Anyway, Caroline also responded to my recent plea for a list of thrillers that might make me walk into lampposts, 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 lamppost. 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, artefacts 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, Anne 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 practice being old, which is a good one; mine is that he had a terrific idea for a nonfiction 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 they 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 favorite 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 pajamas, 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.
After his busy day on the moon, Bob the astronaut, we’re told, has a nice hot bath, because working on the moon can make you pretty “grubby.” And as my son doesn’t know the word “grubby,” I substitute the word “dirty,” when I remember. Except I don’t always remember, at which point he interrupts—somewhat tetchily—with the exhortation “Do ‘dirty!’” And I’ll tell you, that’s a pretty disconcerting phrase coming from the mouth of a two-year-old, especially when it’s aimed at his father. He says it to his mum, too, but I find that more acceptable. She’s a very attractive woman.
Amos Oz’s Help Us to Divorce isn’t really a book—it’s two little essays published between tiny soft covers. But as you can see, I’m desperate, so I have to include it here. Luckily, it’s also completely brilliant: the first essay, “Between Right and Right,” is a clear-eyed, calm, bleakly optimistic view of the Palestinian crisis, so sensible and yet so smart. “The Palestinians want the land they call Palestine. They have very strong reasons to want it. The Israeli Jews want exactly the same land for exactly the same reasons, which provides for a perfect understanding between the parties, and for a terrible tragedy,” says Oz, in response to repeated invitations from well-meaning bodies convinced that the whole conflict could be solved if only the relevant parties got to know each other better. I wanted Oz’s pamphlet to provide me with quick and easy mental nutrition at a distressingly mindless time of year; it worked a treat. He kicked Bob the astronaut’s ass right into orbit.
April 2005
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Saturday—Ian McEwan
Towards the End of the Morning—Michael Frayn
The 9/11 Commission Report
How To Be Lost—Amanda Eyre Ward
Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life—Claire Tomalin
BOOKS READ:
Saturday—Ian McEwan
Towards the End of the Morning—Michael Frayn
Case Histories—Kate Atkinson
So Now Who Do We Vote For?—John Harris
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City—Nick Flynn
A few years ago, I was having my head shaved in a local barbers’ when the guy doing the shaving turned to the young woman working next to him and said, “This bloke’s famous.”
I winced. This wasn’t going to end well, I could tell. Any fame that you can achieve as an author isn’t what most people regard as real fame, or even fake fame. It’s not just that nobody recognizes you; most people have never heard of you, either. It’s that anonymous sort of fame.
The young woman looked at me and shrugged.
“Yeah,” said the barber. “He’s a famous writer.”
“Well, I’ve never heard of him,” said the young woman.
“I never even told you his name,” said the barber.
The young woman shrugged again.
“Yeah, well,” said the barber. “You’ve never heard of any writers, have you?”
The young woman blushed. I was dying. How long did it take to shave a head, anyway?
“Name one author. Name one author ever.”
I didn’t intercede on the poor girl’s behalf because it didn’t seem to be that hard a question, and I thought she’d come through. I was wrong. There was a long pause, and eventually she said, “Ednit.”
“Ednit?” said her boss. “Ednit? Who the fuck’s Ednit?”
“Well, what’s her name, then?”
“Who?”
“Ednit.”
Eventually, after another two or three excruciating minutes, we discovered that ‘Ednit’ was Enid Blyton, the enormously popular English children’s author of the 1940s and 1950s. In other words, the young woman had been unable to name any writer in the history of the world—not Shakespeare, not Dickens, not even Michel Houellebecq. And she’s not alone. A survey conducted by WHSmith in 2000 found that 43 percent of adults questioned were unable to name a favorite book, and 45 percent failed to come up with a favorite author. (This could be because those questioned were unable to decide between Roth and Bellow, but let’s presume not.) Forty percent of Britons and 43 percent of Americans never read any books at all, of any kind. Over the past twenty years, the proportion of Americans aged 18–34 who read literature (and literature is defined as poems, plays, or narrative fiction) has fallen by 28 percent. The 18–34 age group, incidentally, used to be the one most likely to read a novel; it has now become the least likely.
And meanwhile, the world of books seems to be getting more bookish. Anita Brookner’s new novel is about a novelist. David Lodge and Colm Toíbín wrote novels about Henry James. In The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst wrote about a guy writing a thesis on Henry James. And in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, the central character’s father-in-law and daughter are both serious published poets and past winners of Oxford University’s Newdigate Prize for undergraduate poetry. And though nobody should ever tell a writer what to write about… Actually, forget that. Maybe somebody should. I have called for quotas in these pages before—I would have been great on some Politburo cultural committee—and I must call for them again. Nobody listens anyway. Sort it out, guys! You can’t all write literature about literature! One book a year, maybe, between you—but all of the above titles were published in the last six months.
There are, I think, two reasons to be a little queasy about this trend. The first is, quite simply, that it excludes readers; the woman in the barbers’ is not the only one who wouldn’t want to read about the Newdigate Prize. And yes, maybe great art shouldn’t be afraid of being elitist, but there’s plenty of great art that isn’t, and I don’t want bright people who don’t happen to have a degree in literature to give up on the contemporary novel; I want them to believe there’s a point to it all, that fiction has a purpose visible to anyone capable of reading a book intended for grown-ups. Taken as a group, these novels seem to raise the white flag: We give in! It’s hopeless! We don’t know what those people out there want! Pull up the drawbridge!
And the second cause for concern is that writing exclusively about highly articulate people… Well, isn’t it cheating a little? McEwan’s hero, Henry Perowne, the father and son-in-law of the poets, is a neurosurgeon, and his wife is a corporate lawyer; like many highly educated middle-class people, they have access to and a facility with language, a facility that enables them to speak very directly and lucidly about their lives (Perowne is “an habitual observer of his own moods”), and there’s a sense in which McEwan is wasted on them. They don’t need his help. What I’ve always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren’t themselves smart, or at least don’t necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states. That was the way Twain was smart, and Dickens; and that is surely one of the reasons why Roddy Doyle is adored by all sorts of people, many of whom are infrequent book-buyers. It seems to me to be a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things.
It goes without saying that Saturday is a very good novel. It’s humane and wise and gripping, just like Atonement and Black Dogs and just about everything McEwan has written. Set entirely on the day of the anti-war march in February 2003
, it’s about pretty much everything—family, uxoriousness, contemporary paranoia, the value of literature, liberalism, the workings of the human brain—and readers of this magazine will find much with which they identify. I spent too much time wondering about Henry Perowne’s age, however. McEwan tells us that he’s forty-eight years old, and though of course it’s possible and plausible for a forty-eight-year-old man to have a daughter in her early twenties, it’s by no means typical of highly qualified professional people who must have spent a good deal of their twenties studying; at the end of the book, (SKIP TO THE NEXT SENTENCE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW) Perowne learns that he is about to become a grandfather, and this too bucks a few demographic trends. I belong to Henry Perowne’s generation, and my friends typically have kids who are now in their early-to-mid-teens. On top of that, I’m not sure that I am as consumed by thoughts of my own mortality as Perowne, although to be fair I’m a lot dimmer than he is, and as a consequence it may take me longer to get there. McEwan himself is fifty-six, and it felt to me like Perowne might have been, too. It doesn’t matter much, of course, but the author’s decision perhaps inevitably invites attempts at psychoanalysis.
It made me sad, thinking back to the day of the anti-war march. All that hope! All that confidence! And now it’s dwindled to nothing! I should explain that Arsenal beat Man Utd two–nil that afternoon in an FA Cup match—my passionate opposition to the war was conquered by my passionate desire to watch the TV—and it looked as though we would beat them forever. In fact, we haven’t beaten them since, and I finished Saturday in the very week that they thumped us 4-2 at Highbury to end all championship aspirations for the season.
Usually, when I read a novel I’m enjoying, I just lie there with my mouth open, occasionally muttering things like, “Oh, no! Don’t go in there!” or, “You could still get back together, right? You love each other.” But both Saturday and Kate Atkinson’s novel Case Histories contain detailed descriptions of places where I used to live and work, and as a consequence there were moments when I forgot to maintain even that level of critical engagement. Whenever Kate Atkinson mentioned Parkside, a street in Cambridge, I exclaimed—out loud, the first few dozen times, and internally thereafter—“Parkside!” (I used to teach at Parkside Community College, you see, so that was weird.) And then whenever Ian McEwan mentioned Warren Street, or the Indian restaurants on Cleveland Street, the same thing happened: “Ha! Warren Street!” Or, “Ha! The Indian restaurants!” And if someone was in the room with me while I was reading, I’d say, “This book’s set around Warren Street! Where I used to live!” (It’s not a residential area, you see, so that was weird, too.) It felt entirely right that I should read these books back-to-back, and then I was sent a copy of John Harris’s So Now Who Do We Vote For?, and I felt for a moment as though certain books were stalking me or something. Until someone writes a book called I Know Where You Put Your House Keys Last Night, I can’t imagine a title more perfectly designed to capture my attention.