Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby
Читать онлайн книгу.
alt=""/> Notes on a Scandal—Zoë Heller (released in the U.S. as What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal)
BOOKS READ:
If you write books—or a certain kind of book, anyway—you can’t resist a scan round the hotel swimming pool when you go on holiday. You just can’t help yourself, despite the odds: you need to know, straight off, whether anyone is reading one of yours. You imagine spending your days under a parasol watching, transfixed and humbled, as a beautiful and intelligent young man or woman, almost certainly a future best friend, maybe even spouse, weeps and guffaws through three hundred pages of your brilliant prose, too absorbed even to go for a swim, or take a sip of Evian. I was cured of this particular fantasy a couple of years ago, when I spent a week watching a woman on the other side of the pool reading my first novel, High Fidelity. Unfortunately, however, I was on holiday with my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law provided a gleeful and frankly unfraternal running commentary. “Look! Her lips are moving.” “Ha! She’s fallen asleep! Again!” “I talked to her in the bar last night. Not a bright woman, I’m afraid.” At one point, alarmingly, she dropped the book and ran off. “She’s gone to put out her eyes!” my brother-in-law yelled triumphantly. I was glad when she’d finished it and moved on to Harry Potter or Dr Seuss or whatever else it was she’d packed.
I like to think that, once he’d recovered from the original aesthetic shock, Jonathan Lethem wouldn’t have winced too often if he’d watched me reading The Fortress of Solitude by the pool this month. I was pinned to my lounger, and my lips hardly moved at all. In fact, I was so determined to read his novel on holiday that the first half of the reading month started with a mess. It went something like, On Being The John McEnroe Stop-Time Fortress of Solitude. I’d just started Tim Adams’s short book on McEnroe when an advance copy of Fortress came in the post, and I started reading that—but because it seemed so good, so much my kind of book, I wanted to save it, and I went back to the McEnroe. Except then the McEnroe turned out to be too short, and I’d finished it before the holiday started, so I needed something to fill in, which is why I reread Stop-Time. (And Stop-Time turned out to be too long, and I didn’t get onto Fortress until the third day of the seven-day holiday.)
Last month I read a lot of Salinger, and he pops up in all three of these books. Tim Adams remembers reading Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters while queuing to watch McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1981; the seventeen-year-old Adams had a theory that McEnroe “was, in fact, a latter-day Holden Caulfield, unable and unwilling to grow up… constantly railing against the phonies—dozing linesmen, tournament organizers with walkie-talkies—in authority.” Later, he points out that McEnroe went to Buckley Country Day School—“one model for Holden Caulfield’s Pencey Prep.” Frank Conroy, meanwhile, attended P.S. 6, “of J. D. Salinger fame.” (Adams’s book is great, by the way. It’s witty and smart, and has ideas about sport that don’t strain for significance. It’s also oddly English, because it’s about the collision of McEnroe and Wimbledon—in other words, McEnroe and one version of England—and about how McEnroe was a weirdly timely illustration of Thatcherism. My favorite McEnroe tirade, one I hadn’t heard before: “I’m so disgusting you shouldn’t watch. Everybody leave!”)
And then, at the beginning of The Fortress of Solitude, I came across the following, describing a street ball game: “A shot… which cleared the gates on the opposite side of the street was a home run. Henry seemed to be able to do this at will, and the fact that he didn’t each time was mysterious.” Compare that to this, from Seymour: An Introduction: “A home run was scored only when the ball sailed just high and hard enough to strike the wall of the building on the opposite street… Seymour scored a home run nearly every time he was up. When other boys on the block scored one, it was generally regarded as a fluke… but Seymour’s failures to get home runs looked like flukes.” Weird, huh? (And that’s all it is, by the way—there’s nothing sinister going on here. Lethem’s book is probably over a hundred thousand words long, and bears no resemblance to anything Salinger wrote, aside from this one tiny echo.) All three books are in part about being young and mixed-up and American, and even though this would appear to be a theme so broad that no one can claim it as their own, somehow Salinger has managed to copyright it (and you wouldn’t put it past him); there is clearly some law compelling you to acknowledge somewhere in your book, however obliquely, that he got there first.
A confession, for the record: I know Jonathan Lethem. Or rather, I’ve met him, and we have exchanged emails on occasions. But I don’t know him so well that I had to read his book, if you see what I mean. I could easily have got away with not reading it. I could have left the proof copy his publishers sent me sitting around unopened, and no social embarrassment would have ensued. But I wanted to read it; I loved Motherless Brooklyn, and I knew a little bit about this book before I started it—I knew, for example, that a lot of funk records and Marvel comics were mentioned by name. In other words, it wasn’t just up my street; it was actually knocking on my front door and peering through the letterbox to see if I was in. I was, however, briefly worried about the title, which sounds portentously and alarmingly Literary, until I was reminded that it refers to Superman.
The Fortress of Solitude is one of those rare novels that felt as though it had to be written; in fact, it’s one of those novels that