Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby

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СКАЧАТЬ other side of the pool reading my first novel, High Fidelity. Unfortunately, however, I was on holiday with my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law provided a gleeful and frankly unfraternal running commentary. “Look! Her lips are moving.” “Ha! She’s fallen asleep! Again!” “I talked to her in the bar last night. Not a bright woman, I’m afraid.” At one point, alarmingly, she dropped the book and ran off. “She’s gone to put out her eyes!” my brother-in-law yelled triumphantly. I was glad when she’d finished it and moved on to Harry Potter or Dr Seuss or whatever else it was she’d packed.

      I like to think that, once he’d recovered from the original aesthetic shock, Jonathan Lethem wouldn’t have winced too often if he’d watched me reading The Fortress of Solitude by the pool this month. I was pinned to my lounger, and my lips hardly moved at all. In fact, I was so determined to read his novel on holiday that the first half of the reading month started with a mess. It went something like, On Being The John McEnroe Stop-Time Fortress of Solitude. I’d just started Tim Adams’s short book on McEnroe when an advance copy of Fortress came in the post, and I started reading that—but because it seemed so good, so much my kind of book, I wanted to save it, and I went back to the McEnroe. Except then the McEnroe turned out to be too short, and I’d finished it before the holiday started, so I needed something to fill in, which is why I reread Stop-Time. (And Stop-Time turned out to be too long, and I didn’t get onto Fortress until the third day of the seven-day holiday.)

      Last month I read a lot of Salinger, and he pops up in all three of these books. Tim Adams remembers reading Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters while queuing to watch McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1981; the seventeen-year-old Adams had a theory that McEnroe “was, in fact, a latter-day Holden Caulfield, unable and unwilling to grow up… constantly railing against the phonies—dozing linesmen, tournament organizers with walkie-talkies—in authority.” Later, he points out that McEnroe went to Buckley Country Day School—“one model for Holden Caulfield’s Pencey Prep.” Frank Conroy, meanwhile, attended P.S. 6, “of J. D. Salinger fame.” (Adams’s book is great, by the way. It’s witty and smart, and has ideas about sport that don’t strain for significance. It’s also oddly English, because it’s about the collision of McEnroe and Wimbledon—in other words, McEnroe and one version of England—and about how McEnroe was a weirdly timely illustration of Thatcherism. My favorite McEnroe tirade, one I hadn’t heard before: “I’m so disgusting you shouldn’t watch. Everybody leave!”)

      And then, at the beginning of The Fortress of Solitude, I came across the following, describing a street ball game: “A shot… which cleared the gates on the opposite side of the street was a home run. Henry seemed to be able to do this at will, and the fact that he didn’t each time was mysterious.” Compare that to this, from Seymour: An Introduction: “A home run was scored only when the ball sailed just high and hard enough to strike the wall of the building on the opposite street… Seymour scored a home run nearly every time he was up. When other boys on the block scored one, it was generally regarded as a fluke… but Seymour’s failures to get home runs looked like flukes.” Weird, huh? (And that’s all it is, by the way—there’s nothing sinister going on here. Lethem’s book is probably over a hundred thousand words long, and bears no resemblance to anything Salinger wrote, aside from this one tiny echo.) All three books are in part about being young and mixed-up and American, and even though this would appear to be a theme so broad that no one can claim it as their own, somehow Salinger has managed to copyright it (and you wouldn’t put it past him); there is clearly some law compelling you to acknowledge somewhere in your book, however obliquely, that he got there first.

      A confession, for the record: I know Jonathan Lethem. Or rather, I’ve met him, and we have exchanged emails on occasions. But I don’t know him so well that I had to read his book, if you see what I mean. I could easily have got away with not reading it. I could have left the proof copy his publishers sent me sitting around unopened, and no social embarrassment would have ensued. But I wanted to read it; I loved Motherless Brooklyn, and I knew a little bit about this book before I started it—I knew, for example, that a lot of funk records and Marvel comics were mentioned by name. In other words, it wasn’t just up my street; it was actually knocking on my front door and peering through the letterbox to see if I was in. I was, however, briefly worried about the title, which sounds portentously and alarmingly Literary, until I was reminded that it refers to Superman.

      The Fortress of Solitude is one of those rare novels that felt as though it had to be written; in fact, it’s one of those novels that deals with something so crucial—namely, the relationship between a middle-class white boy and black culture—that you can’t believe it hasn’t been written before. Anyone who has grown up listening to black music, or even white music derived from black music, will have some point of connection to this book; but Dylan Ebdus, Lethem’s central character, is a kind of walking, talking embodiment of a cultural obsession. He’s the only white kid in his street (in Brooklyn, pre-gentrification), and one of a handful of white kids in his school; Mick Jagger would have killed for his experience, and Mick Jagger would have suffered in exactly the same ways.

      This is a painful, beautiful, brave, poetic and definitive book (anyone who attempts to enter this territory again will be found out, not least because Lethem clearly knows whereof he speaks), and though it has its flaws, the right reader will not only forgive them but love them—just as the right listener loves the flaws in, say, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. They are the flaws that come of ambition, not of ineptitude. I think this is a book that people might argue about, but it will also be a book that a sizable number of people cherish and defend and reread, despite its density and length, and as an author you can’t really ask for much more than that.

      Three of the books on the “read” list—by Patrick Neate, Ian McDonald, and Peter Guralnick—I reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement, and I’m not going to write about them again at any length here. But Where It’s At is in part about a middle-class white boy’s obsession with hip-hop, and Feel Like Going Home is fuelled by a middle-class white boy’s love for R&B and blues; reading them only served to underline why The Fortress of Solitude is so necessary.

      I do seem, however, to have spent a disproportionate amount of time reading about Stuyvesant High School this month. That’s where Dylan Ebdus escapes to, and it’s also where Frank Conroy went, when he could be bothered. I’m guessing that Stuyvesant is decent enough, but I’m sure its students would be perplexed to hear that an Englishman spent an entire holiday in France reading about alumni both fictional and real. I even ended up checking out the Stuyvesant website, just to see what the place looked like. (It looked like a high school.)

      I reread Stop-Time because Frank Conroy is so eloquent and moving about books and their power at the end of The Stone Reader. I don’t reread books very often; I’m too conscious of both my ignorance and my mortality. (I recently discovered that a friend who was rereading Bleak House had done no other Dickens apart from Barnaby Rudge. That’s just weird. I shamed and nagged him into picking up Great Expectations instead.) But when I tried to recall anything about it other than its excellence, I failed. Maybe there was something about a peculiar stepfather? Or was that This Boy’s Life? And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of, say, fifteen and forty, I haven’t even read the books I think I’ve read. I can’t tell you how depressing this is. What’s the fucking point?

      Apart from Stuyvesant and Salinger, the recurring theme of the month was Paula Fox. Fox has given blurbs for both The Fortress of Solitude and Zoë Heller’s novel; Lethem has given a blurb to Desperate Characters. I know I’m wrong about this book, because everyone else in the world, including writers I love, thinks it’s fantastic, but it Wasn’t For Me. It’s brilliantly written, I can see that much, and it made me think, too. But mostly I thought about why I don’t know anyone like the people Fox writes about. Why are all my friends СКАЧАТЬ