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

  ME: It’s pretty worrying, all this iPad and Kindle stuff.

  NICE BOOK LOVER: Why?

  ME: It’s not just the physical book that’s under threat. Have you been on a plane or a train recently? Nobody’s reading at all, in any form. They’re all watching screens.

  NBL: Oh, I love books.

  ME: Yeah, I know, but…

  NBL: There’s nothing like the experience of being immersed in fiction.

  ME: I agree, but…

  NBL: And I could never switch to a Kindle. I love the smell of a new book. The feel of it. I like to know where I am in a book, and…

  ME: I know you do, but…

  NBL: Plus, I love my local independent bookstore. The people there are so knowledgeable, and they recommend things that they know I’ll—

  ME: Yes, but there are only seventy-three of you in the entire country! You’re fifty years old! Your kids don’t even know which way up they should hold a book! The only reason people ever used to read in the first place was because they had nothing else to do, and now they have a million things to do, even in a dentist’s waiting room! Will you shut the fuck up about you?

  NBL: I think you should go home now. You’re upsetting the other dinner guests.

  It’s like trying to talk about global terrorism to someone who isn’t worried because he knows for a fact that he would never strap a bomb to himself and blow himself up, and neither would any of his friends or family. You’re glad to hear it, but your worries have not been entirely eradicated.

  And yet, every now and again something happens that makes me wonder whether everything is going to be as awful and as depressing as I fear it will be. I have wondered this a couple of times before—once in the mid-’80s, and again in the early noughties—and I was disappointed (I’m talking about the entire future here, not just the future of publishing); but there is a possibility that if we are smart, if we engage properly with what’s going on and don’t close our eyes and hope for the best, then it might not all be over. Some of the things listed in my Books Bought column this month are not books at all: Ann Patchett’s The Getaway Car, Jess Walter’s Don’t Eat Cat, and Buzz Bissinger’s After Friday Night Lights are all from the interesting-looking online publisher Byliner, do not exist in physical form, and are in any case too short to justify conventional publication. Don’t Eat Cat is a six-thousand-word zombie story with a twist, yours for ninety-nine cents, and, unless your dentist is running very late, it might even fill up the time in the waiting room. And suddenly I had a vision of the future as a happy digital re-creation of the 1930s, where writers were well paid for short stories that appeared in “the slicks,” Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post—Fitzgerald got four thousand dollars a shot for his. The vision didn’t last long, though. The shutters came down, like they did on those public binoculars you used to find at places with a view. After Friday Night Lights became a free Starbucks download, and Amazon hit back by reducing the price to zero, as in nought dollars and nought cents. Byliner, understandably, decided that it didn’t want its authors’ work given away, and withdrew the piece from Amazon. I won’t dare to dream about anything good happening for another couple of decades.

  “Maybe it’s always the end of the world,” says the narrator of Don’t Eat Cat, in a brilliant riff on our need to catastrophize that repays your ninety-nine-cent investment at a stroke. “Maybe you’re alive for a while and then you realize you’re going to die, and that’s such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.” Yes. Well. In this case, it’s the only possible explanation. The world must die with me.

  I met Tom Franklin a few years back, in Oxford, Mississippi. At that time he’d published a much-admired collection of short stories and a terrific novel, Hell at the Breech, and he was teaching creative writing. To be honest, when I picked up Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter in a London bookstore, it didn’t occur to me for a moment that the author was the same Tom Franklin; this new one was the recipient of a British TV crime-writing award, and one of the quotes on the back had been provided by A. N. Wilson, an English novelist who… Let’s just say that he’d probably be happier in our Oxford, the one with the dreaming spires, even though the American Oxford is much nicer and more interesting. And Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a crime thriller—or at least, it’s being very successfully marketed as such—that has been on the New York Times best-seller list. I was delighted to learn that there is only one Tom Franklin, and it’s the one I met, rather than an English impostor.

  What’s interesting, I think, is that Franklin hasn’t had to sell out, or to reinvent himself, or to compromise his art, in order to find a large readership. He wasn’t an uncommercial writer when I met him, and he isn’t a commercial writer now. Hell at the Breech was a magnificent, gripping book about a bloody postbellum feud; Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is set in contemporary Mississippi, and its cast of characters (and body count) is smaller, but it is every bit as ambitious, as thoroughly imagined, and as gripping as his earlier work. Genre is in the eye of the beholder, or at least in the eye of the publisher, but we all need the help.

  Meanwhile, the brilliant Megan Abbott, who started her career writing steamy noir fiction, has been wandering right to the edge of genre territory and can now shake hands with Franklin without having to stretch. Her last novel, The End of Everything, was a dreamy, haunting novel about teenage sexuality, centered around the disappearance of a pubescent girl; Dare Me, the new book… Well, there are more teenage girls. And there’s more sex. It’s not dreamy, though. It’s set in a high school, and it’s about cheerleading. It’s dark and vicious, and Abbott ventriloquizes a kind of gum-snap young-adult voice quite brilliantly. She gets up so close to these girls that, every now and again, I feel the need to explain to anyone who might be in the vicinity that it’s OK for me to be reading it, because the author is a woman, and she’s serious-minded and gifted, and, you know, teen sexuality is a subject like any other, although obviously more interesting than most, or indeed any. This is the third Megan Abbott novel I have read this year, and I can see that, given the synopses I have provided, my enthusiasm might be open to misinterpretation. I can only repeat, with all the sincerity I can muster, that she’s really good, and is doing something that nobody else I’ve read is attempting. (I am hoping—praying—that Abbott’s work bears some resemblance to my description of it. If her novels are in fact conventional analyses of middle-class, middle-aged marital discord in Connecticut, or imaginative accounts of Henry VIII’s court, then I will give up reading altogether.)

  I suspect that you don’t need to be a practicing psychotherapist to understand why I read Stephen Amidon’s Something Like the Gods, a short, interesting, and extremely useful history of sports, immediately after Dare Me. It is difficult to achieve a corpore sano simply through the act of reading, but clearly I was looking for something that might provide some kind of literary cold shower. This, I should hasten to add, is by no means the entire appeal of Amidon’s book. But the access Abbott had provided to the girls’ locker room left some residual awkwardness, and the mere act of reading about the utter nakedness of the young men in the original Greek Olympic games washed it away.

  Something Like the Gods is full of information that you want to pass on immediately—I had no idea, for example, that the Greek Olympics had lasted for a thousand years, nor that we have a record of every single winner of the stadion, a 210-yard race, and the first Olympic event ever contested. But Amidon’s political consciousness, his gleeful skewering of sport’s perennial propensity for doing the wrong things at the wrong time, gives him a real head of steam. Here in London, we are planting antiaircraft missiles on residential tower blocks in careful preparation for the Olympics (I’m not even joking), and it’s good to be reminded of the hopeless idiocy of the modern tournament—its tacit endorsement of Nazism in 1936, its reactionary exclusion of women (there was no female fifteen-hundred-meter race until 19
72, and no marathon until 1984), its suspension of Tommie Smith and John Carlos for their black-power salute. There are many villains in Something Like the Gods, but if anyone ever made an Olympics movie, John Malkovich would be licking his lips at the meaty roles provided by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee, or long-serving IOC president Avery Brundage.

  After the brief respite provided by Stephen Amidon, I was ready to return to the eternally interesting subject of young women and their sexual relationships. I’d been meaning to read Barbara Trapido’s much-loved Brother of the More Famous Jack for some time, and a new paperback edition, with an introduction by Rachel Cusk, finally pushed me over the edge. It was the introduction that did it, and I haven’t even read it yet; this kind of public enthusiasm and endorsement, it seems to me, is a very good way of ensuring the survival of our best books, and of our best writers. And Brother of the More Famous Jack is a wonderful novel, as lovable as I Capture the Castle, with as much potential, I’d have thought, to mean a very great deal to the right kind of young woman, even though it was published thirty years ago. It’s not a very high-concept book: Katherine, the heroine, is introduced to a large, bohemian, occasionally exasperating family when she is eighteen, and spends her entire young adulthood escaping from them, and being pulled back to them. But such are Trapido’s warmth and energy and wit that I wanted to return to it every chance I got, as if it were a genre thriller. It’s about a lot of women and places that I know very well, and if you buy it and don’t like it, then I can only presume that you’re not from round here. You can probably find it for ten cents on Amazon. You can probably even get it for free, somewhere. As I was saying: it’s the end of the world, and everything’s turning to shit—unless, I suppose, you like reading wonderful novels and not paying very much for them. If that’s the case, then you might think that the world is really OK.

  September 2012

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail —Cheryl Strayed

  The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story—Glenway Wescott

  The Austerity Olympics: When the Games Came to London in 1948—Janie Hampton

  Persuasion—Jane Austen

  XX—YY

  Rosamond Lehmann—Selina Hastings

  Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex—Mary Roach

  BOOKS READ:

  Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail—Cheryl Strayed

  Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk—Ben Fountain

  The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story—Glenway Wescott

  The Austerity Olympics: When the Games Came to London in 1948—Janie Hampton

  Here’s the thing: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is one of the best books I’ve read in the last five or ten years, up there with David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, and Mark Harris’s Scenes from a Revolution, and Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets, and Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang—or rather in there, because whereas the former preposition indicates some kind of indefensibly objective ranking system, the latter more accurately reflects what happens to our favorite books, I think: we separate them from the other books we’ve read—the ones we liked but didn’t love, or admired but didn’t connect with, or hated and didn’t finish—and we place them on a special and infinitely extendable shelf somewhere within our souls. So Wild is now in this personal library, which consists of probably three or four hundred books, a number I intend to add to as often as I can for the rest of my life; it’s “mine,” in a way that Sullivan’s Travels is mine, and the first Ramones album is mine. In other words, it’s not mine at all, but such is my affinity with it that I’ve somehow ended up embarking on long and expensive legal battles in an attempt to get myself a co-credit. (Preston Sturges, by the way, is not an easy man to deal with, if you’re thinking about going down that road yourself with The Lady Eve or The Palm Beach Story.) Anyway, we’re lucky if we find one of these a year; my admiration for Wild means that this was a very good reading month, whatever else happened.

  I put down Strayed’s book and picked up Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and suddenly a very good reading month turned into a very difficult one. The problem was this: I loved Fountain’s novel as much as I had loved Wild. So suddenly, all was chaos. Is it possible to read two modern classics back-to-back, without anyone having mentioned that they’re modern classics? Did this mean that my standards were slipping? Did it mean that times are so tough in publishing that only modern classics are being published? Had I gone mad? And, more pertinently, what was I going to read next?

  This last question became particularly troubling, not only because I was unlikely to be lucky a third time, and would thus end up feeling itchy and dissatisfied by anything that attempted to occupy the time happily devoted to Wild and Billy Lynn, but because I had this column to write. Younger visitors to this page may not recall the Believer’s legendary and entirely laudable no-snark rule: the Polysyllabic Spree, the seventy-eight stunningly attractive but dismayingly solemn editors of this magazine, are constantly on the lookout for slighting references to writers and/or works of literature, however carefully encrypted. (Seven of the Spree are employed full-time on this task.) And this was why I was so upset by the brilliance of Fountain’s novel—how could I avoid incurring their wrath now? Any praise for the next books I read was likely to be faint by comparison, and to the collective mind of the Spree, showering a book with faint praise is like peeing on it. (And just in case this simile leaves any room for confusion in the minds of our more “artistic” subscribers: they’re against peeing on books. I’m pretty sure they are, anyway. TBC.) My subsequent fear and indecision resulted in a lot of books being purchased and a lot of books being abandoned after a couple of pages. And we also have a first in one of the lists that introduce “Stuff I’ve Been Reading”—an anonymous Book Bought.

  Here’s how that works. I think carefully about the next novel I’m going to read. One in particular comes highly recommended, by two different friends whose taste I trust. I buy it, and resolve to read it next, and then I walk into a party and a third friend with impeccable taste asks me whether I’ve read XX by YY, the novel in question. I tell her I haven’t, and am about to launch into an explanation of its sudden importance in my life, and she makes a face. It was a “Meh” face rather than a “Bleeeugh” face, but even so… There was no way I could persist with XX after that. I’d be reading it in the wrong spirit, and in any case I needed a cast-iron, superstrength guarantee of brilliance, and I hadn’t got it. I still haven’t read a word of XX. In desperation, I turned to Persuasion, but it didn’t have the tremendous kinetic energy of the Fountain novel, and its careful moderation wasn’t likely to give me the bare-knuckle punch of Strayed’s memoir.

  In the end, Glenway Wescott and Janie Hampton dug me out of a hole. Wescott’s slim novella was published in 1940, and in any case has already had classic status conferred upon it, by both the New York Review of Books and Michael Cunningham, who in his introduction calls it “a work of brilliance.” Plus, Wescott died in 1987, and the Spree don’t seem to care much what I say about dead authors—I remember being underwhelmed by Voltaire without receiving so much as an admonitory email. Nobody around here cares what I think of The Pilgrim Hawk, which is why I bought it in the first place. It’s really good, though, odd and shape-shifting and compelling, despite having to labor under that deathly plain title. The narrative is simple: the narrator, Alwyn Tower, is staying with a rich expatriate friend in a French village; one afternoon they are visited by an Irish couple, the Cullens, and Mrs. Cullen’s hawk, Lucy, whose eating habits and occasional bates tend to dominate the social occasion. The relationships between the characters are subtle and labyrinthine, however, and Tower is an acute observer, not only of his companions but of himself: one of the joys of The Pilgrim Hawk is the way that the bird’s moods and appetites provide an opportunity for a dense and surprisingly melancholy internality. The Pilgrim Hawk is subtitled A Love Story, but
there’s a lot more about love’s impossibility than its joys.

  By the time you read this, the 2012 Olympics will be over, and Londoners will have literally nothing to look forward to ever again. Janie Hampton’s The Austerity Olympics is a straightforward, cheerful, frequently amazing account of the last time my city hosted the games, in 1948, when food was scarcer than it had been during the war, British athletes were obliged to take a day’s unpaid holiday to compete in their events, and, with air travel not yet an option, the New Zealand team took five weeks to get here. (The ship’s carpenter built for the one Kiwi swimmer a cabinet that was filled with seawater every day, so that she could train; the cabinet was a foot longer than she was.) The first gold medal of the games was awarded to Micheline Ostermeyer of France, a discus-thrower who had picked up a discus for the first time a few weeks before the event—but then again, her day job as a concert pianist had probably taken up a lot of her time and attention. It was the last time medals were awarded for artistic endeavor—Stravinsky had judged the music category in the 1924 games—although most of the competitors had to settle for honorable mentions, due to the dismal standard of their entries. The temperature in London on the day of the ten-thousand-meter final was 94 degrees, the hottest recorded since 1911, and seventeen of the thirty-one runners collapsed—hardly surprising when you learn that the prevailing nutritional wisdom of the time advised athletes not to drink in the twenty-four hours before a race. These events took place nine years before I was born, in a city I live in, and yet they seem to have happened in a parallel, and much less knowing, universe.

  So both Hampton and Wescott did a magnificent job for me in very trying circumstances, but at this point I feel I should turn my attention, reluctantly, to the books that gave me all this trouble in the first place. Strayed started it, with Wild, and I really didn’t think she was going to cause me any grief, despite the inspiring, life-changing review by Dwight Garner in the New York Times that made me order the book in the first place; when it arrived I noted darkly that (a) it was a book about hiking, and (b) that it seemed to be a “decide-to” book—as in, Cheryl Strayed decided to walk the eleven-hundred-mile Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Washington State, and then write a book about it. There are a lot of “decide-to” books: people decide to have sex three times a day for a decade, or decide to marry the first person they see in the morning, or decide to eat an entire car, and the reason that they decided to do these things can never be articulated in their narrative: it’s because they could get an advance from a publisher. Good luck to them and all, but I’ve never really wanted to read about the car-eating that they’re being paid to do.