Stuff I've Been Reading Read online

  In an attempt to compensate for the disappointment caused by the bungling bureaucrats, my reading was exclusively Southern for a couple of weeks, and I began with Beth Ann Fennelly’s collection of poems, Tender Hooks. I met Beth Ann and her daughter on the aforementioned veranda, admittedly only briefly (Claire will one day find it bewildering to learn that on the basis of these few minutes, I had made concerted attempts to become her extremely big brother), but both of them seemed like the kind of people that one would like to know better. And then, as luck would have it, a few days later I read ‘Bite Me’, the very first poem in the collection, in which Beth Ann describes her daughter’s birth:

  And Lord did I push, for three more hours

  I pushed, I pushed so hard I shat,

  Pushed so hard blood vessels burst

  in my neck and in my chest, pushed so hard

  my asshole turned inside out like a rosebud …

  So I ended up feeling as though I knew them both better anyway – indeed, I can think of one or two of my stuffier compatriots who’d argue that I now know more than I need to know. (Is now the appropriate time, incidentally, to point out the main advantage of adoption?) If I had never met mother or daughter, then these lines would have made me wince, of course, but I doubt if they would have made me blush in quite the same way; maybe one should know poets either extremely well or not at all.

  Tom Franklin’s novel Hell at the Breech – which I haven’t yet read – is set in 1890s Alabama, and is by all accounts gratifyingly bloody. So from the outside it looks as though they obey old-school gender rules round at the Fennelly/Franklin place: the man writes about guns and mayhem, the lady writes about babies and home. But as the above excerpt indicates, it’s not really like that at all. Yes, Tender Hooks is mostly about motherhood, but Fennelly’s vision has more in common with Tarantino’s than Martha Stewart’s. One long, rich poem placed at the centre of the collection, ‘Telling the Gospel Truth’, puts the blood and sweat back into the Nativity, before moving on, cleverly and without contrivance, to contemplate the fatuity of poems that use ‘dinner knives to check for spinach in their teeth’. Fennelly’s poems aren’t mannered, needless to say. They’re plain, funny and raw, and if you want to buy a present that isn’t cute or dreamy for a new mother, then Tender Hooks will hit the spot – and won’t stop hitting it even though it’s sore.

  Larry Brown lived in Oxford before his untimely death in 1994. On Fire is a terse, no-bullshit little memoir about his life as a fireman and a hunter and a father and a writer (he did all of those things simultaneously), and though I know next to nothing about the last two occupations … Ah, now, you see, that’s precisely it. It’s not true that I know next to nothing about the last two occupations, of course. I know a reasonable amount about both of them, and I was making a silly little self-deprecating joke. (There I go again. Was it silly? Was it little? Probably not. It was probably a brilliant and important self-deprecating joke.) But what struck me about Brown’s memoir is that, if you have experience of firefighting and hunting, self-deprecation is inappropriate and possibly even obstructive. It’s not that Brown is self-aggrandizing in any way. He isn’t. But in order to describe simply and clearly how you rescued someone from a burning building, you don’t want to waste words on all the throat-clearing and the oh-it-was-nothings that many of us (especially many of us in England) have to go through before we’re able to say anything at all. Before I read On Fire, I believed that self-deprecation was a matter of taste and personality, but now I can see that it’s much more a function of experience – that old joke, the one about having a lot to be modest about, is unavoidable here. There is a very precise description of the self-deprecator and his mindset in The Sixth Heaven, the second part of L. P. Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda trilogy (about which more later):

  Eustace had no idea in what guise he wanted to appear to his listener – he tried to confine himself to the facts, but the facts must seem such small beer to her, with her totally different range of experience. He tried to make them sound more impressive than they were; then he was ashamed of himself, and adopted a lighter tone, with an ironical edge to it, as if he well knew that these things were mere nothings, the faintest pattering of raindrops … But he thought she did not like this; once or twice she gently queried his estimate of events and pushed him back into the reality of his own feelings.

  And that, of course, is the danger of self-deprecation: its avoidance of that reality. Larry Brown can confine himself to the facts, which actually aren’t small beer (or certainly don’t seem that way to those of us who experience no physical danger in the course of a normal working week); and as a consequence, the truth of any given situation is perhaps a lot easier to reach … Oh, there we are! Thank God! It was actually easier for him than it is for me! He had it cushy, with his diving into burning buildings and his, you know, his heavy equipment!

  Still on my Southern kick, I read James Wilcox’s gentle, rich and atmospheric Modern Baptists, and True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass, Tom Piazza’s little book (it was originally a magazine article) about Jimmy Martin, in which the backstage area of the Grand Ole Opry is rather charmingly revealed to be a kind of country music limbo, where Nashville musicians wander around, apparently for ever, harmonizing and jamming with anyone they bump into. (The only bum notes are struck by Piazza’s hero, who tries to pick a fight with anyone who still speaks to him.)

  Baltimore isn’t really in the South, I know, but when a new Anne Tyler novel is published, you have to kick whatever habit you’ve developed and pick it up. And then read it. Digging to America is, I think, my favourite of her recent books. It may be disconcerting for those of you reared on Bret Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh to read a novel whose climactic scene deals with a parent’s comical attempts to get her child to give up her pacifiers (or ‘binkies’, as they are known within the family); I can imagine some critics complaining that Tyler ignores ‘the real world’, wherever that might be – especially as Baltimore, where all her novels take place, is also the setting for The Wire, HBO’s brilliant, violent series about drug dealers, their customers and the police officers who have to deal with them. The best answer to this actually rather unreflective carping comes from John Updike, in his New Yorker review of bad boy Michel Houellebecq’s new novel:

  But how honest, really, is a world picture that excludes the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last?

  Nicely put, John. (And if there’s more where that came from, maybe it’s time to have a go at something longer than a book review.) Neatly, his summary of Houellebecq’s omissions serves as a perfect summary of some of the themes in Digging to America, although the emphasis on pleasures and comforts can’t do justice to Tyler’s complications and confusions. Perhaps no single novel can capture the variety of our lives; perhaps even Houellebecq and Anne Tyler between them can’t get the job done. Perhaps we need to read a lot.

  Ali Smith’s brilliant The Accidental manages to capture more of our lives, including both the humdrum and the uncomfortable, than any novel has any right to do. The central narrative idea (stranger walks into a family holiday home) is basic, and the book is divided into three parts: ‘The Beginning’, ‘The Middle’ and ‘The End’. And yet The Accidental is extremely sophisticated, very wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic and occasionally very funny. (It says something about Ali Smith’s comic powers that she can make you laugh simply by listing the schedule of UK History, a British cable channel.) Here’s a little bit from the middle of the book, the section entitled ‘The Middle’:

  The people on the TV talk endlessly … They say the word middle a lot. Support among the middle class. No middle ground. Now to other news: more unrest in the Middle East. Magnus thinks about Amber’s middle …

  I should own up here and tell you that The Accidental is a literary novel; there’s no point trying
to hide this fact. But it’s literary not because the author is attempting to be boring in the hope of getting on to the shortlist of a literary prize (and here in the UK, Smith’s been on just about every shortlist there is) but because she can’t figure out a different way of getting this particular job done, and the novel’s experiments, its shifting points of view and its playfulness with language seem absolutely necessary. I can’t think of a single Believer reader who wouldn’t like this book. And I know you all.

  I read The Shrimp and the Anemone, the first part of L. P. Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda trilogy, bloody ages ago. And then I lost the book, and then I went off on my Southern thing, and then it was way too slow to pick up in a European Cup Final month, and … to get to the point: I’ve now read The Sixth Heaven, the second part, and it was something of a disappointment after the first. The Shrimp and the Anemone is an extremely acute book about childhood because, well, it explores the reality of the feelings involved, even though these feelings belong to people not quite into their teens. Hartley (who wrote The Go-Between and hung out in country houses with Lady Ottoline Morrell and the like) never patronizes, and the rawness, the fear and the cruelty of his young central characters chafes against their gentility in a way that stops the novel from being inert. In The Sixth Heaven, however, Eustace and Hilda are in their twenties, and inertia has taken hold – there is a lot more hanging out in country houses with posh people than I could stomach. The Sixth Heaven, indeed, might have become an Unnamed Literary Novel, as per the diktats of the Polysyllabic Spree, if Hartley didn’t write so wonderfully well. I nearly gave up hundreds of times, but just as I was about to do so, along came another brilliant observation. Even so, the third novel, Eustace and Hilda, begins with a chapter entitled ‘Lady Nelly Expects a Visitor’. The first sentence reads thus: ‘Lady Nelly came out from the cool, porphyry-tinted twilight of St Mark’s into the strong white sunshine of the Piazza.’ I fear it might be all over for me.

  I have just consulted my Amazon Recommends list, just in case anything took my fancy, and the first five books were as follows:

  1) Fidgety Fish by Ruth Galloway

  2) The Suicidal Mind by Edwin S. Shneidman

  3) The Very Lazy Ladybird by Isobel Finn and Jack Tickle (illustrator)

  4) Clumsy Crab by Ruth Galloway

  5) No Time to Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One by Carla Fine.

  It will have to be The Very Lazy Ladybird, I think. I haven’t got time for books about clumsy crabs in a World Cup month.

  September 2006

  BOOKS BOUGHT:

  ★ Field Notes from a Catastrophe – Elizabeth Kolbert

  ★ The Case of Mr Crump – Ludwig Lewisohn

  BOOKS READ:

  ★ None

  You have probably noticed that we don’t think much of scientists, here at Believer Towers. The Polysyllabic Spree, the eighty-seven white-robed and intimidatingly effete young men and women who edit this magazine, are convinced that the real work in our society is done by poets, novelists, animators, experimental film-makers, drone-metal engineers and the rest of the riff-raff who typically populate the pages of this magazine. I, however, am not so sure, which is why, after a great deal of agonized internal debate, I have decided to introduce a Scientist of the Month Award. As will become clear, this month’s winner, Matthias Wittlinger of the University of Ulm, in Germany, is a worthy one, but I am very worried about several, if not all, of the months to come. I don’t really know much about science, and my fear is that we’ll end up giving the prize to the same old faces, month after month after month. A word in Marie Curie’s ear: I hope you have plenty of room on your mantelpiece. Without giving anything away, you’re going to need it.

  According to the July 1 edition of the Economist, Matthias Wittlinger decided to investigate a long-held but never proven suspicion that what enables an ant to find his (or her) way home to the nest is an inbuilt pedometer – in other words, they count their steps. He tested this hypothesis in an ingenious way. First, he made the ants walk through a ten-metre tunnel to get food; he then made them walk back to their nests through a different ten-metre tunnel. But the fun really started once they’d got the hang of this. Wittlinger trimmed the legs of one group of ants, in order to shorten the stride pattern; another group was put on stilts made out of pig bristle, so that their steps became much bigger. The results were satisfying. The ants with little legs stopped about four metres short of the nest; the ants on stilts, meanwhile, overshot by fifteen feet. Anyone who thinks that someone other than Wittlinger is a more deserving recipient of the inaugural Stuff I’ve Been Reading Scientist of the Month Award is, to put it bluntly, an idiot. Science doesn’t get any better than this.

  I’m delighted for Matthias, of course, but I am also feeling a little rueful. For many years now, I’ve been trimming and lengthening ants’ legs, mostly because the concentration and discipline involved has allowed me to forgo all sexual activity. (I have been using pieces of old guitar string for the stilts, and guitar string is funnier than pig bristle, because the ants kind of bounce along.) I wasn’t, however, doing it in a particularly purposeful way – I had no idea that I could have been written about in the Economist, or that I could win prestigious awards. And anyway, I was making an elementary error: I was trimming and lengthening the legs of the same ants – and this, I see now, was completely and utterly pointless: three hours of microsurgery on each ant and they all ended up the same height, anyway.

  Cynics don’t read the Believer, which is fortunate, because a cynic might say that the introduction of the Scientist of the Month Award is a desperate attempt to draw attention away from the stark, sad entry under ‘Books Read’ at the top of this page. And a clever cynic might wonder whether the absence of read books, and therefore the appearance of the award, has anything to do with the arrival of the World Cup, a football tournament that every four years consumes the inhabitants of every country in the world bar the USA. The truth is that the World Cup allowed me to introduce the award. I’d been meaning to do it for years, but space had always prevented me from doing so. Now that I have no books to write about, I can fulfil what can be described, without exaggeration, as a lifelong dream.

  I wish I had read some books this month, to be honest, and not just because I wouldn’t have to drivel on about nothing for a couple of pages. It’s not that I believe reading is more important than sport, but there have been moments during this last month when I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I was wasting my time and yet made no effort to turn off the TV and do something more constructive. Watching Ukraine v. Tunisia can in part be explained by my bet on Andriy Shevchenko to score during the game. (He did, after taking a dive to win a penalty that he himself took.) But I have no way of rationalizing my willingness to stick with Ukraine v. Switzerland, even after it was clear that it was going to be perhaps the most pointless and boring ninety minutes in the history of not only soccer but of all human activity. Couldn’t I have read something at some point during the second half? A couple of Dylan Thomas’s letters, say? They were right there, on the bookshelf behind the sofa.

  It wasn’t a very good World Cup. The star players all underperformed; everybody was too scared of losing; there were too few goals, too many red and yellow cards; and there was way too much cheating and diving and shirtpulling. And yet the rhythm of a World Cup day is unimprovable, if you don’t have a proper job. You wake up in the morning, do a little online betting, read the previews of the games in the newspaper, maybe watch the highlights programme you recorded the previous night. The first game is at two, so just beforehand you are joined by other friends without proper jobs (some of whom won’t leave until eleven that night); it finishes at four, when you repair to the garden, smoke, drink tea and kick a ball about with any of your children who happen to be there. The second game finishes at seven, just in time for bed, bath and story time, and I don’t know about you, but we used the ‘live pause’ feature on our digital system for th
e eight o’clock game – there was a heat wave in Europe, and my kids took a while to get to sleep. Food was ordered at half-time and delivered during the second half. Has there ever been a better way to live than this? Friends, football, takeaways, no work … One can only presume that if Robert Owen and those guys had waited a couple of hundred years for the invention of the World Cup, takeaway food, digital TV and work-shy friends, there was no way any utopian experiment could have failed.

  For maybe the first time in my life, however, I have begun to sympathize with Americans who find the game baffling and slow. The lack of goals has never bothered any football fan, but when it becomes clear that a team doesn’t even want to score one, that they’d rather take their chances in a penalty shoot-out, then the lack of action ceases to become a matter of taste and starts to look like a fatal flaw in the tournament. If you’re so scared of losing, don’t enter! Stay home! Let Belgium and Lithuania play instead! Many teams played with one striker, playing all on his own against two or three defenders; England’s striker Wayne Rooney became so frustrated by these odds that he attempted to even them out by stamping on the balls of one of the defenders looking after him.

  We can be pretty sure that it hurts, having your testicles stamped on, but I understand that Americans have come to refer contemptuously to the more theatrical World Cup injuries as the ‘flop and bawl’ – the implication being, I think, that these players are feigning their distress. First of all, you must understand that the rest of the world is more susceptible to pain than you. Our smoking, our poor diets and our heightened sensitivities (to both literature and life) mean that even a slight push in the back can send excruciating agony coursing through our bodies. You, however, because of your all-meat diet and your status as a bullying superpower, feel nothing, either emotionally or physically, at any time. So you can sneer at our floppers and bawlers if you want, but what does that say about you? How can you ever understand a novel, if you don’t understand pain?