Hornby on reading...Stewart on politics...Torrance on fiction
By Kelly Jane Torrance
Is there a more unalloyed not-quite-guilty pleasure for bibliophiles than reading books about books? A veritable genre has sprung up in the last few years of writers detailing their reading, usually of the big books of the Western Canon. Volumes like David Denby's Great Books, Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading, and, perhaps the most original, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, all provide the pleasure of talk about the classics without the pesky problem of actually reading them.
The latest entrant into the books on books field is Nick Hornby. Hornby, English author of the film-friendly novels High Fidelity and About a Boy and former pop music critic for the New Yorker, writes the "Stuff I've Been Reading" column for The Believer magazine. The Polysyllabic Spree is a collection of 14 of those columns, up to November 2004.
This book, unlike so many of its brethren, is a keeper. And the main reason is that it is simply a fun book. Reading Hornby's criticism is like reading a Hornby novel. It's comfortable, and his prose is close to perfect in the sense that you hardly know it's there at all. Reading Hornby write about books is like listening to Hornby talk about books over a pint at the pub.
In his first sentence, he explains the terrain he will cover:
So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading--about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trial of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.
Anyone who reads more than ten books a year will feel a surge of recognition here. He also will, but is less likely to admit it, when Hornby confesses, "I read 55 percent of the books I bought this month." Of course, this number is quickly revised: "poetry books work more like books of reference," after all, and one he bought he read years earlier. Eighty-one and a half percent it is!
Often it is not the books Hornby is reading that interests, but how he chose those books. A review of Robert Lowell's collected poems led him to the Ian Hamilton biography of the poet. He enjoyed it so much he tried two other books by Hamilton, Against Oblivion and a biography of J.D. Salinger. Realizing he could read Salinger's entire published output in a week, he did so. (Not every month is he so prolific a reader-a few months later, he read only David Copperfield. Which is better than most people can say, of course.)
Hornby reads a fair amount of biography, and he has good insights into the increasingly popular genre. On the Lowell biography, for example: "Sometimes, in the hands of the right person, biographies of relatively minor figures (and Lowell's influence seems to be receding fast) are especially compelling: They seem to have their times and cultural environments written through them like a stick of rock, in a way that sui generis major figures sometimes don't." A thoughtful idea, and then in the next sentence he is immediately funny: "Lowell, it turns out, is the guy you can see just behind Zelig's shoulder: He corresponded with Eliot, hung out with Jackie and Bobby K., and traveled around with Eugene McCarthy in '68."
And on the seemingly overwhelming temptation to put everything of a person's life (and that of his ancestors) into a book: "Please, biographers. Please, please, please. Have mercy. Select for us. We have jobs, kids, DVD players, season tickets."
Hornby is a real reader, after all, like the rest of us--despite the fact he's a bestselling author who has a rather flexible job. And like us, he is not always reading the latest and greatest. That is one of the charms of his column. Why shouldn't critics write also about older books? Books are timeless and always waiting to be discovered by new readers. And it is one of the jobs of the critic to point readers towards worthy books, and keep those worthy books from, as Ian Hamilton might say, dying in oblivion.
Unlike in most book criticism, here we also learn about Hornby himself. "I knew a little bit about this book before I started--I knew, for example, that a lot of funk records and Marvel comics were mentioned by name," he says of Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude. "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."
And even writers whose books have been made into movies with John Cusack and Hugh Grant aren't immune to certain insecurities. "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," he admits. This leads to an amusing bit when he finally does spot one young lady reading his first novel. His family does not let him enjoy the sensation.
I have only one complaint about Hornby's collection. He seems reluctant to say anything really bad about a book. But real readers often end up with duds. The Believer is most famous for its editors' condemnations of "snark" in the book reviewing business. Reviewers are too willing to be nasty, they say, and not willing enough to put in the effort to be charitable. Hornby jokingly says he would be fired if he engaged in snark himself, and so only reports the books he really dislikes anonymously. But there is some seriousness here, and it takes away from the satisfying realism of the rest of the book.
This is a very small criticism, however, of what is a perfect dip-into-it-anytime-bedside-table-book. Hornby can write engagingly of British football, pop music, and now books. Let's hope he continues to chronicle his obsessions in such charming ways.
*****
The good news: an educational book about politics was Barnes & Noble's top nonfiction seller of books released in 2004.
The bad news: the fact that it was Jon Stewart's America (The Book) means most people are getting their civics education from a team of comedy writers.
*****
I have reviewed only nonfiction in this column so far. So let me at least name here what was the best work of fiction published last year that I read--Muriel Spark's The Finishing School. Spark, in her 22nd novel, is as sharp as ever. The Finishing School has many of the Spark trademarks--it is short, and its themes include jealousy and the difficulty of separating art from life. Rowland Mahler, who runs a European finishing school with his wife, Nina, is a failed novelist who becomes obsessed with his certain-to-be-successful writer student, Chris. A thoroughly modern and original novel from this 86-year-old Scottish author.
Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and culture editor of Brainwash. Her website on culture can be found at www.kellyjanetorrance.com.
