Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby

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СКАЧАТЬ a lot of writers, I can’t really stand my own writing, in the same way that I don’t really like my own cooking. And, just as when I go out to eat, I tend not to order my signature dish—an overcooked and overspiced meat-stewy thing containing something inappropriate, like tinned peaches, and a side order of undercooked and flavorless vegetables—I really don’t want to read anything that I could have come up with at my own computer. What I produce on my computer invariably turns out to be an equivalent of the undercooked overcooked stewy thing, no matter how hard I try to follow the recipe, and you really don’t want to eat too much of that. I’d love to be sent a book with an accompanying letter that said, “This is nothing like your work. But as a man of taste and discernment, we think you’ll love it anyway.”)

      But while I am an unapologetic Hornby fan, what I am not is a member of the Polysyllabic Spree (my application was rejected because of a perceived susceptibility to cult deprogramming), that robed band of somewhere between six and sixty lit lovers and ritual spankers who first assigned Nick this project.

      That puts me in a good spot to evaluate the success of the most controversial aspect of this experiment, the Believer’s insistence on “acid-free” criticism, which, while clearly a challenge for Hornby, contributed to a few small but revolutionary ideas that book reviewers and critics had either forgotten or never knew:

      1) That it’s OK to give up on a book. So, alongside works that brace and embolden, that thrill and surprise, are books “abandoned” and “unfinished”—unnamed big books of this season, or that classic which might simply not be worth the effort.

       Last month, I may inadvertently have given the impression that No Name by Wilkie Collins was a lost Victorian classic (the misunderstanding may have arisen because of my loose use of the phrase “lost Victorian classic”)… We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and aeroplanes and by hotel swimming pools.

      2) That sometimes the fault for a bad read lies not with the book and its author but with the reader. That we are never the same reader twice—sometimes we want the collected letters of some literary giant, sure, but sometimes we want “thrillers that make us walk into lampposts.” This is an especially important idea now, during this tyranny of the customer review, when a book can be dismissed with inanities like “It didn’t hold my interest,” and “It just wasn’t my cup of tea,” and “I didn’t root for the characters.” Well, gentle reader: did you ever think maybe the problem is you?

       We are never allowed to forget some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.

      3) That the books we buy are almost as important as those we read. From the beginning there were always two columns, Books Bought and Books Read. By my crude math, Nick spent somewhere around ten or fifteen grand on books he hasn’t even read. Besides showing that he did his part to support publishing during a tough economic period, this suggests something important about reading. Looking around my own obsessively crowded shelves, I see there are two categories of books I tend to keep: those I love and those I hope one day to read. If the books we read reflect the person we are, the books we hope to read might just be who we aspire to be. There is something profound in that.

       All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal… With each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.

      In the end, that’s it, of course, books as “the fullest expression of self.” That is what our books say about us, about you and me and Nick Hornby and not the lady in 13B. We are our books, the ones we struggle with, the ones we put down and the ones we can’t, the ones we still hope to read, and, of course, the ones that we love. That, more than anything: the ones we love.

      As that other great British-born writer, Zadie Smith, said of Nick Hornby in Time magazine a few years ago: “He believes that beautiful songs, beautiful books and yes, the beautiful game, are the great redemptive forces. He loves good stuff so much that one might call him the European Ambassador of Goodness.”

      Right. Now go troll this big-ass book for some goodness. You might find it exists for you, as it does for Ambassador Hornby, in Charles Dickens, in Marilynne Robinson, in Roddy Doyle, in Anne Tyler, about whom Nick uses words that I would suggest describe the ambassador himself: a writer of “simplicity, intelligence, humor, and heart,” whose curse may just be “a gift that seems effortless.”

       September 2003

      BOOKS BOUGHT:

       Robert Lowell: A Biography—Ian Hamilton

       Collected Poems—Robert Lowell

       Against Oblivion: Some of the Lives of the 20th-Century Poets—Ian Hamilton

       In Search of J. D. Salinger—Ian Hamilton

       Nine Stories—J. D. Salinger

       Franny and Zooey—J. D. Salinger

       Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters/Seymour: An Introduction—J. D. Salinger

       The Ern Malley Affair—Michael Heyward

       Something Happened—Joseph Heller

       Penguin Modern Poets 5—Corso/Ferlinghetti/Ginsberg

      BOOKS READ:

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