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

by Nick Hornby

  We all of us know that the circumstances surrounding the reading of a book are probably every bit as important as the book itself, and I read Gilead at a weird time. I was on book tour in the UK, and I was sick of myself and of the sound of my own voice, and of appearing on daft radio shows, where I found that it was surprisingly easy to reduce my own intricately wrought novel to idiotic sound bites: if anyone were ever in need of the astonishing hush that Marilynne Robinson achieves in her book—how do you do that, in something crafted out of words?—it was I. Caveat emptor, but if you don’t like it, then you have no soul.

  So Gilead is one of the most striking novels I have ever read, and it won the Pulitzer Prize, and it’s a modern classic, but it doesn’t win the coveted “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” book-of-the-month award. It didn’t even come close, incredibly. That honor goes to my sister Gill’s Jane Austen: The Girl with the Magic Pen, a biography intended for children but strongly recommended to anyone of any age. If you want me to be definitive about it, then I would say that whereas Gilead is one of the best new novels I’ve read for years, Hornby’s biography is undoubtedly the best book of all time. Strong words, I know, but: it’s ninety pages long! It’s about Jane Austen, who was great, right? I rest my case.

  My sister’s work is, however, quite clearly, underneath it all, both about and aimed at me. Listen to this: “Jane’s eldest brother, James, was busy trotting out lofty verse, in a manner befitting the vicar he was soon to become… There was no doubt, they all said, who was the writer in the family—and James readily (and a little smugly) agreed!” I think we can all read the subtext here, can’t we? James Austen = NH. Jane Austen = GH. (Weirdly, my sister didn’t even know about my recent decision to become a man of the cloth when she wrote those lines.) And what about this? “Families are funny things, and often cannot see what is under their noses.” Hey, no need to beat around the bush! Just come out and say what’s on your mind, Oh Great One! As if Mum ever allowed me to forget that you were the really clever member of the family. As if Mum didn’t always love you more than me anyway… Sorry. This probably isn’t the most appropriate forum in which to air grievances of this kind, however justifiable. And in any case, if you’re too dim to understand the book properly, to see it for what it really is—namely, a rage-fueled, ninety-page poison-pen letter to the author’s brother—you’ll find much to enjoy on the superficial level. She had to pretend at least that she was writing about Austen, and that stuff is great, lively, and informative. See? If I can be generous about your work, how come you can’t bring yourself to… Sorry again. I’m just going out for a cigarette and a walk. I’ll be right back.

  A whole bunch of these books I read for work. You can’t just go on the radio and say, “Buy my new novel. It’s great.” Oh, no. That’s not how it works. You have to go on the radio and say, “Buy his new novel. It’s great.” And then, according to the publicity departments at my publishers, the listening public is so seduced by the sound of your voice that it ignores what you’re actually telling them, and goes out to buy your book anyway. We have this show called A Good Read, on which a couple of guests talk with the show’s presenter about a book they love, and I chose Michael Frayn’s Spies, which is a wonderful, complicated, simple novel about childhood, suburbia, and the Second World War. My fellow guest chose Nancy Mitford’s Noblesse Oblige, which was published in the 1950s, and discusses the upper classes and their use of language—they say “lavatory,” we say “toilet,” that kind of thing. My fellow guest wasn’t so keen on Spies, which was kind of hilarious, considering that he’d just made us plough through all this stuff about “napkin” versus “serviette.” I won’t say any more about Noblesse Oblige, as otherwise the Polysyllabic Spree will ban me for yet another issue, and I’m spending more time out than in as it is.

  Our host, meanwhile, chose Anne Tyler’s The Amateur Marriage, and both the choice and the novel itself made me very happy. Anne Tyler is the person who first made me want to write: I picked up Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in a bookshop, started to read it there and then, bought it, took it home, finished it, and suddenly I had an ambition, for about the first time in my life. I was worried that The Amateur Marriage was going to be a little schematic: Tyler tells the story of a relationship over the decades, and the early part of the book is perhaps too tidy. In the ’50s, the couple are living out America’s postwar suburban dream, in the ’60s they’re on the receiving end of the countercultural revolution, and so on. But the cumulative details of the marriage eventually sprawl all over the novel’s straight, tight lines as if Tyler were creating a garden; as it turns out, in those first chapters, she’s saying, “Just wait for spring—I know what I’m doing.” And she does, of course. Before too long, The Amateur Marriage is teeming with life and artfully created mess, and when it’s all over, you mourn both the passing of Tyler’s creation and the approaching end of her characters’ lives.

  My ongoing disciplinary troubles with the Polysyllabic Spree, the four hundred and thirty white-robed and utterly psychotic young men and women who control both the Believer and the minds of everyone who contributes to it, mean that I have to cram two months’ worth of reading into one column. (I no longer have any sense of where I’m going wrong, by the way. I’ve given up. I think I may have passed on some admittedly baseless gossip about the Gawain poet at the monthly editorial conference, and it didn’t go down well, but who knows, really?) So, in brief: Jeremy Lewis’s biography of Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, is a tremendous piece of social history, which I have already written about in Time Out. (It was the same deal as with Spies—I recommend someone else’s book, this time in print, and everyone rushes out to buy mine. See how it works? You’ve got to hand it to the people who think this stuff up.) And Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlett comprehensively rubbishes yet another theory this column has previously and unwisely expounded—that crime novels in a series are always inferior to what I believe the trade calls “stand-alones.” Easy Rawlins is one of probably scores of exceptions to the rule, possibly because one of Mosley’s aims in the Rawlins books is to write about race in twentieth-century America. Little Scarlett is set in L.A. during the Watts riots of 1965, and you never get the sense that you’re whiling away the time; the stakes are high, and both detective and book demonstrate a moral seriousness that you don’t find in many literary novels, never mind generic thrillers.

  Seth Mnookin is yet another member of Violet Incredible’s literary set. So those of us who pretend we still know her since she went all Hollywood animated have dutifully read his book about Jayson Blair and the New York Times, even though the subject has nothing to do with us, for fear that we’ll be cast into the darkness, far away from the warm glow of celebrity. Luckily, Mnookin’s book is completely riveting: I doubt I’ll read much else about U.S. newspaper culture, so it’s just as well that this one is definitive. Mnookin’s thoroughness—he explains with clarity and rigor how Blair and the NYT was an accident waiting to happen—could have resulted in desiccation, but it’s actually pretty juicy in all the right places. None of the outrage Blair caused makes much sense to us in England—you can make up whatever you want here, and you’ll never hear from a fact-checker or even an editor—so reading Hard News was like reading an Austen novel. You have to understand the context, the parameters of decency in an alien environment, to make any sense of it.

  So I’m off on a book tour of the U.S. now, and I’m thinking of taking Barnaby Rudge with me. It’ll last me the entire three weeks, and it’s about the Gordon riots, apparently. I’ll bet you can’t wait for the next column.

  September 2005

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  The Diary of a Country Priest—Georges Bernanos

  A Complicated Kindness—Miriam Toews

  Blood Done Sign My Name—Timothy B. Tyson

  Over Tumbled Graves—Jess Walter

  Becoming Strangers—Louise Dean

  BOOKS READ:

  Citizen Vince—Jess Walter


  A Complicated Kindness—Miriam Toews

  On my recent book tour of the U.S. I met a suspiciously large number of people who claimed to be Believer readers; some of the people who came to the signings even told me that they had read and enjoyed this column, although I can see that if you’re standing in front of someone waiting for a signature, you might as well say something, even if what you end up saying is patently and laughably untrue. Anyway, having met and talked to some of you, I now realize that the descriptions I occasionally provide of the Polysyllabic Spree, the eighty horribly brainwashed young men and women who control this magazine (and who may in turn, I am beginning to realize, be controlled by someone else), have been misleading. There are some misconceptions out there, and I feel it’s only fair, both to you and to the Spree, to clear a few things up.

  Numbers. The Spree consists of sixty-four people. You can safely ignore any other figure you may come across, either here or in the national media. Sometimes I have inflated or deflated the numbers, for comic purposes—because the joke of saying, for example, forty or eighty when really it’s sixty-four is always funny, right? Or it could have been funny, if people weren’t so literal-minded. My recent conversations have left me with the feeling that this particular witticism, along with several others (see below), may have fallen flat.

  Robes. The trademark, tell-tale Spree white robes are only worn in certain circumstances, namely during editorial meetings, major sporting events (as a protest against their existence) and morning “prayers,” wherein the Spree shout out the names of literary figures. (I can’t tell you how disconcerting it is to hear otherwise attractive and frequently naked young women yelling out “SYBILLE BEDFORD!” in a banshee wail.) I’m sorry if I have somehow given the impression that they wear white robes all the time. They don’t. In fact, given the propensity for nudity up at Believer Towers, I wish they’d put them on more often.

  Free copies of the Believer. A while back I remarked in passing that I didn’t ever see this magazine because the Spree refused to send me free copies. I can’t say too much about this, because, sadly, it’s all sub judice, and my lawyers have told me to be careful about how I address the matter in print. In brief: I have discovered that the magazine and its new publishing venture is not, as I had been assured previously, a vanity publishing outfit, and that therefore I should not have been paying the company to have my columns and my book The Polysyllabic Spree published. In a desperate attempt to avoid having their asses sued off, the Spree have started lavishing subscriptions and T-shirts upon me. It won’t do them any good. Things have gone too far.

  Suspensions. Similarly, I have in the past complained bitterly about my suspension from these pages after having ignored one of the Spree’s many unfathomable and apparently random edicts. The truth is that I haven’t been suspended by the Spree nearly as often as I’ve claimed; I made some of those stories up, usually to excuse my own indolence and/or temporary disappearances, usually prompted by the investigations of the relentless Child Support Agency here in the UK.

  I hope that’s cleared a few things up and we can now all make a fresh start.

  As you were probably beginning to suspect, the preceding nonsense was a crude attempt to deflect attention away from the dismal brevity of this month’s Books Read list: for the first time since I began writing for this magazine, I have completely lost my appetite for books. I have half-read several, and intend to finish all of them, but at the moment I find it impossible to concentrate on what anyone has to say about more or less any subject. This seems, in part, to be something to do with my book tour—it’s unfair, I know, but I seem to be sick of the sound of everyone’s voice, not just my own. Plus, at the time of this writing, I live in a city which seems to be exploding about our ears, and this has done nothing at all for my interest in contemporary literature. It all seems a bit beside the point at the moment. I’m sure that’s an error in my thinking, and that my unwillingness to engage with sensitive first novels about coming out on a sheep farm in North Dakota in the 1950s—I made this book up, by the way, and if you wrote it, I mean no offense—proves that the terrorists have won, to use the phrase that seems to end every sentence here at the moment. (“It means they’ve won” is applied indiscriminately to anyone’s failure to do anything at all that they usually do. If you don’t feel like getting on a tube or a bus, going into the center of the city, reading a book, getting drunk, or punching someone on the nose, it means you’re a scaredy-cat, not British, etc.) Instead of reading, I play endless games of solitaire on my mobile phone, watch twenty-four-hour news channels, and try to find newspaper articles written by experts on fundamentalism assuring me that this will all be over by Tuesday. I haven’t found any such reassurance yet. This morning I found myself moderately uplifted by a piece in the Times explaining that acetone peroxide, the explosive that London bombers favor, has a shelf-life of less than a week. It’s cheap, though, and available in any half-decent hardware store, so it’s not all good news.

  Anyway, in this context it seems something of a miracle that I’ve finished any books at all. Jess Walter, a wonderful writer of whose existence I was previously unaware, sent me Citizen Vince in the hope that I might start a third list at the top of this page, a list entitled “Books Foisted Upon Me,” so I was immediately intrigued by his novel; as a freelance reviewer I get sent a ton of books, but nobody to date has expressed an ambition to appear in a Believer list. If I hadn’t actually gone and read the thing I might have been tempted.

  The clincher for me was an enthusiastic blurb by the great Richard Russo, and he didn’t let me down, because Citizen Vince is fast, tough, thoughtful, and funny. (Right at the beginning of the book there’s a terrific scene involving an unwilling hooker and her unsatisfied customer, a scene culminating in an interesting philosophical debate about whether there’s such a thing as half a blow job.) It’s about a guy who’s moved from New York City to Spokane, Washington, under the Witness Protection Program; he’s going about his business of making doughnuts and committing petty fraud when it becomes apparent that a man who may or may not be connected to Vince’s past wants to kill him. And this guy, the bad guy, he’s really, really bad. He threatens to do something so vile to a small child that you can’t read on until you’ve started breathing again.

  Citizen Vince would have worked fine as “just” a thriller, but Walter has ambitions on top of that, because it’s also about voting, believe it or not; Vince has been registered by the authorities, and for the first time in his life he has to decide who he wants as President. The book’s set in 1980, so the choice is between Carter and Reagan, and Vince is paralyzed by it; this is hardly surprising, seeing as Walter suggests that the choice is between the America you ended up with, and another America, one that vanished when poor, decent, hopeless Jimmy was beaten. In a couple of bravura passages, Walter leaves his gangsters and petty crooks to fend for themselves while he enters the minds of the candidates themselves. I loved this novel. It came through my letter box just when I was beginning to think that I’d have to write “NONE!” under the heading Books Read; it seemed to know that what I needed was pace, warmth, humor, and an artfully disguised attempt to write about a world bigger than the one its characters live in.

  Miriam Toews’s lovely A Complicated Kindness is funny, too, but it’s not overly bothered about pace, not least because it’s partly about the torpor that comes from feeling defeated. Last month, I believe I threatened to get religion; I may even have said that I’d gone to live in a monastery, but before anyone at a reading asks me how I’m enjoying the monastic life, I should explain that this was another of those jokes where I say that something is so when it is in fact not so. (Maybe it’s a cultural thing, these jokes falling flat? But then again, I don’t make anyone laugh here either.) Anyway, A Complicated Kindness has further delayed my plans to turn my back on this vale of tears: Nomi Nickel, Miriam Toews’s narrator, is a Mennonite, or at least she comes from a family of Mennonites, and she doesn’t
make it sound like too much fun.

  Mennonites—and everyone’s a Mennonite where Nomi lives—are against the things that make life bearable: sex, drugs, rock and roll, make-up, TV, smoking, and so on; Nomi Nickel, on the other hand, is for all of those things, wherein lies both the tension and the torpor. Nomi’s sister Tash and her mother have already been driven out of town by the Mennonite powers-that-be, but Nomi has stayed behind to look after her father Ray, a man who spends a lot of time sitting on his lawn chair and staring into space; Nomi, meanwhile, bounces round the town off the diamond-hard disapproval she meets everywhere, getting into all the trouble she can, which isn’t so much, in a town that doesn’t even have a bus station—it was removed because the more rebellious spirits kept wanting to go places. One of the joys of the book, in fact, is the desperate ingenuity of its characters, looking for ways to express themselves in a culture that allows no self-expression. “That was around the time our Aunt Gonad asked Tash to burn her Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack. Tash could do a hilariously sexy version of ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ where she basically worked herself into a complete fake orgasm during that big crescendo.” You may think that you don’t want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you’ll read anything that a good writer wants you to read. And the voice that Miriam Toews finds for her narrator is so true and so charming that you don’t even mind spending a couple hundred pages in a town as joyless as Nomi’s East Village.

  I bought A Complicated Kindness in the Powell’s bookstall at the Portland, Oregon, airport, after several fervent recommendations from the Powell’s staff who looked after me at my signing. Did you know that you have the best bookshops in the world? I hope so. Over here in England, the home of literature ha-ha, we have only chain bookstores, staffed by people who for the most part come across as though they’d rather be selling anything else anywhere else; meanwhile you have access to booksellers who would regard their failure to sell you novels about Mennonites as a cause of deep personal shame. Please spend every last penny you have on books from independent bookstores, because otherwise you’ll end up as sour and as semi-literate as the English.