Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby
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BOOKS READ:
First, an apology. Last month, I may inadvertently have given the impression that No Name by Wilkie Collins was a lost Victorian classic (the misunderstanding may have arisen because of my loose use of the phrase “lost Victorian classic”), and that everyone should rush out and buy it. I had read over two hundred pages when I gave you my considered verdict; in fact, the last four hundred and eighteen pages nearly killed me, and I wish I were speaking figuratively. We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and aeroplanes and by hotel swimming pools. Sometimes—usually late at night, in bed—he could put me out cold with a single paragraph; every time I got through twenty or thirty pages, it felt to me as though I’d socked him good, but it took a lot out of me, and I had to retire to my corner to wipe the blood and sweat off my reading glasses. And still he kept coming back for more. Only in the last fifty-odd pages, after I’d landed several of these blows, did old Wilkie show any signs of buckling under the assault. He was pretty tough for a man of nearly one hundred and eighty. Hats off to him. Anyway, I’m sorry for the bum steer, and readers of this column insane enough to have run down to their nearest bookstore as a result of my advice should write to the Believer, enclosing a receipt, and we will refund your $14. It has to say No Name on the ticket, though, because we weren’t born yesterday, and we’re not stumping up for your Patricia Cornwell novels. You can pay for them yourselves.
In his introduction to my Penguin edition, Mark Ford points out that Collins wrote the closing sections of the novel “in both great pain and desperate anxiety over publishers’ deadlines.” (In fact, Dickens, who edited the magazine in which No Name was originally published, All the Year Round, offered to nip down to London and finish the book off for him: “I could take it up any time and do it… so like you as that no-one should find out the difference.” That’s literature for you.) It is not fair to wonder why Collins bothered: No Name has lots going for it, including a driven, complicated, and morally ambiguous central female character, and a tremendous first two hundred pages. But it’s certainly reasonable to wonder why a sick man should have wanted to overextend a relatively slight melodrama to the extent that people want to fight him. No Name is the story of a woman’s attempt to reclaim her rightful inheritance from cruel and heartless relatives, and one of the reasons the book didn’t work for me is that one has to quiver with outrage throughout at the prospect of this poor girl having to work for a living, as a governess or something equally demeaning.
It could be, of course, that the book seems bloated because Collins simply wasn’t as good at handling magazine serialization as Dickens, and that huge chunks of the novel, which originally came in forty-four parts, were written only to keep the end well away from the beginning. I’m only guessing, but I’d imagine that many subscribers to All the Year Round between May 1862 and early January 1863 felt exactly the same way. I’m guessing, in fact, that there were a few cancelled subscriptions, and that No Name is the chief reason you can no longer find All the Year Round alongside the Believer at your nearest newsstand.
There are two sides to every fight, though, and Wilkie would point out that I unwisely attempted to read the second half of No Name during a trip to Los Angeles. Has anyone ever attempted a Victorian novel in Los Angeles, and if so, why? In England, we read Victorian novels precisely because they’re long, and we have nothing else to do. L.A. is too warm, too bright, there’s too much sport on TV, and the sandwiches are too big (and come with chips/“fries”). English people shouldn’t attempt to do anything in L.A.; it’s all too much. We should just lie in a darkened room with a cold flannel until it’s time to come home again.
With the exception of The Sirens of Titan, bought secondhand from a Covent Garden market stall, all this month’s books were purchased at Book Soup in L.A. (Book Soup and the Tower Records directly opposite have become, in my head, what Los Angeles is.) Going to a good U.S. bookshop is still ludicrously exciting (unless I’m on book tour, when the excitement tends to wear off a little): as I don’t see American books-pages, I have no idea whether one of my favorite authors—Charles Baxter, for example, on this trip—has a new book out, and there’s every chance that it won’t be published in the UK for months, if at all. There is enough money in the music and movie industries to ensure that we get to hear about most things that might interest us; books have to remain a secret, to be discovered only when you spend time browsing. This is bad for authors, but good for the assiduous shopper.
Mark Salzman’s book about juvenile offenders I read about in the Believer. I met Mark after a reading in L.A. some years ago, and one of the many memorable things he told me was that he’d written a large chunk of his last novel almost naked, covered in aluminum foil, with a towel round his head, sitting in a car. His reasons for doing so, which I won’t go into here, were sound, and none of them were connected with mental illness, although perhaps inevitably he had caused his wife some embarrassment—especially when she brought friends back to the house. Jincy Willett, whose work I had never heard of, I bought because of her blurbs, which, I’m afraid to say, only goes to show that blurbs do work.
I was in the U.S. for the two epic playoff series, between the Cubs and the Marlins, and the Red Sox and the Yankees, and I became temporarily fixated with baseball. And I’d read something about Moneyball somewhere, and it was a staff pick at Book Soup, and when, finally, No Name lay vanquished and lifeless at my feet, it was Lewis’s book I turned to: it seemed a better fit. Moneyball is a rotten title, I think. You expect a subtitle something along the lines of How Greed Killed America’s National Pastime, but actually the book isn’t like that at all—it’s the story of how Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A’s, worked out how to buck the system and win lots of games despite being hampered by one of the smallest payrolls in baseball. He did this by recognizing (a) that the stats traditionally used to judge players are almost entirely worthless, and (b) that many good players are being discarded by the major leagues simply because they don’t look like good players.