Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby
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griefs currency for just about anyone but themselves?
First of all: “by accident”? “BY ACCIDENT”? Those two words, so coolly patronizing and yet, paradoxically, so dim, must have made LeBlanc want to buy a gun. And I think a decent lawyer could have got her off, in the unfortunate event of a shooting. She spends ten years writing a book, and a reviewer in a national newspaper doesn’t even notice what it’s about. (It’s about the American experience of class injustice, among other things.) Secondly: presumably the extension of the argument about grants and fellowships and editors is that they are only appropriate for biographies of bloody, I don’t know, Vanessa Bell; I doubt whether “the support net” has ever been put to better social use.
And lastly: if you get to the end of Random Family and conclude that it was written to create “a frisson,” then, I’m sorry, but you should be compelled to have your literacy surgically removed, without anesthetic. The lives of Coco and Jessica are “valuable raw material” because people who read books—quite often people who are very quick to judge, quite often people who make or influence social policy—don’t know anyone like them, and certainly have no idea how or sometimes even why they live; until we all begin to comprehend, then nothing can even begin to change. Oh, and there’s no evidence to suggest that Coco and Jessica resented being used in this way; there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they got it. But what would they know, right?
It’s not humorless, either, although of necessity the humor tends to be a little bleak. When Coco is asked, as part of her application, for an essay entitled “Why I Want To Live in Public Housing,” she writes simply, “Because I’m homeless.” And a description of the office Christmas party thrown by Jessica’s major-duty drug-dealing boyfriend Boy George is hilarious, if you’re able to laugh at the magnitude of your misapprehensions concerning the wages of sin. (The party took place on a yacht. There were 121 guests, who ate steak tartare and drank twelve grand’s worth of Moët, and who won Hawaiian trips and Mitsubishis in the raffle. The Jungle Brothers, Loose Touch, and Big Daddy Kane performed. Are you listening, Spree?)
George is banged up in the end, of course, so mostly Jessica and Coco are eating rice and beans, when they’re eating at all, and moving from one rat-infested dump to the next. Luckily we don’t have poverty in England, because Tony Blair eradicated it shortly after he came to power in 1997. (Note to Guardian reviewer—that was a joke.) But American people should really read this book. That’s “should” as in, It’s really good, and “should” as in, You’re a bad person if you don’t.
I warned you that this was going to be a nonfiction month. I started three novels, all of them warmly recommended by friends or newspapers, and I came to the rather brilliant conclusion that not one of them was David Copperfield, the last novel I read, and the completion of which has left a devastating hole in my life. So it seemed like a good time to find out about Coco and Jessica and Bobby Fischer, real people I knew nothing about. Bobby Fischer Goes to War isn’t the most elegantly written book I’ve ever read, but the story it tells is so compelling—so hilarious, so nutty, so resonant—that you forgive it its prose trespasses.
When Fischer played Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 I was fifteen, and not yet worrying about whether anyone was pregnant. You heard about chess all the time that summer, on the TV and on the radio, and I presumed that you always heard about chess in the year of a World Chess Championship, that I’d simply been too young to notice the previous tournament. That happened all the time when you were in your early teens: things that only rolled around every few years, like elections and Olympics, suddenly assumed a magnitude you’d never known they possessed, simply because you were more media-aware. The truth in this case was, of course, that no one had ever talked about chess before, and no one ever would again, really. Everyone was talking about Fischer: Fischer and his refusal to play, Fischer and his demands for more money (he just about bankrupted an entire country by demanding a bigger and bigger chunk of the purse, and then refusing to allow the Icelanders to recoup it through TV and film coverage), Fischer and his forfeit of the second game, Fischer and his absence from the opening ceremony… You could make an absolutely gripping film of Reykjavik ’72 which would end with the very first move of the very first match, and which would be about pretty much everything.
Tony Hoagland is the sort of poet you dream of finding but almost never do. His work is relaxed, deceptively easy on the eye and ear, and it has jokes and unexpected little bursts of melancholic resonance. Plus, I pretty much understand all of it, and yet it’s clever—as you almost certainly know, contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century. If something doesn’t give you even a shot at comprehension in the first couple of readings, then my motto is “Fuck it,” but I never swore once. They can use that as a blurb, if they want. They should. Who wouldn’t buy a poetry book that said “I never swore once” on the cover? Everyone would know what it meant. And isn’t What Narcissism Means to Me a great title?
I cheated a little with What Narcissism Means to Me—I read it last month, immediately after my night on the town with the Spree. But I wanted this clean Copperfield line in my last column, and anyway I was worried that I’d be short of stuff this month, not least because it’s been a big football month. Arsenal lost the Champions League quarterfinal to Chelsea, lost the FA Cup semi to Man Utd, and then, just this last weekend, won the Championship. (The two losses were in knock-out competitions. The Championship is what counts, really. That’s what we’re all telling ourselves here in Highbury.) So on Sunday night, when I should have been reading stuff, I was in a pub called the Bailey, as has become traditional on Championship nights, standing on a chair and singing a comical song about Victoria Beckham. To be honest, I thought if I threw in some poetry, you might like me more. I thought I might even like myself more. Anyway, the standing on the chair and singing wasn’t as much fun as the consumption of contemporary literature, obviously, but, you know. It was still pretty good.
BOOKS BOUGHT:11
I bought so many books this month it’s obscene, and I’m not owning up to them all: this is a selection. And to be honest, I’ve been economical with the truth for months now. I keep finding books that I bought, didn’t read, and didn’t list.