|
|
'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
September 2004
BOOKS BOUGHT:
The Midnight Bell - Patrick Hamilton
Blockbuster - Tom Shone
We’re in Trouble - Chris Coake
Literary novel (unfinished)
Biography (unfinished)
BOOKS READ
20,000 Streets under the Sky - Patrick Hamilton
Unnamed Literary Novel - Anonymous
The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. 1
Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton - Nigel Jones
Twelve months! A whole year! I don’t think I’ve
ever held down a job for this long. And I have to
say that when I first met the Polysyllabic Spree, the
eighty-four chillingly ecstatic young men and women
who run this magazine, I really couldn’t imagine contributing
one column, let alone a dozen. The Spree all
live together in Believer Towers, high up in the hills
somewhere; they spend their days reading Montaigne’s
essays aloud to each other (and laughing ostentatiously
at the funny bits), shooting at people who own TV sets,
and mourning the deaths of every single writer since
the Gawain poet, in chronological order. When I first
met them, they’d got up to Gerard Manley Hopkins.
(They seemed particularly cut up about him. It may
have been the Jesuit thing, kindred spirits and all that.)
I was impressed by their seriousness and their progressive
sexual relationships, but they really didn’t seem like
my kind of people.
And yet here we are, still. I’m beginning to see
through the white robes to the people beneath, as it
were, and they’re really not so bad, once you get past the
incense, the vegan food, and the communal showers.
They’ve definitely taught me things: they’ve taught me,
for example, that there is very little point in persisting
with a book that isn’t working for me, and
even less point in writing about it. In snarky
old England, we’re used to working the
other way around—we only finish books
that aren’t working for us, and those are definitely
the only ones we write about. Anyway,
as a consequence, my reading has become
more focussed and less chancy, and I no longer
choose novels that I know in advance will make me
groan, snort, and guffaw.
I still make mistakes, though, despite the four-hundred-page manual they make you read before you can
contribute to this magazine, and I made two in the last
four weeks.The biography I abandoned was of a major
cultural figure of the twentieth century—he died less
than forty years ago—so when you see, in the opening
chapter, the parentheses “(1782–1860)” after a name, it’s
really only natural that you become a little disheartened:
you’re a long, long way from the action. I made it
through to the subject’s birth, but then got irritated by
a long-winded story about a prank he played on a little
girl when he was seven. I had always suspected, even
before I knew anything about him, that this major cultural
figure was once a small boy, so the confirmation
was superfluous. And the prank was so banal that he
could just as easily have grown up to be Hemingway, or
Phil Silvers, or any other midcentury colossus. It wasn’t,
like, a revealingly or quintessentially ____esque prank.
At that point I threw the book down in disgust. It went
straight through the bedroom floor, only just missing a
small child. Please, biographers. Please, please, please.
Have mercy. Select for us. We have jobs, kids, DVD players, season tickets. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want
to know about stuff.
My other mistake was a literary first novel, and I’ve
probably broken every rule in the Spree manual just by
saying that much. I took every precaution, I promise: I
was reading a paperback that came garlanded with
superlative reviews, and there were a couple of recommendations involved, although I can see now that they
came from untrustworthy sources. I ignored the most
boring opening sentence I have ever read in my life and
ploughed on, prepared to forgive and forget; I got
halfway through before its quietness and its lack of truth
started to get me down. I don’t mind nothing happening
in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way—
characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that
don’t fit, the whole works—is simply asking too much
of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must
beat nothing happening in a phony way every time,
right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in
an equation, and you can’t often apply science to literature.
Here’s Tom Shone writing about Spielberg’s Jaws in
his book Blockbuster:
'What stays with you, even today, are less the movie’s big
action moments than the crowning gags, light as air,
with which Spielberg gilds his action—Dreyfuss crushing
his Styrofoam cup, in response to Quint’s crushing
of his beercan, or Brody’s son copying his fingersteepling
at the dinner table…'
To get anything resembling such fillets of improvised
characterisation, you normally had to watch
something far more boring—some chamber piece
about marital disintegration by John Cassavetes, say—
and yet here were such things, popping up in a movie
starring a scary rubber shark. It was nothing short of
revolutionary: you could have finger steepling and scary
rubber sharks in the same movie.This seemed like important
information.Why had no one told us this before?
If this column has anything like an aesthetic, it’s
there: you can get finger-steepling and sharks in the
same book. And you really need the shark part, because
a whole novel about finger steepling—and that’s a fair
synopsis of both the Abandoned Literary Novel and
several thousand others like it—can be on the sleepy
side.You don’t have to have a shark, of course; the shark
could be replaced by a plot, or, say, thirty decent jokes.
Tom Shone is a friend, and I’ve known him for
ages—he’s younger than me, but I’m pretty sure he was
the first person ever to phone me up and ask me to
write something for him, when he was the literary
editor of a now-defunct newspaper in London. That
doesn’t mean I owe him anything, and it certainly
doesn’t mean I have to be nice about his book. He gave
me something like one hundred and fifty quid for a
thousand-word piece, so he probably still owes me. In
England, writers are never nice about their friends’
books: I read out a terrific sentence from Blockbuster
with the express purpose of making a mutual friend
groan with horrified envy, and it worked a treat.
With a heavy heart, then, I must tell you that Blockbuster
is compelling, witty, authoritative, and very, very
smart. Subtitled 'How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Summer', it’s an alternative view of the film
universe that's expounded to in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls;
where Peter Biskind believes that Spielberg and Lucas
murdered movies, Shone takes the view that they
breathed a whole new life into them. “It seems worth
pointing out: the art of popular cinema was about to
get, at a rough estimate, a bazillion times better.” He’s
not philistine about it—he doesn’t think that blockbusters
have got better and better with each successive
summer, for example, and he despairs in all the right
places.
Indeed, he manages to put his finger on something
that had always troubled my populist soul: he explains
why breaking all box-office records has become a
meaningless feat, almost certainly indicative of lack of
quality rather than the opposite, over the last few years.
Raiders of the Lost Ark took $8 million in its opening
weekend, but then went on to make $209 million. By
contrast, the big movies of 2001—AI, Jurassic Park III,
Pearl Harbor, The Mummy Returns, Planet of the Apes—all
opened big, and then disappeared fast. “By the time
we’ve all seen that it sucked, it’s a hit. The dollar value
of our bum on seat has never been greater, but what it
signifies has never meant less.”
There is, in the end, something untrustworthy about
the film critics who have sat in an audience spellbound
by Close Encounters of the Third Kind and then gone on
to slag it off at some stage in their careers.There’s certainly
something untrustworthy about them as critics,
and I would argue that there is something untrustworthy
about them as people: what was it that prevented them from responding in the way we all
responded, those of us who were old enough to go to a
cinema in 1977? What bit of them is missing? Star Wars,
Raiders, ET, Close Encounters, and the rest clearly worked
for discriminating cinema audiences; Tom Shone
demonstrates that all his bits are where they should be
by writing with acuity and enthusiasm about how and
why they worked. This may be a strange thing to say
about a book that embraces the evil Hollywood empire
so warmly, but Blockbuster is weirdly humane: it prizes
entertainment over boredom, and audiences over critics,
and yet it’s a work of great critical intelligence. It
wouldn’t kill me, I suppose, to say I’m proud of the boy.
I know Chris Coake, too. I taught him for a week,
a couple of years ago—by which I mean that I read a
couple of his stories, scratched my head while trying to
think of some way they could be improved, gave up the
unequal struggle, and told him they were terrific. I
would like to claim that I discovered him, but you can’t
really discover writers like this: the quality of the work
is so blindingly obvious that he was never going to labor
in obscurity for any length of time, and the manuscript
he sent me has already been bought by Harcourt Brace
in the United States, Penguin in the UK, Guanda in
Italy, and so on.You won’t be able to read his book until
next year, but when you see the reviews, you’ll be
reminded that you heard about it here first—which is,
after all, how you usually hear about most things, apart
from sports results.
We’re in Trouble is, for the most part, a book about
death—quite often, about how death affects the young.
“In the Event” takes place over the course of a few
hours: it begins in the early morning, just after a car
crash that has killed the parents of a three-year-old boy,
and ends shortly before the boy wakes up to face his terrible
new world. In between times, the child’s youthful
and untogether godfather, who will raise the child, has
a very long and very dark night of the soul. In the collection’s
title story, death casts a shadow over three relationships,
at various stages of maturity, and with increasing
directness. Sometimes, when you’re reading the stories,
you forget to breathe, which probably means that
you read them with more speed than the writer intended.
Are they literary? They’re beautifully written, and
they have bottom, but they’re never dull, and they all
contain striking and dramatic narrative ideas. And
Coake never draws attention to his own art and language;
he wants you to look at his people, not listen to
his voice. So they’re literary in the sense that they’re
serious, and will probably be nominated for prizes, but
they’re unliterary in the sense that they could end up
mattering to people.
Patrick Hamilton, who died in 1962, is my new best
friend. I read his most famous book, Hangover Square, a
couple of months back; now a trilogy of novels, collectively
entitled 20,000 Streets under the Sky, [which has also] just been
republished here in the UK, and the first of them, The
Midnight Bell, seemed to me to be every bit as good as
Hangover Square. Usually, books have gone out of print
for a reason, and that reason is they’re no good, or, at
least, of very marginal interest. (Yeah, yeah, your favorite
book of all time is currently out of print, and it’s a scandal.
But I’ll bet you any money you like it’s not as good
as The Catcher in the Rye, or The Power and the Glory, or
anything else still available that were written in the same
year.) Hamilton’s books aren’t arcane, or difficult,
although they’re dated in the sense that the culture,
which produced them has changed beyond recognition.
Tonally, though, they’re surprisingly modern: they’re
gritty, real, tough, and sardonic, and they deal with dissipation.
And we love a bit of dissipation, don’t we?
We’re always reading books about that. Or at least,
someone’s always writing one. Hamilton’s version,
admittedly, isn’t very glamorous—people sit in pubs and
get pissed. But if you were looking to fly from Dickens
to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then
Hamilton is your man. Or your airport, or whatever.
Doris Lessing called him “a marvellous novelist
who’s grossly neglected,” and she felt that he suffered
through not belonging to the 1930s Isherwood clique.
She also thought, in 1968, that “his novels are true now.
You can go into any pub and see it going on.” This,
however, is certainly no longer the case—our pub culture
here in London is dying. Pubs aren’t pubs any
more.They’re discos, or sports bars, or gastropubs, and
the working- and lower-middle-class men that
Hamilton writes about with such appalled and amused
fascination don’t go anywhere near them.That needn’t
bother you, however.You’re all smart enough to see that
the author’s central theme—men are vile and stupid,
women are vile and manipulative—is as meaningful
today as it ever was. I have only just started to read Nigel
Jones’s biography, but I suspect that Hamilton wasn’t the
happiest of chaps.
Thank you, dear reader, for your time over these last
twelve months, if you have given any. And if you didn’t,
then thank you for not complaining in large enough
numbers to get me slung out. I reckon I’ve read at least
a dozen wonderful books since I began this column. I’ve
read Hangover Square, How to Breathe Underwater, David
Copperfield, The Fortress of Solitude, George and Sam, True
Notebooks, Random Family, Ian Hamilton’s Lowell biography,
The Sirens of Titan, Mystic River, Clockers, Moneyball…
And there’ll be the same number this coming
year, too. More, if I read faster. What have you done
twelve times over the last year that was so great, apart
from reading books? Fibber. |
|
|
|
|
The Believer
http://www.believermag.com
Penguin publish The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. Read more... |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
