Ten Years in the Tub. Nick HornbyЧитать онлайн книгу.
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BOOKS READ:
LITERARY CDS BOUGHT AND LISTENED TO:
Unfinished, abandoned, abandoned, unfinished. Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. In the first of these columns, I voiced the suspicion that my then-current reading jag was unsustainable: I was worried, I seem to recall, about the end of the summer, and the forthcoming football season, and it’s true that both of these factors have had an adverse effect on book consumption. (Words added to ongoing novel since autumnal return to work: not many, but more than the month before. Football matches watched in the last month: seven whole ones, four of them live in the stadium, and bits and pieces of probably half a dozen others.) Of the two books I started and finished this month, one I read in a day, mostly on a plane, during a day trip to Amsterdam. And it was a book about football.
It is not only sport and work that have slowed me up, however; I would have to say that the ethos of this magazine has inhibited me a little too. As you are probably aware by now, the Believer has taken the honorable and commendable view that, if it is attacks on contemporary writers and writing you wish to read, then you can choose from an endless range of magazines and newspapers elsewhere—just about all of them, in fact—and that therefore the Believer will contain only acid-free literary criticism.
This position is, however, likely to cause difficulties if your brief is simply to write honestly about the books you have been reading: boredom and, very occasionally, despair is part of the reading life, after all. Last month, mindful of the Believer’s raison d’être, I expressed mild disappointment with a couple of the books I had read. I don’t remember the exact words; but I said something to the effect that, if I were physically compelled to express a view as to whether the Disappointing Novel was better or worse than Crime and Punishment, then I would keep my opinion to myself, no matter how excruciating the pain, such was my respect for the editorial credo. If, however, the torturers threatened my children, then I would—with the utmost reluctance—voice a very slight preference for Crime and Punishment.
Uproar ensued. Voicing a slight preference for Crime and Punishment over the Disappointing Novel under threat of torture to my children constituted a Snark, it appeared, and I was summoned to appear before the Believer committee—twelve rather eerie young men and women (six of each, naturally), all dressed in white robes and smiling maniacally, like a sort of literary equivalent of the Polyphonic Spree. I was given a severe dressing-down, and only avoided a three-issue suspension by promising never to repeat the offense. Anyway, We (i.e. the Polysyllabic Spree) have decided that if it looks as though I might not enjoy a book, I will abandon it immediately, and not mention it by name. This is what happened with the Literary Novel and the Work of Nonfiction—particularly regrettable in the latter case, as I was supposed to be reviewing it for a London newspaper. The loss of income there, and the expense of flying from London to San Francisco to face the Committee (needless to say, those bastards wouldn’t stump up), means that this has been an expensive month.
I did, however, finish Blake Bailey’s biography of Yates that I started last month. I haven’t changed my view that it could easily have afforded to shed a few of its six-hundred-plus pages—Yates doesn’t sell his first story until page 133—but I’m glad I stuck with it. Who’d have thought that the author of Revolutionary Road wrote speeches for Robert Kennedy, or provided the model for Alton Benes, the insane writer-father of Seinfeld’s Elaine? (Yates’s daughter Monica, an ex-girlfriend of Larry David, was apparently an inspiration for Elaine herself.) And who’d have thought that the author of an acknowledged American classic, as well as several other respected novels and an outstanding collection of short stories, could have ended up living and then dying in such abject penury? A Tragic Honesty, like the Ian Hamilton biography of Lowell that I read recently, is a sad and occasionally terrifying account of how creativity can be simultaneously fragile and self-destructive; it also made me grateful that I am writing now, when the antidepressants are better, and we all drink less. Stories about contemporary writers being taken