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

by Nick Hornby

  Cynics don’t read the Believer, which is fortunate, because a cynic might say that the introduction of the Scientist of the Month award is a desperate attempt to draw attention away from the stark, sad entry under Books Read at the top of this page. And a clever cynic might wonder whether the absence of read books, and therefore the appearance of the award, have anything to do with the arrival of the World Cup, a football [sic] tournament that every four years consumes the inhabitants of every country in the world bar the U.S. The truth is that the World Cup allowed me to introduce the award. I’d been meaning to do it for years, but space had always prevented me from doing so. Now that I have no books to write about, I can fulfill what can be described, without exaggeration, as a lifelong dream.

  I wish I had read some books this month, to be honest, and not just because I wouldn’t have to drivel on about nothing for a couple of pages. It’s not that I believe reading is more important than sport, but there have been moments during this last month when I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I was wasting my time and yet made no effort to turn off the TV and do something more constructive. Watching Ukraine v. Tunisia can in part be explained by my bet on Andrei Shevchenko to score during the game. (He did, after taking a dive to win a penalty that he himself took.) But I have no way of rationalizing my willingness to stick with Ukraine v. Switzerland, even after it was clear that it was going to be perhaps the most pointless and boring ninety minutes in the history, of not only soccer but of all human activity. Couldn’t I have read something at some point during the second half? A couple of Dylan Thomas’s letters, say? They were right there, on the bookshelf behind the sofa.

  It wasn’t a very good World Cup. The star players all underperformed; everybody was too scared of losing; there were too few goals, too many red and yellow cards; and there was way too much cheating and diving and shirtpulling. And yet the rhythm of a World Cup day is unimprovable, if you don’t have a proper job. You wake up in the morning, do a little online betting, read the previews of the games in the newspaper, maybe watch the highlights program you recorded the previous night. The first game is at two, so just beforehand you are joined by other friends without proper jobs (some of whom won’t leave until eleven that night); it finishes at four, when you repair to the garden, smoke, drink tea, and kick a ball about with any of your children who happen to be there. The second game finishes at seven, just in time for bed, bath, and story time, and I don’t know about you, but we used the “live pause” feature on our digital system for the eight o’clock game—there was a heat wave in Europe, and my kids took a while to get to sleep. Food was ordered at halftime and delivered during the second half. Has there ever been a better way to live than this? Friends, football, takeaways, no work… One can only presume that if Robert Owen and those guys had waited a couple of hundred years for the invention of the World Cup, takeaway food, digital TV, and work-shy friends, there was no way any utopian experiment could have failed.

  For maybe the first time in my life, however, I have begun to sympathize with Americans who find the game baffling and slow. The lack of goals has never bothered any football [sic] fan, but when it becomes clear that a team doesn’t even want to score one, that they’d rather take their chances in a penalty shoot-out, then the lack of action ceases to become a matter of taste and starts to look like a fatal flaw in the tournament. If you’re so scared of losing, don’t enter! Stay home! Let Belgium and Lithuania play instead! Many teams played with one striker, playing all on his own against two or three defenders; England’s striker Wayne Rooney became so frustrated by these odds that he attempted to even them out by stamping on the balls of one of the defenders looking after him.

  We can be pretty sure that it hurts, having your testicles stamped on, but I understand that Americans have come to refer contemptuously to the more theatrical World Cup injuries as the “flop and bawl”—the implication being, I think, that these players are feigning their distress. First of all, you must understand that the rest of the world is more susceptible to pain than you. Our smoking, our poor diets, and our heightened sensitivities (to both literature and life) mean that even a slight push in the back can send excruciating agony coursing through our bodies. You, however, because of your all-meat diet and your status as a bullying superpower, feel nothing, either emotionally or physically, at any time. So you can sneer at our floppers and bawlers if you want, but what does that say about you? How can you ever understand a novel, if you don’t understand pain?

  And secondly, these players are terrible, awful cheats. It wasn’t always like this. But ten or so years ago, those in charge of the game decided, laudably, that they wanted to encourage the more creative players, which meant penalizing the defenders whose job it was to stifle that creativity. Nobody foresaw what would happen as a result: that these creative players would spend more time trying to land their opponents with a yellow or red card than they would trying to score a goal. (A yellow card means that the recipient is frightened of making a tackle for the rest of the game; a red card means he can’t take any further part. Either is useful for the opposing team, which means there’s too much of an incentive to fake an injury at the moment.) In my book Fever Pitch, which was first published in 1992 (and you can take great literature out of the month, but you can’t take it out of the man), I wrote that “for a match to be really, truly memorable… you require as many of the following features as possible,” and the sixth requirement listed was for a member of the opposition to receive a red card. At that time, I’d maybe seen half a dozen sendings-off in my twenty-five-year life as a fan; in the last five years, I’ve probably seen five times that many. It’s no fun any more, and it kills the game. I withdraw my earlier ruling.

  The saddest moment for me in this World Cup was watching Thierry Henry, my role model and hero and the man that both my wife and I wish had fathered our children, clutching his face after receiving a blow on the chest. Et tu, Thierry? Anyway, flopping and bawling now occupies the same position in our sporting culture as steroids do in yours. Crying like a baby is obviously less harmful than performance-enhancing drugs, but a lot more annoying to the spectators.

  I have always previously referred in these pages to the mother of my children as my “partner”; you may have noticed that she has now been downgraded to “wife,” due to our marriage, two days before the World Cup final. This too has resulted in less reading than normal, what with all the suit fitting, seating plans, parties, and the actually rather distressing legal requirements for consummation. I have read a little, of course. I abandoned a sweet-natured but hopelessly overhyped novel halfway through, and I’ve nearly finished Imperium, my brother-in-law’s forthcoming novel about Cicero, which I’ll puff next month.

  I’ve been buying books, too. At my eldest son’s school fair I bought The Case of Mr. Crump, yet another Penguin classic I’d never heard of, because on the cover it had a blurb from Sigmund Freud. I bought Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe, about climate change, after reading the brilliant but terrifying series of articles in the New Yorker that form the basis for the book. I thought I was buying it because I wanted to be reminded that things like the World Cup and weddings don’t really matter. But then I began to remember some of the details of the New Yorker pieces, and I changed my mind: if things are as bad as Kolbert suggests, then weddings and the World Cup are the only things that do matter.

  October 2006

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  Winter’s Bone—Daniel Woodrell

  Will This Do?—Auberon Waugh

  Because I Was Flesh—Edward Dahlberg

  Clear Water—Will Ashon

  My Life with the Hustler—Jamie Griggs Tevis

  BOOKS READ:

  Field Notes From a Catastrophe—Elizabeth Kolbert

  Imperium—Robert Harris

  Jimi Hendrix Turns 80—Tim Sandlin

  The Zero—Jess Walter

  Fun Home—Alison Bechdel

  “What we need,” one of
those scary critics who write for the serious magazines said recently, “is more straight talking about bad books.” Well, of course we do. It’s hard to think of anything we need more, in fact. Because then, surely, people would stop reading bad books, and writers would stop writing them, and the only books that anyone read or wrote would be the ones that the scary critics in the serious magazines liked, and the world would be a happier place, unless you happen to enjoy reading the books that the scary critics don’t like—in which case the world would be an unhappier place for you. Tough.

  Weirdly, the scary critic was attempting to review a book she did like at the time, so you might have thought that she could have forgotten about bad books for a moment; these people, however, are so cross about everything that they can’t ever forget about bad books, even when they’re supposed to be thinking about good ones. They believe that if you stop thinking about bad books even for one second, they’ll take over your house, like cockroaches. She got distracted mid-review by the Believer, and its decision—which was taken over three years ago—to try and play nice when talking about the arts; some people are beginning to come to terms with it now, not least because they can see that very few pages of the magazine are given over to reviews. (Do we have to do the straight talking even if we’re interviewing someone? Wouldn’t that be rude? And pointless, given that presumably we’d be interviewing someone whose work we didn’t like?)

  The scary woman is not a big fan of this column, which is sad, of course, but hardly a surprise. What’s more disappointing to me is that she and I go way back, right to the time when we used to bump into each other on the North of England stand-up comedy circuit, and now we seem to have fallen out. People in Bootle still talk about her impression of the Fonz. Why did she want to throw all that merriment away and become a literary editor? To borrow an old line from the late, great Tommy Cooper: we used to laugh when she said she wanted to be a comedian. We’re not laughing now.

  I am unable, unfortunately, to do any straight talking about the books I’ve been reading, because they were all great. The one I enjoyed the least was Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe, and that’s because she makes a very convincing argument that our planet will soon be uninhabitable. Usually, devastatingly depressing nonfiction gives you some kind of get-out: it couldn’t happen here, it won’t happen to me, it won’t happen again. But this one really doesn’t allow for much of that. Kolbert travels to Alaskan villages with permafrost experts to see how the permafrost is melting. (Hey, W. It’s called permafrost. It’s melting. Tell us again why there’s nothing to worry about.) She visits Greenland with NASA scientists to watch the ice sheets disintegrating, listens to biologists describe how English butterflies are moving their natural habitats northwards, goes to Holland to look at the amphibious houses being built in preparation for the coming deluge. You couldn’t wish for a cleaner or more concise explanation of the science—Kolbert’s research is woven into her text like clues in the scariest thriller you’ll ever read. There is no real debate about any of this in the scientific community, by the way. Oil companies and other interested parties occasionally try to start a debate by making claims that are clearly and criminally fallacious, on the grounds that we might believe there’s an element of doubt, or that the truth lies somewhere in between, but really there’s nothing to argue about. Climate change is happening now, and it will be devastating, unless unimaginably enormous steps are taken by everyone, immediately.

  There is, I need hardly tell you, very little evidence that anyone in any position of authority in the U.S. is prepared to do what is desperately needed. Senator James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, believes that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”; White House official Philip Cooney “repeatedly edited government reports on climate change in order to make their findings seem less alarming,” before quitting his job and going off to work for Exxon-Mobil.

  I don’t often have the urge to interview authors of nonfiction, because the book should, and invariably does, answer any questions I might have had on the subject. But I noticed in the author bio on the dust-jacket that Elizabeth Kolbert, like me, has three sons. Has she talked to them about this stuff? How does it affect her morale, her ability to provide the kind of positivity and sense of security that children need? The evidence suggests that our children will be living very different, and much less comfortable, lives than our own; they may well decide that there’s not much point in having children themselves. You may not want to read a book as lowering as this one, but maybe that’s one of the problems anyway, that we don’t want to know. If you don’t want to know, then you need to take your head out of your ass and read Field Notes From a Catastrophe. It’s short, and it’s rational and calm, and it’s terrifying.

  I picked up a manuscript of Tim Sandlin’s novel Jimi Hendrix Turns 80 just at the right time: not only is it funny, but it imagines a future, because that’s where it’s set. Sandlin’s characters all live or work in Mission Pescadero, a retirement community in California, in the year 2023; almost all the old folk are pot-smoking, sexually incontinent hippies who have been sleeping with each other, and arguing with each other (quite often about the original line-up of Blue Cheer) for decades. The in-house band that plays covers at the Friday night sock hop is called Acid Reflux, which may well be the most perfect fictional band name I’ve ever come across.

  The residents of Mission Pescadero, sick of being tranquillized and denied privileges by the authoritarian staff, stage a revolution and seize control, but Jimi Hendrix Turns 80 is not the sort of satire that loses its soul in an attempt to crank up the pace, and nor does it waste its characters while wrapping up its narrative. And, of course, it would have been unreadable if it had attempted to patronize or poke fun at the old, or the ageing process, but it never does that. Sandlin can see that there is a kind of gruesome comedy in what happens to us, but the humor is never mean, and he loves his people too much not to understand that their grief and nostalgia and frustration is real. This clever novel slipped down easily, and provided real refreshment in this vicious, stupefying (and, Elizabeth Kolbert has taught me, probably sinister) London summer.

  Imperium is the first novel in my brother-in-law’s projected trilogy about Cicero. I wrote about his last novel, Pompeii, in this column, and was positive that I’d have been sacked by the time his next one came out, but here we are. I won’t say too much about it, other than that I have the cleverest brother-in-law a man could wish for, and that having a clever brother-in-law is enormously and gratifyingly educative. He doesn’t need any help from me, anyway.

  OK, I will say this: Robert’s Cicero is a proper, living, breathing politician, and therefore perhaps the best fictional portrayal of the breed I’ve come across. Usually, the narrative in novels about politics goes like this: earnest, committed and naïve young politician is made older and more cynical by the real world. Anyone who was ever at school or college with a politician, however, knows that this narrative only works as metaphor, because people who want to be politicians are never naïve. Those little bastards are sneaky and ambitious even when attempting to be elected as entertainments secretary. (We need our representatives in our respective parliaments, of course we do, but they are the least representative people you could ever come across.) Robert understands this, although he’s a former political reporter, so he likes politicians more than I do, and as a result, Cicero is properly complicated: attractive, devious, passionate, ferociously energetic, pragmatic. This, surely, is how he was, and I suspect our own Prime Minister must have been very similar. Your President, however, is sui generis.

  I’ve been waiting to see how Jess Walter followed up last year’s brilliant Citizen Vince, although I wish I’d had to wait a little longer—not because I thought his new book needed the extra time and care, but because he’s not playing the game. Yes, it’s perfectly possible to write a book every year—all you need to
do is write five hundred words a day (less than a quarter of the length of this column) for about eight months. This, however, would only leave four months of the year for holidays, watching the World Cup, messing about on the internet, judging book prizes in exotic locales, and so on. So most authors keep to a much more leisurely schedule of a book every two or three years, while at the same time managing to give the impression to publishers that books are somehow bubbling away inside them, and that any attempt to force the pace of the bubbling process would be disastrous. It’s a system that works well, provided that people like Walter don’t work too hard. If the various writers’ unions had any real teeth, he’d be getting a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

  It doesn’t help that The Zero is a dazzlingly ambitious novel, a sort of Manchurian Candidate-style satire of post-9/11 paranoia. Brian Remy is a policeman involved in the clear-up of an enormous structure that has been destroyed in some sort of horrific terrorist attack. To his bewilderment, he’s taken off this job and put to work on an undercover counter-terrorist organization, a job he never fully understands—partly because the task itself is dizzyingly incomprehensible, and partly because Remy suffers from blackouts, or slippages out of consciousness, which means that he wakes up in the middle of scenes with no real awareness of how he got there, or what he’s supposed to be doing.

  This condition is a gift, for both writer and reader—we’re as compelled and as thrillingly disoriented as he is—but where Walter really scores is in the marriage of form and content. Has there ever been a more confusing time in our recent history? You didn’t have to be Brian Remy to feel that life immediately post 9/11 seemed to consist of discrete moments that refused to cohere into an unbroken narrative. And there were (and are still) pretty rich pickings for paranoiacs, too. Remy keeps stumbling into huge aircraft hangars filled with people poring over bits of charred paper, and one recognizes both the otherworldliness and plausibility of these scenes simultaneously. A couple of books ago, Walter was writing (very good) genre thrillers; now there’s no telling where he’s going to end up. I don’t intend to miss a single step of his journey.