Stuff I've Been Reading

by Nick Hornby

  In 1971, the Booker Prize suddenly changed its qualification period. Up until then, the prize had been awarded to a work of fiction published in the previous twelve months; in 1971 they switched it, and the award went to a book released contemporaneously. In other words, novels published in 1970 weren’t eligible for the prize. So somebody has had the bright idea of creating a Lost Booker Prize for this one year, and as a consequence our bookstores are displaying a shortlist of novels that, if not exactly forgotten (they had to be in print to qualify), certainly weren’t terribly near the top of British book-club reading lists – and I’m betting not many of you have read Nina Bawden’s The Birds on the Trees, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles, The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard, Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault, The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark, or Patrick White’s The Vivisector. I bought three of them, partly because it was such a pleasure to see books published forty years ago on a table at the front of a chain store: British bookshops are desperately, crushingly dull at the moment. Our independents are almost all gone, leaving bookselling at the mercy of the chains and the supermarkets, and they tend to favour memoirs written, or at least approved, by reality TV stars with surgically enhanced breasts, and recipe books by TV chefs. To be honest, even memoirs written in person by reality TV stars with entirely natural breasts wouldn’t lift the cultural spirits much. If asked to represent this magazine’s views, I’d say we favour natural breasts over augmented, but that breasts generally are discounted when we come to consider literary merit. And if I have that wrong, then I can only apologize.

  Nina Bawden’s The Birds on the Trees is what became known, a few years later, as a Hampstead Novel – Hampstead being a wealthy borough of London that, in the imagination of some of our grumpier provincial critics, is full of people who work in the media and commit adultery. My wife grew up there, and she works in the media, but … Actually, I should do some fact-checking before I finish that sentence. I’ll get back to you. Nobody would dare write a Hampstead Novel any more, I suspect, and though its disappearance is not necessarily a cause for noisy lamentation – there is only so much to say about novelists having affairs, after all – it’s interesting to read an early example of the genre. The Birds on the Trees is about a middle-class media family (the wife is a novelist, the husband a journalist) in the process of falling apart, mostly because of the stress brought on by a son with mental-health problems. People drink a lot of spirits. Marshall McLuhan is mentioned, and he doesn’t come up so much in fiction any more. There are lots of characters in this short book, all with tangled, knotty connections to each other – it feels like a novel-shaped Manhattan at times – and, refreshingly, Bawden doesn’t feel the need to be definitive. There’s none of that sense of ‘if you read one book this year, make it this one’; you get the sense that it was written in an age when people consumed new fiction as a matter of course, so there was no need to say everything you had to say in one enormous, authoritative volume.

  None of the Lost Booker books are very long; I chose to read Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (a) because I’d never read anything by Muriel Spark before, and she has the kind of reputation that convinced me I was missing out, and (b) her novel was so slim that it is almost invisible to the naked eye. And, if you look at the ‘Books Bought’ and ‘Books Read’ columns this month, you will see, dear youthful writer, that short books make sound economic and artistic sense. If Spark had written a doorstopper of a novel, I probably wouldn’t have bought it; if I’d bought it, I wouldn’t have gotten around to picking it up; if I’d picked it up, I wouldn’t have finished it; if I’d finished it, I’d have chalked her off my to-do list, and my relationship with Muriel Spark would be over. As it is, she’s all I read at the moment, and the income of her estate (she died four years ago) is swelling by the day. What’s the flaw in this business plan? There isn’t one.

  My only caveat is that your short novels have to be really, really good – that’s the motor for the whole thing. (If you’re going to write bad short books, then forget it – you’d be better off writing one bad long one.) The Driver’s Seat, which is pitched straight into the long grass somewhere between Patricia Highsmith and early Pinter, is a creepy and unsettling novella about a woman who travels from Britain to an unnamed European city, apparently because she is hell-bent on getting herself murdered. I couldn’t really tell you why Spark felt compelled to write it, but understanding the creative instinct isn’t a prerequisite for admiring a work of art, and its icy strangeness is part of its charm. A Far Cry from Kensington came later but is set earlier, in a West London boarding house whose inhabitants are drawn towards each other in strange ways when one of them, an editor at a publishing house, is rude to a talentless hack. (She calls him a ‘pisseur de copie’, an insult that is repeated gleefully and satisfyingly throughout the book. Spark is fond of strange, funny mantras.) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is her most famous novel, at least here, where the movie, starring Maggie Smith as an overbearing and eccentric teacher in a refined Scottish girls’ school, is one of our national cinematic treasures. I probably enjoyed this last one the least of the three – partly because I’d seen the film, partly because Miss Brodie is such a brilliantly realized archetype that I felt I’d already come across several less successful versions of her. (Influential books are often a disappointment, if they’re properly influential, because influence cannot guarantee the quality of the imitators, and your appetite for the original has been partially sated by its poor copies.) But what a writer Spark is – dry, odd, funny, aphoristic, wise, technically brilliant. I can’t remember the last time I read a book by a well-established writer previously unknown to me that resulted in me devouring an entire oeuvre – but that only brings me back to the subject of short books, their beauty and charm and efficacy. A Far Cry from Kensington weighs in at a whopping 208 pages, but the rest are all around the 150 mark. You want your oeuvre devoured? Look and learn.

  At the end of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, one of Miss Brodie’s girls, now all grown up, visits another, and attempts to tell her about her troubled marriage:

  ‘I’m not much good at that sort of problem,’ said Sandy. But Monica had not thought she would be able to help much, for she knew Sandy of old, and persons known of old can never be much help.

  Which sort of brings us full circle.

  In next month’s exciting episode, I will describe an attempt, not yet begun, to read Our Mutual Friend on a very modern e-book machine thing. It’s the future. Monday, in fact, probably, once more Spark oeuvre has been devoured.

  September 2010

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  ★ Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens

  ★ Brooklyn: Historically Speaking – John B. Manbeck

  ★ Books downloaded for nothing:

  ★ Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens

  ★ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

  ★ Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis

  BOOKS READ:

  ★ Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live – Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller

  ★ Brooklyn – Colm Tóibín

  ★ The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark

  ★ The Given Day – Dennis Lehane (half)

  ★ Loitering with Intent – Muriel Spark (half)

  ★ The Finishing School – Muriel Spark (half)

  ★ Tinkers – Paul Harding (one-third)

  Four years ago to the very month, as I’m sure you will remember, this column daringly introduced a Scientist of the Month Award. The first winner was Matthias Wittlinger, of the University of Ulm, in Germany, who had done remarkable things with, and to, ants. In an attempt to discover how it was that they were able to find their way home, Wittlinger had shortened the legs of one group and put another group on stilts, in order to alter their stride patterns. Shortening the legs of ants struck us, back in 2006, as an entirely admirable way to spend one’s time – but we were younger then, and it was a more innocent age. De
spite the huge buzz surrounding the inaugural award, Wittlinger received nothing at all, and is unlikely even to know about his triumph, unless he subscribes to this magazine. And to add insult to injury, there was no subsequent winner, because the following month we forgot about the whole thing.

  Anyway: it’s back! I am absurdly pleased to announce that this month’s recipient, Rolando Rodríguez-Muñoz, is employed at a university right here in England – the University of Exeter. Together with his colleague Tom Tregenza, Rodríguez-Muñoz has been studying the mating strategies of crickets; they discovered, according to the Economist, that ‘small males … could overcome the handicap of their stature and win mates through prodigious chirping’. In other words, being the lead singer works for the nerdy and the disadvantaged in other species, too.

  Rodríguez-Muñoz has shaded it over Tregenza because, after he and his colleagues had ‘captured, marked, released and tracked hundreds of crickets’, they filmed sixty-four different cricket burrows. Rodríguez-Muñoz then watched and analysed the results: 250,000 hours of footage. A quarter of a million hours! Just under three years of cricket porn! Presumably crickets, like the rest of us, spend much more time trying to get sex than actually having it, but even so, he must have seen some pretty racy stuff. Some of the sterner members of the judging panel tried to argue that because Rolando had watched the film on fast-forward, and on sixteen monitors at once, he had cut corners, but I’m not having that; as far as I’m concerned, watching crickets mate quickly is even harder than watching them mate in normal time. No, Rolando Rodríguez-Muñoz is a hero, and fully deserving of all the good things about to come his way.

  There was a hurtful suggestion, four years ago, that the Scientist of the Month was somehow tangentially connected to the World Cup. He hasn’t read enough to fill up a whole column, because he’s spent the entire month watching TV, the argument went; so just because he stumbled upon an interesting article in a magazine between games, he’s invented this bullshit to get him out of a hole. I resent this deeply, not least because it devalues the brilliant work of these amazing scientists. And though it is true that, at the time of writing, we are approaching the end of another World Cup, and reading time has, indeed, been in shorter supply, I can assure you that the sudden reappearance of this prestigious honour is pure, though admittedly baffling, coincidence.

  The effect of the World Cup on the books I intended to read has been even more damaging in 2010 than it was in 2006. In ’06, I simply didn’t pick any up, and though I was troubled by the ease with which a game between Turkey and Croatia could suppress my hunger for literature, at least literature itself emerged from the tournament unscathed. This time around, as you can see from the list above, my appetite was partially satisfied by grazing on the first few pages of several books, and as a consequence, there are half-chewed novels lying all over the place. At least, I’m presuming they’re lying all over the place; I seem to have temporarily lost most of them. When the World Cup is over, and we clear away the piles of betting slips and wall charts, some of them will, presumably, reappear. I wrote in this column recently about Muriel Spark’s novels, their genius and their attractive brevity, but there is an obvious disadvantage to her concision: her books tend to get buried under things. I can put my hands on Dennis Lehane’s historical novel The Given Day whenever I want, simply because it is 700 pages long. True, this hasn’t helped it to get itself read, but at least it’s visible. I didn’t lose The Girls of Slender Means, and it was as eccentric and funny and sad as the bunch of Spark novels I read last month.

  At the end of the last column, I vowed to have read Our Mutual Friend on an e-reader, and that didn’t happen either. This was partly because of the football, and partly because the experience of reading Dickens in this way was unsatisfactory. It wasn’t just that a Victorian novelist clearly doesn’t belong on a sleek twenty-first-century machine; I also took the cheapskate route and downloaded the novel from a website that allows you to download out-of-copyright novels for no charge. I helped myself to Babbitt and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the same time. The edition squirted down to me came without footnotes, however, and I rather like footnotes. More to the point, I need footnotes occasionally. (You may well work out for yourself eventually that the ‘dust’ so vital to the plot is household rubbish, rather than fine grains of dirt, but it saves a lot of confusion and doubt to have this explained clearly and plainly right at the beginning of the novel.) The advantage handed the e-reading business by copyright laws hadn’t really occurred to me before I helped myself, but it spells trouble for publishers, of course; Penguin and Co. make a lot of money selling books by people who are long dead, and if we all take the free-downloading route, then there will be less money for the living writers. In a spirit of self-chastisement, I bought a copy of Our Mutual Friend immediately, even though I have one somewhere already. It won’t do any good, in the long run, because clearly books, publishers, readers and writers are all doomed. But maybe we should all do what we can to stave off impending disaster just that little bit longer.

  I was attempting to read Our Mutual Friend for professional reasons: I’m supposed to be writing an introduction for a forthcoming edition. I read Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn for work, too: I was asked to consider taking on the job of adapting it for the cinema, and as about a million critics and several real people had told me how good it was, I took the offer seriously. It’s not the best circumstance in which to read a novel. Instead of admiring the writing, thinking about the characters, turning the page to discover what happens next, you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I dunno,’ and, ‘Yay, I could chop that,’ and, ‘Miley Cyrus would be great for this,’ and, ‘Do I really want to spend the next few years of my life wrecking this guy’s prose?’ It is a tribute to Tóibín’s novel – its quiet, careful prose, its almost agonizing empathy for its characters, its conviction in its own reality – that pretty soon I forgot why I was reading it, and just read it. And then, after I’d finished it, I decided that I wanted to adapt it – not just because I loved it, but because I could see it. Not the movie, necessarily, but the world of the novel: the third-class cabin in which his protagonist travels from Liverpool to New York in the early 1950s, the department store she works in, the dances she attends. They are portrayed with a director of photography’s relish for depth and light and detail.

  The laziest, most irritating book-club criticism of a novel is that the reader ‘just didn’t care’ about the characters or their predicament, a complaint usually made in a tone suggesting that this banality is the product of deep and original thought. (It never seems to occur to these critics that the deficiency may well lie within themselves, rather than in the pages of the books. Perhaps they feel similarly about their friends, parents, children. ‘The trouble with my kid is that she doesn’t make me care enough about her.’ Are we all supposed to nod sagely at that?)

  It is not intended to be a backhanded compliment when I say that Tóibín doesn’t care whether you care about Eilis, his heroine; it’s not that the book is chilly or neutral, or that Tóibín is a disengaged writer. He’s not. But he’s patient, and nerveless, and unsentimental, and he trusts the story rather than the prose to deliver the emotional pay-off. And it does deliver. Brooklyn chooses the narrative form of a much cheaper kind of book – ‘one woman, two countries, two men’ – but that isn’t what it’s about; you’re not quite sure what it’s about until the last few pages, and then you can see how carefully the trap has been laid for you. I loved it. Will I wreck it? It’s perfectly possible, of course. It’s a very delicate piece, and Eilis is a watchful, still centre. I won’t have to hack away at its complicated architecture, though, because it doesn’t have one, so maybe I have half a chance. By the time you read this, I should have started in on it; if you have a ten-year-old daughter with ambitions to be an actor, then she might as well start trying to acquire an Irish accent. In my experience of the film business, we’ll be shooting sometime in 2020, if it hasn’t all collapsed
by then.

  In a way, I read Live from New York, an oral history of Saturday Night Live, because of work, too. Earlier in the year I got an American agent, a lovely, smart woman whose every idea, suggestion and request I’ve ignored, more or less since the moment we agreed she’d represent me. Anyway, she recommended Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s book, and my feeling was that if I’m not going to make her a penny, I could at least follow up on her book tips. And I’m pretty sure that if it had to be one or the other, money or successful recommendations, she’d go for the recommendations. That’s what makes her special.

  I read the book despite never having seen a single minute of Saturday Night Live, at least prior to Tina Fey’s turn as Sarah Palin in 2008. The show was never shown in the UK, so I hadn’t a clue who any of these people were. Will Ferrell? Bill Murray? Adam Sandler? Eddie Murphy? John Belushi? Chris Rock? Dan Aykroyd? It’s sweet that you have your own TV stars over there. You’ve probably never heard of Pat Phoenix, either.

  When it’s done well, as it is here, then the oral history is pretty unbeatable as a non-fiction form – engrossing, light on its feet, the constant switching of voices a guarantee against dullness. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s Edie Sedgwick book, Studs Terkel’s Working … These are books that I hope to return to one day, when I’ve read everything else. Live from New York is probably just a little too long for someone unfamiliar with the show, but if you want to learn something about the crafts of writing and performing, then you’ll pick something up every few pages. I am still thinking about these words from Lorne Michaels:

  The amount of things that have to come together for something to be good is just staggering. And the fact that there’s anything good at all is just amazing. When you’re young, you assume that just knowing the difference between good and bad is enough: ‘I’ll just do good work, because I prefer it to bad work.’