Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby
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something pretty big, maybe something like another Jonestown. (That makes sense, if you think about it. The robes, the eerie smiles, “the Believer”… if you find a free sachet of powdered drink, or—more likely—an edible poem in this month’s issue, don’t touch it.) Anyway, while they’re thus distracted, I shall attempt to sneak a snark under the wire: Tobias Wolff’s Old School is too short. Oh, come on, guys! That’s different from saying it’s too long! Too long means you didn’t like it! Too short means you did!
The truth is, I’ve been reading more short books recently because I need to bump up the numbers in the Books Read column—six of this month’s seven were really pretty scrawny. But Old School I would have read this month, the month of its publication, no matter how long it was: Wolff’s two volumes of memoir, This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, are perennial sources of writerly inspiration, and you presumably know how good his stories are. Old School is brilliant—painful, funny, exquisitely written, acute about writers and literary ambition. (Old School is set right at the beginning of the sixties, in a boys’ private school, and you get to meet Robert Frost and Ayn Rand.) But the problem with short novels is that you can take liberties with them: you know you’re going to get through them no matter what, so you never set aside the time or the commitment that a bigger book requires. I fucked Old School up; I should have read it in a sitting, but I didn’t, and I never gave it a chance to leave its mark. We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves (the title refers to a somewhat labored joke about a misplaced comma and a panda) is Britain’s number-one best seller at the moment, and it’s about punctuation, and no, I don’t get it, either. It’s a sweet, good-humored book, and it’s grammatically sound and all, but, you know… it really is all about how to use a semicolon and all that. What’s going on? One writer I know suspects that the book’s enormous success is due to the disturbing rise of the Provincial Pedant, but I have a more benign theory: that when you hear about it (and you hear about it a lot, at the moment), you think of someone immediately, someone you know and love, whose punctuation exasperates you and fills them full of self-loathing. I thought of Len, and my partner thought of Emily, neither of whom could place an apostrophe correctly if their lives depended on it. (Names have been changed, by the way, to protect the semiliterate.) And I’m sure Len and Emily will receive a thousand copies each for Christmas and birthdays, and other people will buy a thousand copies for their Lens and Emilys, and in the end the book will sell a quarter of a million copies, but only two hundred different people will own them. I enjoyed the fearful bashing that Lynn Truss gives to the entertainment industry—the Hugh Grant movie Two Weeks Notice (sic), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (sic), the fabricated English pop band Hear’Say (sic)—and the advice she quotes from a newspaper style manual: “Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers understand a story without stumbling,” which helps to explain a lot of literary fiction. I had never before heard of the Oxford comma (used before the “and” that brings a list to a close), and I didn’t know that Jesus never gets a possessive “s,” just because of who He is. I never really saw the possessive “s” as profane, or even very secular, but there you go.
The most irritating book of the month (can’t you feel the collective heart of the Spree beating a little faster?) was Joe Pernice’s Meat Is Murder. One can accept, reluctantly, Pernice’s apparently inexhaustible ability to knock out brilliant three-minute pop songs—just about any Pernice Brothers record contains half a dozen tunes comparable to Elvis Costello’s best work. But now it turns out that he can write fiction too, and so envy and bitterness become unavoidable. Meat Is Murder and Warren Zanes’s Dusty in Memphis are both part of a new and neat little “33-and-a-third” series published by Continuum; Pernice is the only writer who has chosen to write a novella about a favorite album, rather than an essay; his story is set in 1985, and is about high school and suicide and teen depression and, tangentially, the Smiths. Warren Zanes’s effort, almost the polar opposite of Pernice’s, is a long, scholarly and convincing piece of nonfiction analyzing the myth of the American South. Endearingly, neither book mentions the relevant records as much as you’d expect: the music is a ghostly rather than physical presence. I liked Art Linson’s What Just Happened?, one of those scabrous, isn’t-Hollywood-awful? books written by someone—a producer, in this case (and indeed in most other cases, e.g. Julia Phillips, Lynda Obst)—who knows what he’s talking about. I can’t really explain why I picked it up, however; perhaps I wanted to be made grateful that I work in publishing, rather than film, and that’s what happened.
Clockers was my big book of the month, the centerpiece around which I can now arrange the short books so that they look functional—pretty, even, if I position them right. I cheated a little, I know—Clockers is essentially a thriller, so it didn’t feel as though I’d had to work for my 650 pages—but it was still a major reading job. Why isn’t Richard Price incredibly famous, like Tom Wolfe? His work is properly plotted, indisputably authentic and serious-minded, and it has soul and moral authority.
Clockers asks—almost in passing, and there’s a lot more to it than this—a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? Price’s central characters, brothers Strike (complicatedly bad, a crack dealer) and Victor (complicatedly good, the minimum wage guy) act out something that feels as inevitable and as durable as a Bible story, except with a lot more swearing and drugs. Clockers is—eek—really about the contradictions of capitalism.
I’ve been trying to write a short story that entails my knowing something about contemporary theories of time—hence Introducing Time—but every time I pick up any kind of book about science I start to cry. This actually inhibits my reading pretty badly, due to not being able to see. I’m OK with time theorists up until, say, St. Augustine, and then I start to panic, and the panic then gives way to actual weeping. By my estimation, I should be able to understand Newton by the time I’m 850 years old—by which time I’ll probably discover that some smartass has invented a new theory, and he’s out of date anyway. The short story should be done some time shortly after that. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, because it’s killing me.
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