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'I'm a reasonably serious reader. But I'm also a reasonably serious sports fan and TV fan, and I have three kids, and I listen to a lot of music, so... books really have to fight for a place in my life. You get no sense of that from book reviewers. They make me feel completely inadequate, and if they make people like me feel inadequate, then who the (expletive) are they talking to? I'm trying to make the common reader feel sane'
Nick Hornby, interview with The Journal News
STUFF I’VE BEEN READING
The Believer Magazine
July 2004
BOOKS BOUGHT:
The Invisible Woman - Claire Tomalin
Y: The Last Man Vols 1–3 - Vaughan, Guerra, Marzan Jr., Chadwick
I Never Liked You - Chester Brown
David Boring - Daniel Clowes
The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist - Michael Chabon et al
Safe Area Gorazde - Joe Sacco
Not Entitled - Frank Kermode
BOOKS READ
Train — Pete Dexter
This Is Serbia Calling — Matthew Collin
The Invisible Woman — Claire Tomalin
Y:The Last Man Vols 1–3 — Vaughan, Guerra, Marzan Jr., Chadwick
I Never Liked You — Chester Brown
David Boring — Daniel Clowes
If you wanted to draw a family tree of everything I
read and bought this month—and you never know,
it could be fun, if you’re a writer, say, or a student, and
there are several large holes in your day—you’d have to
put McSweeney’s 13 and Pete Dexter’s novel Train right
at the top. They’re the Adam and Eve here, or they
would be if Adam and Eve had been hermaphrodites,
each able to give birth independently of the other.
McSweeney’s 13 and Train never actually mated to produce
a beautiful synthesis of the two; and nor did any of
the other books actually get together, either. So it would
be a pretty linear family tree, to be honest: one straight
line coming out of McSweeney’s 13, because McSweeney’s
begat a bunch of graphic novels (McSweeney’s 13, edited
by Chris Ware, is a comics issue, if you’re
not from ’round these parts), and another
straight line coming out of Train, which
leads to a bunch of nonfiction books, for
reasons I will come to later. Train didn’t
directly beget anything, although it did
plant some seeds. (I know what you’re
thinking. You’re thinking, well, if Train and
McSweeney’s 13 never actually mated, and
if Train never directly begat anything, then
how good is this whole family-tree thing? And my
answer is, Oh, it’s good. Trust me. I have a writer’s
instinct.) Anyway, if you do decide to draw the family
tree, the good news is that it’s easy; the bad news is that
it’s boring, pointless, and arguably makes no sense. Up to
you.
Pete Dexter’s Train was carefully chosen to reintroduce
me to the world of fiction, a world I have been
frightened of visiting ever since I finished David Copperfield
a couple of months back. I’ve read Dexter before—
The Paperboy is a terrific novel—and the first couple of
chapters of Train are engrossing, complicated, fresh, and
real, and I really thought I was back on the fictional
horse. But then, in the third chapter, there is an episode
of horrific violence, graphically rendered, and suddenly I
was no longer under the skin of the book, the way I had
been; I was on the outside looking in. What happens is
that in the process of being raped, the central female
character gets her nipple sliced off, and it really upset me.
I mean, I know I was supposed to get upset. But I was
bothered way beyond function. I was bothered to the
extent that I struck up a conversation with the author at
periodic intervals thereafter. “Did the nipple really have
to go, Pete? Explain to me why. Couldn’t it have just…
nearly gone? Or maybe you could have left it alone altogether?
I mean, come on, man. Her husband has just
been brutally murdered. She’s been raped. We get the
picture. Leave the nipple alone.”
I am, I think, a relatively passive reader, when it
comes to fiction. If a novelist tells me that something
happened, then I tend to believe him, as a rule. In his
memoir Experience, Martin Amis recalls his father,
Kingsley, saying that he found Virginia Woolf ’s fictional
world “wholly contrived: when reading her he found
that he kept interpolating hostile negatives, murmuring
‘Oh no she didn’t’ or ‘Oh no he hadn’t’ or ‘Oh no it
wasn’t’ after each and every authorial proposition”; I
only do that when I’m reading something laughably bad
(although after reading that passage in Experience, I
remember it took me a while to shake off Kingsley’s
approach to the novel). But in the nipple-slicing incident
in Train, I thought I could detect Dexter’s thumb
on the scale, to use a brilliant Martin Amis phrase from
elsewhere in Experience. It seemed to me as though poor
Norah lost her nipple through a worldview rather than
through a narrative inevitability; and despite all the great
storytelling and the muscular, grave prose, and the richness
and resonance of the setup (Train is a golf caddy in
1950s L.A., and the novel is mostly about race) I just
sort of lost my grip on the book. Also, someone gets
shot dead at the end, and I wasn’t altogether sure why.
That’s a sure sign that you haven’t been paying the right
kind of attention. It should always be clear why someone
gets shot. If I ever shoot you, I promise you there
will be a really good explanation, one you will grasp
immediately, should you live.
While I was in the middle of Train, I went browsing
in a remainder bookshop, and came across a copy of
Frank Kermode’s memoir Not Entitled. I knew of Kermode’s
work as a critic, but I didn’t know he’d written a
memoir, some of which is about his childhood on the
Isle of Man, and when I saw it, I was seized by a need to
own it.This need was entirely created by poor Norah in
Train. There would be no nipple-slicing in Not Entitled,
I was sure of it. I even started to read the thing in a cab
on the way home, and although I gave up pretty quickly
(it probably went too far the other way—it’s a delicate
balance I’m trying to strike here), it was very restorative.
I bought Claire Tomalin’s gripping, informative The
Invisible Woman at the Dickens Museum in Doughty
Street, London, which is full of all sorts of cool stuff:
marked-up reading copies which say things like “SIGH
here,” letters, the original partwork editions of the novels,
and so on.The thing is, I really want to read a Dickens
biography, but they’re all too long: Ackroyd’s is a
frankly hilarious 1,140 pages, excluding notes and postscript.
(It has a great blurb on the front, the Ackroyd.
“An essential book for anyone who has ever loved or
read Dickens,” says P. D. James [my italics]. Can you
imagine? You flog your way through Great Expectations
at school, hate it, and then find you’ve got to read a
thousand pages of biography! What a pisser!) So both
the museum visit and the Tomalin book—about his
affair with the actress Nelly Ternan—were my ways of
fulfilling a need to find out more about the great man
without killing myself.
Here’s something I found out in The Invisible
Woman: the son of Charles Dickens’s mistress died during
my lifetime. He wasn’t Dickens’s son, but even so: I
could have met a guy who said, “Hey, my mum slept
with Dickens.” I wouldn’t have understood what he
meant, because I was only two, and as Tomalin makes
clear, he wouldn’t have wanted to own up anyway,
because he was traumatized by what he found out about
his mother’s past. It’s still weird, though, I think, to see
how decades—centuries—can be eaten up like that.
Ackroyd, by the way, disputes that Ternan and Dickens
ever had an affair. He concedes that Chas set her up
in a couple of houses, one in France, and disappeared for
long stretches of time in order to visit her, but he won’t
accept that Dickens was an adulterer: that sort of explanation
might work for an ordinary man, he says, but
Dickens “was not ‘ordinary’ in any sense.” The Invisible
Woman is such a formidable work of scholarship, however,
that it leaves very little room for doubt. Indeed,
Claire Tomalin is so consumed by her research, so much
the biographer, that she actually takes Dickens to task
for destroying evidence of his relationship with Nelly
Ternan. “Dickens himself would not have welcomed
our curiosity,” she says.“He would have been happier to
have every letter he ever wrote dealt with as Nelly…
dealt with the bundles of twelve years’ intimate correspondence.
[She destroyed it all.] He was wrong by any
standards.”
Don’t you love that last sentence? The message is
clear: if you’re a writer whose work will interest future
generations, and you’re screwing around, don’t delete
those emails, because Claire Tomalin and her colleagues
are going to need them. Zadie Smith and Michael
Chabon and the rest of you, watch out. (I’m not implying,
of course, that either of you is screwing around, and
I’m sorry if you made that inference. It was supposed to
be a compliment. It just came out wrong. Forget it,OK?
And sue the Spree, not me. It was their sloppy editing.)
This Is Serbia Calling, Matthew Collin’s book about
the Belgrade radio station B92 and the role it played in
resisting Milosevic, has been lying around my house for
a while. But when my post–McSweeney’s 13 research
into comic books led me to conclude that I should buy,
among other things, Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, I
wanted to do a little extra reading on the Yugoslavian
wars, and Collin’s book is perfect: it gives you a topnotch
potted history, as well as an enthralling and humbling
story about very brave young people refusing to
be cowed by a brutal regime. It’s pretty funny, too, in
places. If you have a taste for that hopelessly bleak Eastern
European humor, then the Serbian dissenter of the
1990s is your sort of guy.You’ve got warring nationalist
groups, and an inflation rate, in January ’94, of
313,563,558 percent (that’s on the steep side, for those
of you with no head for economics) which resulted in
a loaf of bread costing 4,000,000,000 dinars.You’ve got
power cuts, rigged elections, a government too busy
committing genocide to worry about the niceties of
free speech, and, eventually, NATO bombs. There are
good jokes to be made, by those with the stomach for
them. “The one good thing about no electricity,” one
cynic remarked during the power failures,“is that there’s
no television telling us we’ve got electricity.” This Is Serbia
Calling is essential reading if you’ve ever doubted the
power or the value of culture, of music, books, films,
theater; it also makes a fantastic case for Sonic Youth and
anyone else who makes loud, weird noises. When your
world is falling round about your ears,Tina Turner isn’t
going to do it for you.
Y: The Last Man is a comic-book series about a
world run by women, after every man but one has been
wiped out by a mysterious plague. It’s a great premise,
and full of smart ideas: the Democrats are running the
country, because the only Republican women are
Republican wives; Israel is cleaning up in the Middle
East, because they have the highest proportion of
trained female combat soldiers. It’s strange, reading a
comic—a proper comic, not a graphic novel—in which
a woman says “You can fuck my tits if you want” (and I
can only apologize, not only for repeating the expression,
but for the number of references to breasts in this
month’s column. I’m pretty sure it’s a coincidence,
although we should, I suppose, recognize the possibility
that it marks the beginning of a pathetic middle-aged
obsession). Is that what happens in comics now? Is this
the sort of stuff your ten-year-old boy is reading?
Crikey. When I was ten, the only word I’d have understood
in the whole sentence would have been “you,”
although not necessarily in this context. Daniel Clowes’s
David Boring—yeah, yeah, late again—is partly about
large bottoms, but as one of the reviews quoted on the
back called the book “perverse and fetishistic,” I’d have
wanted my money back if it hadn’t been. It’s also clever,
and the product of a genuinely odd imagination.
There’s no rule that says one’s reading has to be
tonally consistent. I can’t help but feel, however, that my
reading has been all over the place this month. The Invisible
Woman and Y: The Last Man were opposites in just
about every way you can imagine; they even had opposite
titles. A woman you can’t see versus a guy whose
mere existence attracts the world’s attention. Does this
matter? I suspect it might. I was once asked to DJ at a
New Yorker party, and the guy who was looking after me
(in other words, the guy who was actually playing the
records) wouldn’t let me choose the music I wanted
because he said I wasn’t paying enough attention to the
beats per minute: according to him, you can’t have a differential
of more than, I don’t know, twenty bpm
between records.At the time, I thought this was a stupid
idea, but there is a possibility that it might apply to reading.
The Invisible Woman is pacy and engrossing, but it’s no
graphic novel, and reading Tomalin’s book after The Last
Man was like playing John Lee Hooker after the Chemical
Brothers—in my opinion, John Lee Hooker is the
greater artist, but he’s in no hurry, is he? Next month, I
might try starting with the literary equivalent of a
smoocher, and move on to something a bit quicker. And
I promise that if there are any breasts, I won’t mention
them. In fact, I won’t even look at them. |
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The Believer
http://www.believermag.com
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