by Nick Hornby
The real victim here, however, is The Shrimp and the Anemone, which never stood a chance. It was fantastic, too. I picked it up after my friend Wesley Stace, whose first novel Misfortune has been picking up a distressing amount of attention, recommended it. (Not personally, of course – he’s beyond that now. He gave it a mention in a Guardian questionnaire.) I’m going to read the whole Eustace and Hilda trilogy, and I’ll write about it more when I’ve finished. Suffice to say that after last month’s entirely felicitous William Cooper experience, I’m happy with my run of lost mid-century minor classics. And just as, a while back, I vowed only to read things recommended by Professor John Carey, I am now determined only to read things blurbed by John Betjeman. He is quoted on the back of Eustace and Hilda, just as he is on Scenes from Provincial Life, and on Nigel Balchin’s Darkness Falls from the Air, purchased this month after a tip-off. He was missing from the jacket of the Crüe book, which should have served as a warning. He clearly didn’t like it much.
I was not able to heed my own advice and take time out after rubbing my nose in The Dirt: this column, as Nikki Sixx would say, is insatiable, a nymphomaniac, and I had to press on. I couldn’t return to Hartley, for obvious reasons, so I went with Michael Connolly’s clever serial killer – I needed the moral disgust that thriller writers cannot avoid when dealing with dismembered children, etc. There was one twist too many for me at the end, but other than that, The Poet did a difficult post-Crüe job well. I did end up thinking about how evolving technology makes things tough for contemporary crime-writers, though. The Poet was first published in 1996 and contains an unfortunate explanation of the concept of digital photography that even my mum would now find redundant; the novel ends with an enigma that DNA testing would render bathetically unenigmatic within seconds. Filmmakers hate setting movies in the recent past, that awkward time when things are neither ‘period’ nor contemporary. The recent past just looks wrong. Characters have cell phones the size of bricks and listen to music on Discmen. The same principle applies here: at these moments, The Poet feels anachronistic. Surely people who know their way around a laptop can do a spot of DNA testing? But no. I now see why my thriller-writing brother-in-law has run off to ancient Rome and barricaded himself in. He’s not daft.
Still trying to dispel the memory of the egg burrito, I picked up Andrew Smith’s Moondust, a book about what happened to the astronauts who walked on the moon after they fell to earth, on the grounds that you wouldn’t be able to see Nikki Sixx from space. (And even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to see what he was doing.) I put it down again in order to read a proof copy of a terrific first novel, Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End. Young Ferris and I share a publisher, and Then We Came to the End came with a ringing endorsement from a colleague. She wasn’t after a blurb – she just talked with infectious and intriguing enthusiasm about the book, and this enthusiasm is entirely understandable. This book is going to attract a lot of admiration when it comes out later this year. I’m glad I read it before everybody else, because I would otherwise have been deterred by the hype (and here ‘hype’ is an envious and dismissive substitute for ‘praise’, which is how the word is usually used).
The author will, I suspect, become sick of descriptions of his novel, all of which will use the word ‘meets’, or possibly the phrase ‘rewritten by’. As Then We Came to the End has not been published yet, however, he is unlikely to be sick of them yet, so I can splurge. It’s The Office meets Kafka. It’s Seinfeld rewritten by Donald Barthelme. It’s Office Space reimagined by Nicholson… Oh, that’ll do. The book is written in the first-person plural (as in ‘we’, for those who never got the hang of declining nouns), and I was reminded of Barthelme because of his two brilliant stories ‘Our Work and Why We Do It’ and ‘Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby’, neither of which is narrated in the first-person plural, but which, as you may have noticed, refer to ‘us’ or ‘we’ in the titles. So you could be forgiven for thinking that the resemblance is somewhat superficial. Barthelme, however, did have the very great gift of being able to make the mundane seem mysterious, and Ferris can do that when he wants to: his novel is set in an advertising office, and the rhythms and substance of a working day are slowly revealed to have the rhythms and substance of life itself. The novel, almost incidentally, feels utterly authentic in its depiction of office life – a rare achievement in fiction, seeing as most writers have never done a proper day’s work in their lives – but the authenticity is not the point of it, because underneath the politicking and the sackings and the petty jealousies you can hear something else: the sound of our lives (that collective pronoun again) ticking away. And before I put you off, I should add that the novel is awfully funny, in both senses of the phrase. It’s about cancer, totem poles, Emerson and grief, among many other things, and you should preorder it now. It’s our sort of book.
Oh, but what do any of these things matter? Is it really possible that Mötley Crüe have destroyed all the literature in the world, everything that came before them, and everything written since? I rather fear it is. Please don’t go looking for that magnifying glass. Save yourself while there’s still time.
A selection from
THEN WE CAME TO THE END
by JOSHUA FERRIS
You Don’t Know What’s in My Heart
We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly, contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.
Ordinarily jobs came in and we completed them in a timely and professional manner. Sometimes fuck ups did occur. Printing errors, transposed numbers. Our business was advertising and details were important. If the third number after the second hyphen in a client’s toll-free number was a six instead of an eight, and if it went to print like that, and showed up in Time magazine, no one reading the ad could call now and order today. No matter that they could go to the web site, we still had to eat the price of the ad. Is this boring you yet? It bored us every day. Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die.
Lynn Mason was dying of cancer. She was a partner in the agency. Dying? It was uncertain. She was in her early forties. Breast cancer. No one could identify exactly how everyone had come to know this fact. Was it a fact? Some people called it rumor. But in fact there was no such thing as rumor. There was fact, and then there was what did not come up in conversation. Breast cancer was controllable if caught in the early stages but Lynn may have waited too long. We recalled looking at Frank Brizzolera and thinking he had six months, tops. Old Brizz, we called him. He smoked like a fiend. He stood outside the building in the most inclement weather, absorbing Old Golds in nothing but a sweater vest. Then and only then, he looked indomitable. When he returned inside, nicotine stink preceded him as he walked down the hall, where it lingered long after he entered his office. He began to cough, and from our own offices we heard the working-up of solidified lung sediment. Some people put him on their Celebrity Death Watch every year because of the coughing, even though he wasn’t an official celebrity. He knew it, too, he knew he was on death watch, and that certain wagering individuals would profit from his death. He knew it because he was one of us, and we knew everything.
We didn’t know who was stealing things from other people’s workstations. Always small items – postcards, framed photographs. We had our suspicions but no pro
of. We believed it was probably being done not for the loot so much as the excitement – the shoplifter’s addictive kick, or maybe it was a pathological cry for attention. Hank Neary, one of the agency’s only black writers, asked, ‘Come on – who could want my travel toothbrush?’
We didn’t know who was responsible for putting the sushi roll behind Joe Pope’s bookshelf. The first couple of days Joe had no clue about the sushi. Then he started taking furtive sniffs at his pits, and holding the wall of his palm to his mouth to get blowback from his breath. By the end of the week, he was certain it wasn’t him. We were smelling it, too. Persistent, high in the nostrils, it became worse than a dying animal. Joe’s gorge rose every time he entered his office. The following week the smell was so atrocious the building people got involved, hunting the office for what turned out to be a sunshine roll – tuna, whitefish, salmon, and sprouts. Mike Boroshansky, the chief of security, kept bringing his tie up to his nose, as if he were a real cop at the scene of a murder.
We thanked each other. It was customary after every exchange. Our thanks were never disingenuous or ironic. We said thanks for getting this done so quickly, thanks for putting in so much effort. We had a meeting and when a meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting-makers for having made the meeting. Very rarely did we say anything negative or derogatory about meetings. We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.
Karen Woo always had something new to tell us and we hated her guts for it. She would start talking and our eyes would glaze over. Might it be true, as we sometimes feared on the commute home, that we were callous, unfeeling individuals, incapable of sympathy, and full of spite toward people for no reason other than their proximity and familiarity? We had these sudden revelations that we were far from our better selves. Should we quit? Would that solve it? Or were those qualities innate, dooming us to nastiness and paucity of spirit? We hoped not.
Marcia Dwyer became famous for sending an e-mail to Genevieve Latko-Devine. Marcia often wrote to Genevieve after meetings. ‘It is really irritating to work with irritating people,’ she wrote once. There she ended it and waited for Genevieve’s response. Usually when she heard back from Genevieve, instead of writing her again, which would take too long – Marcia was an art director, not a writer – she would head down to Genevieve’s office, close the door, and the two women would talk. The only thing bearable about the irritating event involving the irritating person was the thought of telling it all to Genevieve, who would understand better than anyone else. Marcia could have called her mother, her mother would have listened. She could have called one of her four brothers, any one of those South side crowbars would have been more than happy to beat up the irritating person. But they would not have understood. They would have sympathized, but that was not the same thing. Marcia needed understanding, and Genevieve would only need to nod for Marcia to know that she was getting through. Did we not all understand the essential need for someone to understand? But the e-mail Marcia got back was not from Genevieve. It was from Jim Jackers. ‘Are you talking about me?’ he wrote. Amber Ludwig wrote, ‘I’m not Genevieve.’ Benny Shassburger wrote, ‘I think you goofed.’ Tom Mota wrote, ‘Ha!’ Marcia was mortified. She got sixty-five e-mails in two minutes. One from HR cautioned her about the dangers of sending private e-mails. Jim wrote a second time. ‘Can you please tell me – is it me, Marcia? Am I the irritating person you’re talking about?’
Marcia wanted to eat Jim’s heart because some mornings he shuffled up to the elevators and greeted us by saying, ‘What up, my niggas?’ He meant it ironically in an effort to be funny but he was just not the man to pull it off. It made us cringe, especially Marcia, especially if Hank was present.
In those days it was rare that someone pushed someone else down the hall really fast in a swivel chair. Most of the time there were long, long pauses during which we could hear ourselves breathe as we bent over our individual desks, working on some task at hand, lost to ourselves – a long pause before Benny, bored, came and stood in the doorway. ‘What are you doing?’he’d ask.
It could have been any of us. ‘Working,’was the usual reply.
Then Benny would tap his topaz class ring on the doorway and drift away.
How we hated our coffee mugs! Our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, all the contents of our desk drawers. Even the photos of our loved ones taped to our computer monitors for uplift and support turned to cloying reminders of time served. But when we got a new office, a bigger office, and we brought everything with us into the new office, how we loved everything all over again, and thought hard about where to place things, and looked with satisfaction at the end of the day at how well our old things looked in this new, improved, important space. There was no doubt in our minds just then that we had made all the right decisions, whereas most days we were men and women of two minds. Everywhere you looked, in the hallways and bathrooms, the coffee bar and cafeteria, the lobbies and the print stations, there we were with our two minds.
There seemed to be only the one electronic pencil sharpener in the whole damn place.
MAY 2006
BOOKS BOUGHT:
We’re All in This Together – Owen King Satrapi
Funny Little Monkey – Andrew Auseon Satrapi
The March – E. L. Doctorow
A Man Without a Country – Kurt Vonnegut
BOOKS READ:
Persepolis – Marjane
Persepolis 2 – Marjane
Moondust – Andrew Smith
A Man Without a Country – Kurt Vonnegut
The Pendulum Years – Bernard Levin
Running in the Family – Michael Ondaatje
I have a bookshelf over my bed, which is where I put the Books Bought and others that I have a serious intention of reading one day. And inevitably, over time, some of these are pronounced dead, and taken gently and respectfully either to the living room shelves downstairs, if they are hardbacks, or the paperback bookcase immediately outside the bedroom door, where they are allowed to rest in peace. (Do we have a word for something that looked like a good idea once? I hope so.) I’m sure you all knew this, but in fact books never die – it’s just that I am clearly not very good at finding a pulse. I have learned this from my two younger children, who have taken to pulling books off the shelves within their reach and dropping them on the floor. Obviously I try not to notice, because noticing might well entail bending down to pick them up. But when I have finally and reluctantly concluded that no one else is going to do it, the book or books in my hand frequently look great – great and unread – and they are thus returned to the bookshelf over the bed. It’s a beautiful, if circular, system, something like the process of convectional rainfall: interest evaporates, and the books are reduced to so much hot air, so they rise, you know, sideways, or even downstairs, but then blah blah and they fall to the ground… something like, anyway, although perhaps not exactly like.
This is precisely how Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family was recently rediscovered. It turns out that I own a beautiful little Bloomsbury Classics hardback, as attractive to a small child, clearly, as it was to me. Indeed it’s so attractive that it wasn’t even placed back on the bookshelf over the bed: I began reading it fresh off the floor, as if it weren’t rainfall after all, but a ripe, juicy… enough with the inoperable imagery. Running in the Family is a fever dream of a book, delirious, saturated with colour; it’s a travel book, and a family history, and a memoir, and it’s funny and unforgettable. Ondaatje grew up in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and it would not be unkind to describe his father as nuts – now and again, dangerously so. He pretended to have gone to Cambridge University (he sailed to England, stayed in Cambridge for the requisite three years, read a lot, and hung out with students with
out ever bothering to enrol); he was banned from the Ceylon Railways after hijacking a train, knocking out his travelling companion, who happened to be the future Prime Minister of the country, and bringing the entire railway system to a standstill; he was a part-time alcoholic, prone to epic drinking bouts, who buried scores of bottles of gin in the back garden for emergencies.
Ondaatje helps us to float over all this emotional landscape so that it feels as if we were viewing it from a hot-air balloon on a perfect day; someone with a different temperament (or someone much younger, someone who still felt raw) could have written – and been forgiven for writing – something darker and more troubling. ‘I showed what you had written to someone and they laughed and said what a wonderful childhood we must have had, and I said it was a nightmare,’ says an unnamed sibling at the end of the book, which tells you pretty much all you need to know about the theory and practice of memoir: it ain’t the meat, it’s the motion. The passage describing the death of Lalla, Ondaatje’s grandmother, who was swept away in a flood, is one of the most memorable accounts of someone’s last moments that I can remember. I’m grateful to my children for all sorts of things, of course, things that will inevitably come to me immediately after I have finished this column and sent it off; but I’m extremely grateful that one of them dropped this wonderful book on the floor. Actually, that may well be it, in terms of what my sons have given me, which puts a different complexion on the experience. I loved Running in the Family, and I mean the author no disrespect. But it’s not much to show for twelve years of fatherhood, really, is it?