Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby
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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—not, at least, in the metropolitan center. 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 haven’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.
BOOKS BOUGHT:
BOOKS READ:
Sex with cousins: are you for or against? I only ask because the first two books I read this month, Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints and Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, answer the question with a resounding affirmative. (It’s a long story, but in Liars and Saints, the couple in question is under the impression that they’re actually uncle and niece, rather than cousins—and even that doesn’t stop ’em! Crikey!) People are always plighting their troth to and/or screwing their cousins in Hardy and Austen, but I’d always presumed that this was because of no watercoolers, or speed-dating, or college dances; what is so dispiriting about Liars and Saints and How I Live Now is that they are set in the present, or even in the near-future, in the case of the latter book. No offense to my cousins—or, indeed, to Believer readers who prefer to keep things in the family—but is that really all we have to look forward to?
I know that when it comes to subconscious sexual deviation there’s no such thing as coincidence, but I swear I haven’t been scouring the bookshops for novels about the acceptable face of incest. I picked up Liars and Saints because it’s been blurbed by both Helen Fielding and Philip Roth, and though I enjoyed the book, that conjunction set up an expectation that couldn’t ever be fulfilled: sometimes blurbs can be too successful. I was hoping for something bubbly and yet achingly world-weary, something diverting and yet full of lacerating and unforgettable insights about the human condition, something that was fun while being at the same time no fun at all, in a bracing sort of a way, something that cheered me up while making me want to hang myself. In short, I wanted Roth and Fielding to have cowritten the book, and poor Maile Meloy couldn’t deliver. Liars and Saints is a fresh, sweet-natured first novel, but it’s no Nathan Zuckerman’s Diary. (Cigarettes—23, attacks of Weltschmerz—141, etc.)
How I Live Now has had amazing reviews here in England—someone moderately sensible called it “a classic”—and although that might sometimes be enough to persuade me to shell out (cf. Seven Types of Ambiguity, which has received similar press), normally that wouldn’t be enough to persuade me to read the thing. Rosoff’s book, however, is delightfully short, and aimed at teenagers, and the publishers sent me a copy, so you can see the thinking here: knock off a classic in a day or