What’s so impressive about Chronicles is the seriousness with which Dylan has approached the task of explaining what it’s like to be him and how he got to be that way. He doesn’t do that by telling you about his childhood or about the bath he was running when he started humming ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ to himself for the first time; Chronicles is non-linear and concentrates on tiny moments in a momentous life – an afternoon in a friend’s apartment in New York in 1961, a couple of days in New Orleans in 1989, recording Oh Mercy with Daniel Lanois. But he uses these moments like torches, to throw light backwards and forwards, and by the end of the book he has illuminated great swathes of his interior life – the very part one had no real hope of ever being able to see.
And Chronicles is a lot humbler than anyone might have anticipated, because it’s about wolfing down other people’s stuff as much as it’s about spewing out your own. Here is a random selection of names taken from the second chapter: The Kingston Trio, Roy Orbison, George Jones, Greil Marcus, Tacitus, Pericles, Thucydides, Gogol, Dante, Ovid, Dickens, Rousseau, Faulkner, Leopardi, Freud, Pushkin, Robert Graves, Clausewitz, Balzac, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Leadbelly, Judy Garland, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie… Many of the writers on this list were apparently encountered for the first time on a bookshelf in that NYC apartment. I have no idea whether the shelf, or the apartment, or even the friend actually existed, or whether it’s all an extended metaphor; and nor do I care, because this is a beautiful, remarkable book, better than anyone had any right to expect, and one of the best and most scrupulous I can remember reading about the process of creativity. You don’t even have to love the guy to get something out of it; you just have to love people who create any art at all.
For a brief moment, as I put down Chronicles and picked up The Plot Against America, neither of them published for longer than a fortnight, I felt like some kind of mythical reader, dutifully ploughing through the ‘new and noteworthy’ list. I knew almost enough about what’s au courant to throw one of those dinner parties that the newspaper columnists in England are always sneering at. They’re invariably referred to as ‘Islington dinner parties’ in the English press, because that’s where the ‘liberal intelligentsia’ – aka the ‘chattering classes’ – are supposed to live, and where they talk about the new Roth and eat focaccia, which is a type of bread that the ‘chattering classes’ really, really like, apparently. Well, I live in Islington (there’s no entrance exam, obviously), and I’ve never been to a dinner party like that, and this could have been my moment to start a salon. I could have bought that bread and said to people, ‘Have you read the new Roth?’ as they were taking off their coats. And they’d have gone, like, ‘What the fuck?’ if they were my friends, or ‘Yes, isn’t it marvellous?’, if they were people I didn’t know. Anyway, it’s too late now. The books have been out for ages. It’s too late for the dinner party, and it’s too late even to impress readers of this column. The Spree took care of that with their pictures. This was the one chance I had to show off, and they ruined it, like they ruin everything.
What’s even more galling is that I had something to say about The Plot Against America, and that almost never happens. The truest and wisest words ever written about reviewing were spoken by Sarah Vowell in her book Take the Cannoli. Asked by a magazine to review a Tom Waits album, she concludes that she ‘quite likes the ballads’, and writes that down; now all she needs is another eight-hundred-odd words restating this one blinding aperçu. That’s pretty much how I feel about a lot of things I read and hear, so the realization that I actually had a point to make about Roth’s novel came as something of a shock to me. You’ll have heard my point a million times by now, but tough – I don’t have them often enough to just let them float off.
Actually, if I put it this way, my point will have the virtue of novelty and freshness: in my humble and partial opinion, my brother-in-law’s alternative-history novel Fatherland was more successful as a work of fiction. (You’ve never heard anyone say that, right? Because even if you’ve heard someone compare Roth’s book to Fatherland, they won’t have begun the sentence with ‘My brother-in-law…’ My brother could have said it, but I’ll bet you any money you like, he hasn’t read the Roth. He probably lied about having read Fatherland, come to think of it.) The Plot Against America is a brilliant, brilliantly argued and chilling thesis about America in the twentieth century, but I’m not sure it works as a novel, simply because one is constantly reminded that it is a novel – and not in a fun, postmodern way, but in a strange, slightly distracting way. As you will know, The Plot Against America is about what happened to the US after the fascist-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh won the 1940 presidential election, but for large chunks of the book, this is precisely what it’s about: the alternative history drives the narrative, and as a consequence, you find yourself wondering why we’re being told these things. Because if Lindbergh became US president in 1940 – and this book asks us to believe that he did, asks us to inhabit a world wherein this was a part of our history – then surely we know it all already? Surely we know about the rampant anti-semitism and the ensuing riots, the heroic role that Mayor LaGuardia played, and Lindbergh’s eventual fate? We read on, of course, because we don’t know, and we want to know; but it’s an uncomfortable compulsion, working as it does against the novel’s easy naturalism. When Roth writes, for example, that ‘the November election hadn’t even been close… Lindbergh got 57 percent of the popular vote’, the only thing the sentence is doing is providing us with information we don’t have; yet at the same time, we are invited to imagine that we do have it – in which case, why are we being given it again?
In Fatherland, my brother-in-law – Harris, as I suppose I should call him here – takes the view that in an alternative-history novel, he must imagine not only the alternative history, but the historical consciousness of his reader; in other words, the alternative history belongs in the background, and the information we need to understand what has taken place (in Fatherland, the Nazis have won WWII) is given out piecemeal, obliquely, while the author gets on with his thriller plot. Roth chooses to place his what-if at the centre of his book, and so The Plot Against America ends up feeling like an extended essay.
The thing is, I don’t even know if I care. Did any of this really spoil my enjoyment of The Plot Against America? Answer: no. I could see it, but I didn’t feel it. Who wouldn’t want to read an extended essay by Philip Roth? It’s only on the books pages of newspapers that perceived flaws of this kind inhibit enjoyment, and that’s because book reviewers are not allowed to say ‘I quite like the ballads.’
I now see that just about everything I read was relatively new: Tom Perrotta’s absorbing and brave satire Little Children, Tony Hendra’s mostly lovable Father Joe… Soldiers of Salamis is, I think, the first translated novel I’ve read since I began this column. Is that shameful? I suppose so, but once again, I don’t feel it. When you’re as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English-speaking world seems like a minor infraction.
In Scottish poet Don Paterson’s clever, funny and maddeningly addictive new book of epigrams, The Book of Shadows, he writes that ‘nearly all translators of poetry… fail to understand the poem’s incarnation in its tongue is all there is of it, as a painting is its paint’. I suppose this can’t be true for novels, but there is always the sense that you’re missing something. Soldiers of Salamis is moving and informative and worthwhile and well translated and blah blah, and on just about every page I felt as though I were listening to a radio that hadn’t quite been tuned in properly. You don’t need to write in to express your disgust and disappointment. I’m disappointed enough in myself.
The Book of Shadows, though, came through loud and clear – FM through Linn speakers. Thought for the day: ‘Anal sex has one serious advantage: there are few cinematic precedents that instruct either party how they should look.’Your bathroom needs this book badly.
MARCH 2005
&nbs
p; BOOKS BOUGHT:
Case Histories – Kate Atkinson
The Crocodile Bird – Ruth Rendell
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City – Nick Flynn
Help Us to Divorce – Amos Oz
BOOKS READ:
The Man on the Moon – Simon Bartram
Every Secret Thing – Laura Lippman
Help Us to Divorce – Amos Oz
Assassination Vacation – Sarah Vowell
Early Bird – Rodney Rothman
So this last month was, as I believe you people say, a bust. I had high hopes for it, too; it was Christmastime in England, and I was intending to do a little holiday comfort reading – David Copperfield and a couple of John Buchan novels, say, while sipping an eggnog and… wait a minute! I only just read David Copperfield! What the hell’s going on here?
Aha. I see what’s happened. In hoping to save myself some time by copying out the sentence that began this column a year ago, I neglected to change anything at all. If I’d substituted Barnaby Rudge for David Copperfield, say, I might have got away with it, but I couldn’t be bothered, and now I’m paying the price. A few months ago – back in the days when the Polysyllabic Spree used to tell me, repeatedly and cruelly, that they had commissioned research showing I had zero readers – I could have got away with repeating whole columns. But then, gloriously and unexpectedly, a reader wrote in [‘Dear the Believer’, November 2004] and the Spree had to eat their weasel words. My reader’s name is Caroline, and she actually ploughed through Copperfield at my suggestion, and I love her with all my heart. I think it’s time to throw the question back at the Spree: so how many readers do you have, then?
Anyway, Caroline also responded to my recent plea for a list of thrillers that might make me walk into lamp-posts, which is how come I read Laura Lippman’s Every Secret Thing. I really liked it, although at the risk of alienating my reader at a very early stage in our relationship, I have to say that it didn’t make me walk into a lamp-post. I’m not sure that it’s intended to be that propulsive: it’s gripping in a quiet, thoughtful way, and the motor it’s powered with equips the author to putter around the inside of her characters’ damaged minds, rather than to smash her reader headlong into an inert object. On Lippman’s thoughtful and engaging website – and there are two adjectives you don’t see attached to that particular noun very often – a reviewer compares Every Secret Thing to a Patricia Highsmith novel, and the comparison made sense to me: like Lippman, Highsmith wants to mess with your head without actually fracturing your skull. Every Secret Thing is an American-cheeseburger version of Highsmith’s bloody filet mignon, and that suited me fine.
Like many parents, I no longer have a lot of desire to read books in which children are harmed. My imagination is deficient and puny in every area except this one, where it works unstoppably for eighteen or twenty hours a day; I really don’t need any help from no thriller. Every Secret Thing opens with the release from prison of two girls jailed for the death of a baby, and no sooner are they freed than another child disappears. ‘It’s not incidental that a childless woman wrote Every Secret Thing, and I was very worried about how readers would react,’ Lippman said in an interview with the crime writer Jeff Abbott, but I suspect that it’s precisely because Lippman is childless that she doesn’t allow her novel to be pulled out of shape by the narrative events within it. I recently saw Jaws again, for the first time since it was in the cinema, and I’d forgotten that a small boy is one of the shark’s first victims; what’s striking about the movie now is that the boy is chomped and then pretty much forgotten about. In the last thirty years, we’ve sentimentalized kids and childhood to the extent that if Jaws were made now, it would have to be about the boy’s death in some way, and it would be the shark that got forgotten about. Every Secret Thing is suitably grave in all the right places, but it’s not hysterical, and it’s also morally complicated in ways that one might not have expected: the mother who lost a child in the original crime is unattractively vengeful, for example, and it’s her bitterness that is allowed to drive some of Lippman’s narrative. My reader, huh? She shoots, she scores.
Assassination Vacation is the first of the inevitable Incredibles cash-ins – Sarah Vowell, as some of you may know, provided the voice of Violet Incredible, and has chosen to exploit the new part of her fame by writing a book about the murders of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. See, I don’t know how good an idea this is, from the cash-in angle. Obviously I’m over here in London, and I can’t really judge the appetite for fascinating facts about the Garfield presidency among America’s pre-teens, but I reckon Vowell might have done better with something more contemporary – a book about the Fair Deal, say, or an analysis of what actually happened at Yalta.
I should own up here and say that Sarah Vowell used to be a friend, back in the days when she still spoke to people who weren’t sufficiently famous to warrant animation. She even knows some of the Spree, although obviously she’s been cast out into the wilderness since she started bathing in asses’ milk etc. Anyway, I make a walk-on appearance in Assassination Vacation – I am, enigmatically, a smoker from London called Nick – and Vowell writes of the four hours we spent sitting on a bench in a cold Gramercy Park staring at a statue of John Wilkes Booth’s brother. (This was her idea of a good time, not mine.)
Being reminded of that day made me realize how much I will miss her, because, incredibly, ha ha, she made those four hours actually interesting. Did you know that John Wilkes came from this prestigious acting family, a sort of nineteenth-century Baldwin clan? Hence the Booth Theatre in NYC, and hence the statue in the park? There’s loads more of this sort of stuff in Assassination Vacation: she trawls round museums examining bullets and brains and bits of Lincoln’s skull, and hangs out in mausoleums, and generally tracks down all sorts of weird, and weirdly resonant, arte-facts and anecdotes. If any other of my friends had told me that they were writing a book on this subject, I’d probably have moved house just so that they wouldn’t have had a mailing address for the advance copy. But Vowell’s mind is so singular, and her prose is so easy, and her instinct for what we might want to know so true, that I was actually looking forward to this book, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s sad, because she does such a good job of bringing these people back to life before bumping them off again, and it’s witty, of course (Garfield’s assassin Charles Guiteau was a hoot, if you overlook the murderous bit), and, in the current political climate, it’s oddly necessary – not least because it helps you to remember that all presidencies and all historical eras end. I hope her new friends, Angelina and Drew and Buzz and Woody and the rest, value Sarah Vowell as much as we all did.
Those of you who like to imagine that the literary world is a vast conspiracy run by a tiny yet elite cabal will not be surprised to learn that I read Rodney Rothman’s book because Sarah recommended it, and she happened to have an advance copy because Rothman is a friend of hers. So, to recap: a friend of mine who’s just written a book which I read and loved and have written about gives me a book by a friend of hers which she loved, so I read it and then I write about it. See how it works? Oh, you’ve got no chance if you have no connection with One of Us. Tom Wolfe, Patricia Cornwell, Ian McEwan, Michael Frayn, Ann Rivers Siddons… You’re doomed to poverty and obscurity, all of you. Anyway, Rothman’s book is the story of how he went to live in a retirement community in Florida for a few months, and it’s very sweet and very funny. If you’re wondering why a man in his late twenties went to live in a retirement community in Florida, then I can provide alternative explanations. Rothman’s explanation is that he wanted to practise being old, which is a good one; mine is that he had a terrific idea for a non-fiction book, which in some ways is even better, even if it’s not the sort of thing you’re allowed to own up to. Travel writers don’t have to give some bullshit reason why they put on their kayaks and climb mountains – they do it because that’s what t
hey do, and the idea of voluntarily choosing to eat at 5 p. m. and play shuffleboard for half a year simply because there might be some good jokes in it is, I would argue, both heroic and entirely laudable.
In Early Bird, Rothman discovers that he’s hopeless at both shuffleboard and bingo, and that it’s perfectly possible to find septuagenarians sexually attractive. He gets his ass kicked at softball by a bunch of tough old geezers, and he tries to resuscitate the career of a smutty ninety-three-year-old stand-up comic with the catchphrase ‘But what the hell, my legs still spread.’ There are very few jokes about Alzheimer’s and prune juice, and lots of stereotype-defying diversions. And Rothman allows the sadness that must, of course, attach itself to the end of our lives to seep through slowly, surely and entirely without sentiment.
So this last month was, as I believe you people say… oh. Right. Sorry. What I’m trying to say here is that, once again, I didn’t read as much as I’d hoped over the festive season, and one of the chief reasons for that was a book. This book is called The Man on the Moon, and I bought it for my two-year-old son for Christmas, and I swear that I’ve read it to him fifty or sixty times over the last couple of weeks. Let’s say that it’s, what, two thousand words long? So that’s one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-odd words – longer than the Alan Hollinghurst novel I still haven’t read. And given I haven’t got many other books to tell you about, I am reduced to discussing the salient points of this one, which has, after all, defined my reading month.
I bought The Man on the Moon after reading a review of it in a newspaper. I don’t normally read reviews of children’s books, mostly because I can’t be bothered, and because kids – my kids, anyway – are not interested in what the Guardian thinks they might enjoy. One of my two-year-old’s favourite pieces of nighttime reading, for example, is the promotional flyer advertising the Incredibles that I was sent (I don’t wish to show off, but I know one of the stars of the film personally), a flyer outlining some of the marketing plans for the film. If you end up having to read that out loud every night, you soon give up on the idea of seeking out improving literature sanctioned by the liberal broadsheets. I had a hunch, however, that what with the Buzz Lightyear obsession and the insistence on what he calls Buzz Rocket pyjamas, he might enjoy a picture book about an astronaut who commutes to the moon every day to tidy it up. I dutifully sought the book out – and it wasn’t easy to find, you know, just before Christmas – only to be repaid with a soul-crushing enthusiasm, when I would have infinitely preferred a polite, mild and temporary interest. Needless to say, I won’t be taking that sort of trouble again.