Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books

  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 so dim and unreflective? Where did I go wrong?

  Towards the end of the book, Otto and Sophie, the central couple, go to stay in their holiday home. Sophie opens the door to the house, and is immediately reminded of a friend, an artist who used to visit them there; she thinks about him for a page or so. The reason she’s thinking about him is that she’s staring at something he loved, a vinegar bottle shaped like a bunch of grapes. The reason she’s staring at the bottle is because it’s in pieces. And the reason it’s in pieces is because someone has broken in and trashed the place, a fact we only discover when Sophie has snapped out of her reverie. At this point, I realized with some regret that not only could I never write a literary novel, but I couldn’t even be a character in a literary novel. I can only imagine myself, or any character I created, saying, “Shit! Some bastard has trashed the house!” No rumination about artist friends—just a lot of cursing, and maybe some empty threats of violence.

  Zoë Heller’s Notes from a Scandal, about a fortysomething pottery teacher who has an affair with a fifteen-year-old pupil, was moving along nicely until a character starts talking about football. He tells a teaching colleague that he’s been to see Arsenal, and that “Arsenal won Liverpool 3-0.” Readers of this column will have realized by now that I know almost nothing about anything, but if I were forced to declare one area of expertise, it would be what people say to each other after football matches. It’s not much, I know, but it’s mine. And I am positive that no one has ever said “Arsenal won Liverpool 3-0” in the entire history of either Arsenal Football Club or the English language. “Beat,” “thrashed,” “did” or “done,” “trounced,” “thumped,” “shat all over,” “walloped,” etc., yes; “won,” emphatically, no. And I think that my dismay and disbelief then led me to question other things, and the fabric of the novel started to unravel a little. Can you really find full-time pottery teachers in modern English state schools? Would a contemporary teenager really complain about being treated as “the Kunta Kinte round here” when asked to do some housework? I like Zoë Heller’s writing, and this book has a terrific narrative voice which recalls Alan Bennett’s work; I just wish I wasn’t so picky. This is how picky I am. You know the Arsenal bit? It wasn’t just the unconvincing demotic I objected to; it was the score. Arsenal haven’t beaten Liverpool 3-0 at Highbury since 1991. What chance did the poor woman have?

  I haven’t finished the Richard Yates biography yet. I will,
however, say this much: it is 613 pages long. Despite the influence Yates had on a generation of writers, it’s hard enough finding people who’ve read the great Revolutionary Road, let alone people who will want to read about its author’s grandparents. I propose that those intending to write a biography should first go to the National Biography Office to get a permit which tells you the number of pages you get. (There will be no right of appeal.) It’s quite a simple calculation. Nobody wants to read a book longer than—what?—nine hundred pages? OK, a thousand, maybe. And you can’t really get the job done in less than 250. So you’re given maximum length if you’re doing Dickens, say—someone who lived to a ripe old age, wrote enormous books, and had a life outside them. And everyone else is calculated using Dickens as a yardstick. By this reckoning, Yates is a three-hundred-page man—maybe 315 tops. I’m on page 194 as we speak, and I’m going to stick with it—the book is compelling and warm and gossipy. But on page 48, I found myself reading a paragraph about the choice of gents’ outfitters facing the pupils at Yates’s school; I felt, personally speaking, that it could have gone.

  I reread two other books this month: How to Stop Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good, and Quitting Smoking—The Lazy Person’s Guide! I reread them for obvious reasons; I’ll be rereading them again, too. They’re good books, I think, sensible and helpful. But they’re clearly not perfect. If I do stop smoking, it may be because I don’t want to read Gillian Riley anymore.

  November 2003

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  Bush at War—Bob Woodward

  Six Days of War—Michael B. Oren

  Genome—Matt Ridley

  Isaac Newton—James Gleick

  God’s Pocket—Pete Dexter

  The Poet and the Murderer—Simon Worrall

  Sputnik Sweetheart—Haruki Murakami

  Lie Down in Darkness—William Styron

  Leadville—Edward Platt

  Master Georgie—Beryl Bainbridge

  How to Breathe Underwater—Julie Orringer (two copies)

  BOOKS READ:

  A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates—Blake Bailey (completed)

  Wenger: The Making of a Legend—Jasper Rees

  How to Breathe Underwater—Julie Orringer

  Bush at War—Bob Woodward (unfinished)

  Unnamed Literary Novel (abandoned)

  Unnamed Work of Nonfiction (abandoned)

  No Name—Wilkie Collins (unfinished)

  LITERARY CDS BOUGHT AND LISTENED TO:

  The Spoken Word—Poets

  The Spoken Word—Writers

  Unfinished, abandoned, abandoned, unfinished. Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. In the first of these columns, I voiced the suspicion that my then-current reading jag was unsustainable: I was worried, I seem to recall, about the end of the summer, and the forthcoming football season, and it’s true that both of these factors have had an adverse effect on book consumption. (Words added to ongoing novel since autumnal return to work: not many, but more than the month before. Football matches watched in the last month: seven whole ones, four of them live in the stadium, and bits and pieces of probably half a dozen others.) Of the two books I started and finished this month, one I read in a day, mostly on a plane, during a day trip to Amsterdam. And it was a book about football.

  It is not only sport and work that have slowed me up, however; I would have to say that the ethos of this magazine has inhibited me a little too. As you are probably aware by now, the Believer has taken the honorable and commendable view that, if it is attacks on contemporary writers and writing you wish to read, then you can choose from an endless range of magazines and newspapers elsewhere—just about all of them, in fact—and that therefore the Believer will contain only acid-free literary criticism.

  This position is, however, likely to cause difficulties if your brief is simply to write honestly about the books you have been reading: boredom and, very occasionally, despair is part of the reading life, after all. Last month, mindful of the Believer’s raison d’être, I expressed mild disappointment with a couple of the books I had read. I don’t remember the exact words; but I said something to the effect that, if I were physically compelled to express a view as to whether the Disappointing Novel was better or worse than Crime and Punishment, then I would keep my opinion to myself, no matter how excruciating the pain, such was my respect for the editorial credo. If, however, the torturers threatened my children, then I would—with the utmost reluctance—voice a very slight preference for Crime and Punishment.

  Uproar ensued. Voicing a slight preference for Crime and Punishment over the Disappointing Novel under threat of torture to my children constituted a Snark, it appeared, and I was summoned to appear before the Believer committee—twelve rather eerie young men and women (six of each, naturally), all dressed in white robes and smiling maniacally, like a sort of literary equivalent of the Polyphonic Spree. I was given a severe dressing-down, and only avoided a three-issue suspension by promising never to repeat the offense. Anyway, We (i.e. the Polysyllabic Spree) have decided that if it looks as though I might not enjoy a book, I will abandon it immediately, and not mention it by name. This is what happened with the Literary Novel and the Work of Nonfiction—particularly regrettable in the latter case, as I was supposed to be reviewing it for a London newspaper. The loss of income there, and the expense of flying from London to San Francisco to face the Committee (needless to say, those bastards wouldn’t stump up), means that this has been an expensive month.

  I did, however, finish Blake Bailey’s biography of Yates that I started last month. I haven’t changed my view that it could easily have afforded to shed a few of its six-hundred-plus pages—Yates doesn’t sell his first story until page 133—but I’m glad I stuck with it. Who’d have thought that the author of Revolutionary Road wrote speeches for Robert Kennedy, or provided the model for Alton Benes, the insane writer-father of Seinfeld’s Elaine? (Yates’s daughter Monica, an ex-girlfriend of Larry David, was apparently an inspiration for Elaine herself.) And who’d have thought that the author of an acknowledged American classic, as well as several other respected novels and an outstanding collection of short stories, could have ended up living and then dying in such abject penury? A Tragic Honesty, like the Ian Hamilton biography of Lowell that I read recently, is a sad and occasionally terrifying account of how creativity can be simultaneously fragile and self-destructive; it also made me grateful that I am writing now, when the antidepressants are better, and we all drink less. Stories about contemporary writers being taken away in a straitjacket are thin on the ground—or no one tells them to me, anyway—but it seemed to happen to Lowell and Yates all the time; there are ten separate page references under “breakdowns” in the index of A Tragic Honesty.

  Just as frightening to anyone who writes (or who is connected intimately to a writer) is Yates’s willingness to cannibalize his life—friends, lovers, family, work—for his fiction: just about everyone he ever met was able to find a thinly disguised, and frequently horrific, version of themselves in a novel or a story somewhere. Those who have read The Easter Parade will recall the savagely-drawn portrait of Pookie, the pathetic, vain, drunken mother of the Grimes sisters; when I tell you that Yates’s mother was known to everyone as “Dookie,” you will understand just how far Yates was prepared to go.

  It was something of a relief to turn to Jasper Rees’s biography of Arsene Wenger—not just because it’s short, but because Wenger’s career as a football manager is currently both highly successful and unfinished. I don’t often pick up books about football any more—I wrote one once, and though the experience didn’t stop me from wanting to watch the sport, as I feared it might, it did stop me from wanting to read about it—but I love Arsene, who, weirdly and neatly, coaches my team, Arsenal, and who would probably feature at about number eight in a list of People Who Have Changed My Life for the Better. He transformed a mediocre, plodding side into a thing of beauty, and on a good day, Arsenal plays the best footbal
l that anyone in England has ever seen. He was the first foreign manager to win an English championship, and his influence is such that everyone now wants to employ cool, cerebral Europeans. (The previous fashion was for ranting, red-faced Scotsmen.) Even the English national team has one now, much to the disgust of tabloid sportswriters and the more rabidly patriotic football fan.

  I gave an interview to Rees for his book, but despite my contribution, it’s a pretty useful overview of his career to date. I couldn’t, hand on heart, argue that it transcends the genre, and you probably only really need to read it if you have an Arsenal season ticket. And if there is one single Believer reader who is also an Arsenal season ticket holder, I’ll buy you a drink next home game. What the hell—I’ll buy you a car.

  I received How to Breathe Underwater and the Wilkie Collins novel in the same Jiffy envelope, sent to me by a friend at Penguin, who publishes all three of us in the UK; this friend is evangelical about both books, and so I began one, loved it, finished it, and then started the other. Usually, of course, I treat personal book recommendations with the suspicion they deserve. I’ve got enough to read as it is, so my first reaction when someone tells me to read something is to find a way to doubt their credentials, or to try to dredge up a conflicting view from the memory. (Just as stone always blunts scissors, a lukewarm “Oh, it was OK,” always beats a “You have to read this.” It’s less work that way.) But every now and again, the zealous gleam in someone’s eye catches the attention, and anyway Joanna, jaded as she is by her work, doesn’t make loose or unnecessary recommendations. She keeps her powder dry.