158
isbn:
Sex with cousins: are you for or against? I only ask because the first two books I read this month, Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints and Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, answer the question with a resounding affirmative. (It’s a long story, but in Liars and Saints, the couple in question is under the impression that they’re actually uncle and niece, rather than cousins—and even that doesn’t stop ’em! Crikey!) People are always plighting their troth to and/or screwing their cousins in Hardy and Austen, but I’d always presumed that this was because of no watercoolers, or speed-dating, or college dances; what is so dispiriting about Liars and Saints and How I Live Now is that they are set in the present, or even in the near-future, in the case of the latter book. No offense to my cousins—or, indeed, to Believer readers who prefer to keep things in the family—but is that really all we have to look forward to?
I know that when it comes to subconscious sexual deviation there’s no such thing as coincidence, but I swear I haven’t been scouring the bookshops for novels about the acceptable face of incest. I picked up Liars and Saints because it’s been blurbed by both Helen Fielding and Philip Roth, and though I enjoyed the book, that conjunction set up an expectation that couldn’t ever be fulfilled: sometimes blurbs can be too successful. I was hoping for something bubbly and yet achingly world-weary, something diverting and yet full of lacerating and unforgettable insights about the human condition, something that was fun while being at the same time no fun at all, in a bracing sort of a way, something that cheered me up while making me want to hang myself. In short, I wanted Roth and Fielding to have cowritten the book, and poor Maile Meloy couldn’t deliver. Liars and Saints is a fresh, sweet-natured first novel, but it’s no Nathan Zuckerman’s Diary. (Cigarettes—23, attacks of Weltschmerz—141, etc.)
How I Live Now has had amazing reviews here in England—someone moderately sensible called it “a classic”—and although that might sometimes be enough to persuade me to shell out (cf. Seven Types of Ambiguity, which has received similar press), normally that wouldn’t be enough to persuade me to read the thing. Rosoff’s book, however, is delightfully short, and aimed at teenagers, and the publishers sent me a copy, so you can see the thinking here: knock off a classic in a day or so, at no personal expense, and bulk this column out a little. And that’s pretty much how things worked out.
I’m not sure that How We Live Now is a classic, though, even if a book can achieve that kind of status in the month of its publication. It’s set in a war-torn England a few years from now, and though the love affair between the cousins has a dreamy intensity, and Rosoff’s teenage voice is strong and true, her war is a little shoddy, if you ask me. London has been occupied, but by whom no one, not even the adults, seems quite sure: it could be the French, it could be the Chinese. What sort of war is that? Rosoff is aiming for a fog of half-truth and rumor, the sort of fog that most teenagers live in most of the time, and yet one is given the impression that not even Seymour Hersh would be able to shed much light on the matter of who invaded Britain and why.
I’ve been meaning to read Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son for about ten years; the only thing that was stopping me from reading it was the suspicion that it might be unreadable—miserable and dreary and impossibly remote. First published (anonymously) in 1907, Father and Son describes Edmund’s relationship with his father, Philip, a marine biologist of some distinction who was also a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and whose fierce, joyless evangelism crippled his son’s childhood. In fact, Father and Son is a sort of Victorian This Boy’s Life: it’s inevitably, unavoidably painful, but it’s also tender and wry. OK, sometimes it reads like that Monty Python sketch about the Yorkshiremen, constantly trying to trump each other’s stories of deprivation (“You lived in a hole in the road? You were lucky.”): when Gosse’s mother was dying of cancer, and too sick to travel from one London borough to another for the hopeless last-chance quack treatment she was trying, she and her young son stayed in a grim boarding house in Pimlico, where Edmund was allowed to entertain her by reading from religious tracts. His pathetic treat, at the end of the day, was to read her a hymn—in the Gosse family, that was what passed for fun.
My first book, Fever Pitch, was a memoir, and I own a copy of Father and Son because some clever-dick reviewer somewhere compared the two. (I seem to remember that the comparison did me no favors, before you accuse me of showing off. Someone must have been dissed, and I can’t imagine it was Gosse.) My young life was blighted by my devotion to Arsenal Football Club, a team so dour and joyless during the late sixties and seventies that they would have been rather intimidated by the comparative exuberance and joie de vivre of the Plymouth Brethren. It’s always weird, though, for a writer to spot the same impulses and ambitions in another, especially when the two are separated by history, culture, environment, belief, and just about anything else you can think of, and I identified absolutely with more or less every page in Gosse’s book. I had hoped, when I wrote mine, that even if I were to allow myself the indulgence of writing in detail about 1960s League Cup finals, people might be prepared to put up with it if they thought there was something else going on as well; Gosse’s football-sized hole was created by religion, and filled by marine biology, so he was, in effect, both damaged and repaired by his father’s twin obsessions. (His father, meanwhile, was almost split in two by them—Darwin’s theories were more devastating for the evangelical naturalist than for just about anyone else in the country.) Father and Son is an acknowledged classic, so I had expected it to be good, but I hadn’t expected it to be lovable, or modern, nor had I expected it to speak to me. How I Live Now, by contrast, felt as if it was talking to everyone else but me—I was watching from the wings as its author addressed the multitudes. Maybe that’s why you have to give books time to live before you decide that they’re never going to die. You have to wait and see whether anyone in that multitude is really listening.
Every time I read a biography of a novelist, I discover that the novels in question are autobiographical to an almost horrifying degree. In Blake Bailey’s book about Richard Yates, for example, we learn that Yates fictionalized his mother by changing her name from Dookie to Pookie (or perhaps from Pookie to Dookie, I can’t remember now). In Nigel Jones’s Through a Glass Darkly we learn that, like Bob in The Midnight Bell, Patrick Hamilton had a disastrous crush on a prostitute, and that, like Bone in Hangover Square, his obsession with a young actress (Geraldine Fitzgerald, who appeared in Wuthering Heights alongside Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon) was deranged, although he stopped short of murdering her. And, of course, like all of his characters, Hamilton was a drunk. I’m sure that a biography of Tolkien would reveal that The Lord of the Rings was autobiographical, too—that Tolkien actually fell down a hole and found a place called Central Earth, where there were a whole bunch of Bobbits. Some people—critics, mostly—would argue that this diminishes the achievement somehow, but it’s the writing that’s hard, not the invention.
See, some of us just don’t come from the right kind of background to be the subject of a literary biography. Hamilton’s father was left a hundred thousand pounds in 1884, and pissed it all away during a lifetime of utter indolence and dissolution; his first wife was a prostitute whom Hamilton Sr. imagined he could save from the streets, but the marriage didn’t work out. ’Snot fair! Why didn’t my dad ever have a thing with prostitutes? (Note to Believer fact-checker: I’ll give you his number, but I’m not making the call. He’s pretty grouchy at the best of times.)
Jenny, the prostitute in The Midnight Bell, takes center stage in The Siege of Pleasure, the second novel in the 20,000 Streets Under the Sky trilogy. СКАЧАТЬ