U.K. vs. U.S.: U.K. Wins...More on Clinton...The Sopranos in Tokyo
By Kelly Jane Torrance
The English are an odd bunch. Obsessed with a sport they just aren't very good at, they so prize young men skilled in the use of hands and feet they make them demigods, only to tear them limb from limb (metaphorically…so far) after they miss a kick. One might be forgiven for thinking soccer the only culture the English have. If we leave tabloid England behind, however, we find a nation that reads for pleasure.
Even its rock stars. Keith Richards' love of Gibbon is well known, but The Guardian informs us that Alex James, bass player for the band Blur, has recently enjoyed Fundamentals of Residential Architecture. He also touts a "grown-up book" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince. And James charmingly concludes, "[T]here's always a Wodehouse in summer for the garden, such as The Little Nugget. I'm saving biography for my dotage." I doubt many of this country's rockers know what "dotage" means, even as they fall headlong into it.
How do American celebrities compare? Oprah magazine gives us some of their picks. All too often, they lack the idiosyncratic touch and therefore resemble course requirements for Diversity 101. Hillary Clinton's list includes The Joy Luck Club, The Poisonwood Bible, The Color Purple, The Clan of the Cave Bear, Wild Swans, and West With the Night by pioneer female aviator Beryl Markham. What a virtuous reader our former First Lady is!
The selection made by America's other First Lady, Katie Couric, is just as solemn, but strangely dated: Black Like Me, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Huckleberry Finn, The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, Of Mice and Men, A Patch of Blue. It turns out Couric gave Oprah the names of her childhood favorites. What an earnest young woman she must have been!
On the other hand, Nigella Lawson, the English celebrity chef, is not ashamed to admit her love of the now savagely derided children's author Enid Blyton. Lawson says of Blyton's The Naughtiest Girl in the School, "This book taught me how deeply enjoyable reading is, and that's what counts." Reading--it's not just a grim duty!
*****
English readers appreciate fun, but English writers work hard. Not only do they write more books, they also don't look down on popular journalism. Take A.N. Wilson, for example. In the last 18 months, he has published the foreword to a book by Proust, three books of non-fiction--The Victorians, Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her, London: A History--and a novel, My Name is Legion, a Waughian satire of journalism. All this while writing a weekly political column for the London Evening Standard, a weekly literary column for the London Daily Telegraph and reviewing books for the Times Literary Supplement. All told, the 54-year-old Wilson has published 32 books.
His latest arrived on these shores just last week. London: A History is part of the Modern Library's Chronicles series of short, handsome hardcover histories. (Included in the series are Frank Kermode's The Age of Shakespeare and Karen Armstrong's Islam.)
At just under 200 pages, London is a whirlwind tour through 2,000 years of history, and it helps if the reader has previous knowledge of the subject. Wilson's is primarily a political history, but is continually interspersed with reflections on art and architecture and enlivened by telling details. The chapter titled "The End of the Bowler Hat" is one of the book's best. Wilson explains how the bare head precipitated atomization: "The efficiency and wealth-creating capacity of the City actually depended upon the brokers and dealers all belonging, in fact, and not just in theory, to a cohesive social group."
Wilson's London is almost an elegy. He laments that London has become another tourist trap: overcrowded, overpriced, overrun by criminals, and disfigured by disgusting architecture. Wilson remains optimistic, cheering London's energy, cosmopolitanism, and its multiculturalism, which has brought new faces, new accents, and good ethnic food to the city. Given the preponderance of Wilson's data, his optimism can appear facile. But this is a small quibble with a book so bold, forceful, and sweeping. And who could resist gems such as this, a millennia of legal history contained in two sentences:
In the Middle Ages, the crimes which brought men to the Fleet were comparatively minor misunderstandings over contracts; in the Tudor Age, men and women here fell victim to the religious bigotry of the times and were persecuted for being Catholic, or Protestant; in the great age of commerce the Fleet Prison locked you up for debt. In an age guided by Adam Smith, the worst heresy you could commit was not against God but against Mammon.
*****
Alfred A. Knopf had to sell 700,000 copies of Bill Clinton's My Life just to break even. (Clinton received an advance to the tune of $10-12 million.). Despite almost uniformly bad reviews, My Life has sold an astounding 800,000 copies in just three weeks. The boy wonder must still sell about 1.2 million more copies to earn back his advance and be eligible for more royalties. Perhaps after paying off his lawyers, Clinton will actually manage to earn a few shekels for himself.
*****
An author was recently arrested at a Hiroshima bookstore for assaulting the store's owner. Japan's Mainichi Daily News reports that Hiroshi Kono was picking up a copy of his own book but didn't like "the attitude of the employee who dealt with him." Perhaps the shopkeeper shouldn't have been surprised--Kono's book is a first-hand account of the Japanese mafia. Indeed, isn't this story an upcoming episode of The Sopranos?
Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and culture editor of Brainwash. Her website on culture can be found at www.kellyjanetorrance.com.
