It begins with a mystery: why were a group of academics, mostly neurologists, all sent a book by ‘Joe K’ that consisted entirely of cryptic messages and holes? The perplexed neurologists believed that Ronson was the man to solve the puzzle, and their instincts were sound, because he does so. On the way, he meets a man who pretended to be mad in order to escape a prison sentence, and now cannot convince anybody that he is sane; several Scientologists engaged in a war on psychiatry, as Scientologists tend to be; Bob Hare, the man who devised the eponymous test; and a top CEO whose legendary ruthlessness leads Ronson to suspect that he might tick a few too many boxes. (It is Bob Hare’s contention that psychopaths are all around us, in positions that allow them to exert and abuse their authority.) Like all Ronson’s work, The Psychopath Test is funny, frightening and provocative: it had never occurred to me, for example, that Scientologists had any kind of an argument for their apparently absurd war on science, but Ronson’s account of the equally absurd experiments and treatments for which respected psychiatrists are responsible gives one pause for thought.
If you are a subscriber to this magazine, and a regular reader of this column, and you have very little going on in your life, and you’re kind of anal, you may be thinking to yourself, ‘Hey! It’s eight weeks since he last wrote a column, and he’s read exactly four books!’ There are various explanations and excuses I could give you, but the two most pertinent are as follows:
1) I have been cruelly tricked into co-founding a writing centre for kids, with a weird shop at the front of it, here in London (and don’t even think about copying this idea in the USA unless you want to hear from our lawyers – although why you would want to spend a thousand hours and a million pounds a week doing so I can’t imagine).
2) I have spent way too much time watching the Dillon Panthers, the fictional football team at the heart of the brilliant drama series Friday Night Lights. (And yes, I know, I know – I have seen the fourth season. I am being respectful to those who are catching up.)
Reading time, in other words, has been in short supply, even during the day, and half the reading that has got done is directly related to the above. H. G. Bissinger’s terrific non-fiction book, the source for a movie and then the TV series, is about the Permian Panthers, who represent a high school in Odessa, Texas, and regularly play in front of crowds of 20,000 – or did, when the book was published in the early 1990s. There is no equivalent of high-school or college football in Europe, for several reasons: there are no comparable sports scholarships, for a start, and, in a country the size of England, it’s quite hard to live more than fifty miles from a pro team. And in any case, because your major sports have turned out to be so uninteresting to the rest of the world, young talent in the USA is governable; the young soccer players of London and Manchester no longer compete solely with each other for a place in a top professional team, but with kids from Africa and Asia and Spain. Over the last several years, Arsenal have routinely played without a single English player in their starting eleven. Our best player is Spanish; one of our brightest hopes for the future is Japanese and currently on loan to a club in Holland. So the idea of an entire community’s aspirations being embodied in local teenage athletes is weird, but not unappealing.
The reality, as Bissinger presents it – and he went to live in Odessa for a year, hung out with players and coaching staff and fans, so he knows what he’s talking about – is a lot darker, however. It turns out that there are not as many liberals in small-town Texas as the TV series would have me believe: in Dillon, people are always speaking out against racism, or talking about art, or thinking about great literature. (The adorably nerdy Landry Clarke can quite clearly be seen reading High Fidelity, my first novel, in an episode of the third season. This is almost certainly the greatest achievement of my writing career. And I’m sorry to bring it up, but I had to tell somebody.) In Odessa, Dillon’s real-life counterpart … not so much racism gets confronted, or towering masterpieces of fiction consumed. Bissinger loves his football, and falls in love with the team, but is powerfully good on what the town’s obsession with football costs its kids. It’s not just the ones who don’t make it, or become damaged along the way, all of whom get chucked away like ribs stripped of their meat (and catastrophically uneducated before they’ve been rejected); the kids who can’t play football are almost worthless. The girls spend half their time cheerleading and cake-baking for the players, and the students with more cerebral interests are ignored. In the season that Bissinger followed the team, the cost of rush-delivered post-game videotapes that enabled the coaches to analyse what had gone right and wrong was $6,400. The budget for the entire English department was $5,040. And the team used private jets for away games on more than one occasion. Isn’t it great how little you need to spend to inculcate a passion for the arts? Perhaps I have drawn the wrong conclusion.
David Almond’s My Name Is Mina is an extraordinary children’s book by the author of Skellig, one of the best novels written for anyone published in the last fifteen years. And this new book is a companion piece to Skellig, a kind of prequel about the girl who lives next door. It’s also, as it turns out, a handbook for anyone who is interested in literacy and education as they have been, or are being, applied to them or their children or anybody else’s children:
Why should I write something so that somebody could say I was well below average, below average, average, above average, or well above average? What’s average? And what about the ones that find out they’re well below average? What’s the point of that and how’s that going to make them feel for the rest of their lives? And did William Blake do writing tasks just because somebody else told him to? And what Level would he have got anyway?
‘Little Lamb, Who mad’st thee?
Dost thou know who mad’st thee?’
What level is that?
Almond’s wry disdain for the way we sift our children as if they were potatoes killed me, because I was once found to be below average, across the board, at a crucial early stage in my educational career, and I have just about recovered enough confidence to declare that this judgement was, if not wrong, then at least not worth making. I think that, like everybody, I’m above average at some things and well below at others.
My Name Is Mina is a literary novel for kids, a Blakean mystic’s view of the world, a fun-filled activity book for a rainy day (‘EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY – Write a poem that repeats a word and repeats a word and repeats a word and repeats a word until it almost loses its meaning’), a study of loneliness and grief, and it made more sense to me than half the fiction I usually read. This can’t be right, and I won’t allow it to be right. For literary purposes only, I am off to call my wife obscenities and bounce her up and down on a mattress. As I write, she’s upstairs, helping my youngest son with his homework, so she’s in for a shock.
June 2011
BOOKS BOUGHT:
★ Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America – Lawrence W. Levine
★ Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture – John Seabrook
★ The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism – Thomas W. Evans
★ The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America – James Sullivan
★ London Belongs to Me – Norman Collins
BOOKS READ:
★ Unfamiliar Fishes – Sarah Vowell
★ Norwood – Charles Portis
★ The Imperfectionists – Tom Rachman
★ Mr Gum and the Power Crystals – Andy Stanton
★ Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear – Andy Stanton
My friendship with the writer Sarah Vowell – history buff, TV and radio personality, occasional animated character – is now fifteen years old. For the first decade or so, it was pretty straightforward: whenever I was in New York, we would sit in a park staring at a statue of an obscure but allegedly important American figure, and she wo
uld talk about it while I nodded and smoked. Over the last few years, however, it has become complicated to the extent that it has started to resemble one of those Greek myths where the hero (in this case, me) is asked to perform tasks by some enigmatic and implacable goddess (her) or monster (also her). Vowell isn’t as well known in the UK as she should be – we have different chat shows, for a start, and because of the awesomely uncompromising insularity of her writing, her books aren’t published here. So, as one of her few English fans, I have been taking the literary challenges that she throws across the Atlantic personally. In my mind, at least, it goes like this. I tell her that I am an enormous admirer of her work, and she says, ‘In that case, I am going to write a book about the mu-seums of the assassinated American Presidents, excluding the most recent, and therefore the only one you are interested in. Will you read it?’
I read it, loved it, told her so.
‘I see that you are a worthy English opponent, so I will have to try harder. I will now make you read a book about New England Puritans – not the Plymouth Pilgrims, but the more obscure (and more self-denying) Massachusetts Bay crowd.’
I read it, loved it, asked her to hit me with something a little less accessible.
And now she has come roaring back with Unfamiliar Fishes, a history of Hawaii, although obviously it’s not a complete history of Hawaii, because a complete history of Hawaii would not have intimidated the English reader to quite the required extent, and might have contained some fun facts about Bette Midler. Vowell wisely chose to concentrate on the nineteenth century, post 1820, when her old friends from New England sailed around the entire American continent in order to tell the natives that everything they had hitherto believed was wrong. (One of the many things I had never thought about before reading Unfamiliar Fishes was the sheer uselessness of New England as a home base for missionaries. It took them a good six months to get to anywhere uncivilized enough to need them.)
Unfamiliar Fishes tells the story of the battle for hearts and minds between the Massachusetts killjoys and the locals. In these wars, the liberal conscience always has us rooting for the locals, even though we invariably already know that we are doomed to disappointment, and that the locals, whoever and wherever they might be, are even as we speak tucking into Happy Meals, listening to Adele, and working for Halliburton. In Hawaii, though, there was a lot invested in the idea that a child born from the union between brother and sister was superior to a child conceived any other way, and this particular belief kind of muddied the water a little for me. I know, I know. Different times, different cultures. But I have a sister, and you too may well have a sibling who operates an entirely different genital system. And if you do, then you might find yourself unable to boo the meddling Christians with the volume you can usually achieve in situations like this.
And yet, as Vowell points out, the whole foundation of royalty is based on the notion that one bloodline is superior to another, and therefore shouldn’t be messed with:
The way said contamination is prevented is through inbreeding, which, of course, is often the genetic cause of a royal dynasty’s demise through sterility, miscarriages, stillbirths, and sickliness. That would be true of the heirs of Keopuolani just as it was true of the House of Hapsburg.
In other words, one of the reasons that my own country is in such a mess is that there simply hasn’t been enough inbreeding: if there had, we might be shot of our Royal Family by now. Incest is more complicated than it looks (and please feel free to go and get that printed on a T-shirt, if it’s a slogan that grabs you). Like anything else, it’s got its good points and its bad.
The one team we can all get behind in Unfamiliar Fishes is the crew of the English whaler John Palmer. They were so annoyed by the missionaries messing with their inalienable right to onboard visits from prostitutes that they started shelling the port. I am, however, grudgingly respectful of the Americans who, convinced of the Hawaiians’ need for a Bible, first helped to invent a written Hawaiian language, and then translated the whole thing from the original Greek and Hebrew. It took them seventeen years. Finally, I have a notion of what I might do when I retire. Anyway, I have sailed through yet another task set by the dark nerd-maiden from across the water; I don’t think she is capable of writing anything that I wouldn’t read, although I hope she doesn’t take that as a provocation. And her history of whaling on the island was so enthralling that it got me through the entire first chapter of Moby-Dick.
The idea of this column, for those of you who have arrived eight years late, is that I write about what I have read in the previous month; for some reason, the books I read with my children have never been included. This last couple of months, however, we have been reading Andy Stanton’s Mr Gum series at bedtime, and as Stanton’s books are providing as much joy to me as they do to the boys, their omission from these pages would be indefensible.
Mr Gum is an evil, joyless, smelly old man who tries to poison dogs, and whose favourite TV programme is Bag of Sticks, which is as exciting as it sounds. His best friend is the evil butcher Billy William the Third, and his enemies are the entirely admirable Polly, Friday O’Leary and the billionaire gingerbread man with electric muscles, little Alan Taylor. The books are a happy product of a tolerably non-incestuous relationship between Roald Dahl and Monty Python, and they are properly funny: Stanton has an eccentric imagination and an anarchic verbal wit that occasionally redirects his narrative in directions that possibly even the author didn’t expect.
My sons’ enormous enjoyment of the books has been intensified through a series of superb readings by their father, readings that, in his mind at least, are comparable only to the performances Dickens is reported to have given at public events. Billy William the Third is rendered as an evil version of the great English comic actor Kenneth Williams, Alan Taylor as the football commentator John Motson, and Mr Gum as a kind of ancient Cockney gangster paterfamilias. It seems ridiculous that performances with this level of invention take place night after night in a child’s bedroom, in front of an audience of two; I may well have to throw them open to the public.
If you, like me, have been cursed by boy children, you too may have found that their relationship with books is a fractious one, no matter how many times they see a male role model lounging around the house with his nose glued to a partial history of Hawaii. Andy Stanton’s series has been a real breakthrough, and a testament to the importance and the power of jokes; we are just about to start the seventh of the eight books, and I’m already fearful of the Gumless future.
I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes – and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think jokes even belong in proper books. I won’t bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search for gravitas through literature. Charles Portis is a Believer favourite (one of our editors wrote an enormous and completely excellent piece about him in the very early days of this magazine’s life) partly because he takes his humour seriously: the Coen Brothers’ recent adaptation of True Grit was admirable in many ways, but it didn’t really convey the comic brilliance of the novel, nor was it able to, as so much of it was embedded in the voice of the priggish, God-fearing Mattie Ross. I suspect that we have the Coen Brothers to thank for the reappearance of Portis’s first novel, Norwood, in bookstores, so they have done their bit for comedy, anyway.
‘Norwood’ is Norwood Pratt, a marine who obtains a hardship discharge so that he can return to Texas to look after his incapable sister Vernell. Vernell promptly marries an unlikeable disabled veteran called Bill Bird, however, thus liberating Norwood to go to New York, partly in an attempt to reclaim seventy dollars that an army friend owes him. So Norwood is a road-trip book, and the simplicity of its structure allows for a dazzling range of eccentric minor characters and plenty of room for any number of terrific, short, often
crazily pointless passages of dialogue. Here’s Norwood, on a bus, trying to engage with a two-year-old called Hershel Remley:
‘I believe the cat has got that boy’s tongue,’ said Norwood.
‘Say no he ain’t,’ said Mrs Remley. ‘Say I can talk aplenty when I want to, Mr Man.’
‘Tell me what your name is,’ said Norwood. ‘What is your name?’
‘Say Hershel. Say Hershel Remley is my name.’
‘How old are you, Hershel? Tell me how old you are.’
‘Say I’m two years old.’
‘Hold up this many fingers,’ said Norwood.
‘He don’t know about that,’ said Mrs Remley. ‘But he can blow out a match.’
There’s so much to love here: the portrayal of the clearly slow-witted toddler, Mrs Remley’s desperate and hopeful pride, the author’s merciless ear for disastrous parental anthropomorphizing … This is the third novel I have read by Charles Portis, and I am now completely convinced that he’s a neglected comic genius. And here’s a cool fact: in Nora Ephron’s new book of essays, I Remember Nothing, she talks about dating Portis in the 1960s. The relationship clearly didn’t last, but it feels as though their children are everywhere, anyway.
Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, which I suspect you may have read already, is an ingeniously structured work of fiction that manages to tell the entire history of an English-language newspaper based in Rome through a series of linked short stories about its members of staff. This, to me, makes The Imperfectionists a collection rather than a novel, despite the bald assertion on the cover (‘A Novel’), and I slightly resented being misled, for entirely indefensible reasons; in most ways I haven’t aged at all over the last quarter of a century, remarkably, but I seem to have developed some kind of old-geezerish resentment of story collections. Is that possible? Is resentment of short fiction a sign of ageing, like liver spots? And if it is, then why? As the end of one’s life draws closer, surely one should embrace short fiction, not spurn it. And yet I was extremely conscious of not wanting to make the emotional effort at the beginning of each chapter, to the extent that I could almost hear myself grumbling like my grandmother used to. ‘Who are these people, now? I don’t know them. Where did the other ones go? They’d only just got here.’ It’s a great tribute to Rachman, to his sense of pace and his choice of narrative moment, that within a couple of pages I had forgiven him. And the world of the expatriate is, it occurred to me halfway through the book, rich with fictional possibilities; almost by definition, the characters are lost, restless, discontented – just the way we like them.