that looks like uselessness to appear in your work. Christopher Ricks did it in his recent book Dylan’s Visions of Sin: he becomes very troubled by a ropy rhyme (“rob them”/“problem”) in “Positively Fourth Street,” and then nags at it until the ropy rhyme becomes yet another example of Bob’s genius: “It must be granted that if these lines induce queasiness, they do make a point of saying ‘No, I do not feel that good.’ So an unsettling rhyme such as problem/rob them might rightly be hard to stomach…” The notion that Dylan might have just thought, “Oh, fuck it, that’ll do” never crosses Ricks’s mind for a moment.
Malcolm does her own, perhaps more self-aware version of this when talking about the troublingly “abrupt” and “unmotivated” changes of character in Chekhov’s stories: “after enough time goes by, a great writer’s innovations stop looking like mistakes.” See, I’m at that early stage, where everything still looks like a mistake, so I would have liked Ms. Malcolm to be a little more precise with the figures here. What’s “enough time”? Just, you know, roughly? Are we talking six months? Two years? I don’t really want to have to wait much longer than that.
I’ve known Roddy Doyle for a while now. I read him before I met him, and the Barrytown trilogy was an important source of inspiration for me when I was starting out: who knew that books written with such warmth and simplicity could be so complex and intelligent? On this side of the Atlantic, at least, Doyle single-handedly redefined what we mean by “literary” fiction. Oh, Play That Thing is the second part of the trilogy that began with A Star Called Henry; it’s set in the United States during the twenties and thirties, and features Louis Armstrong as a central character, so I’ve been reading it while listening to Hot Fives and Sevens on my iPod.
Reading reviews and interviews with him over the last few weeks, one is reminded that there’s nothing critics like less than a writer producing something that he hasn’t done before—apart, that is, from a writer producing more of the same. One reviewer complained that Doyle used to write short books, and now they’ve gone fat; another that he used to write books set in Dublin, and he should have kept them there; another that he used to write with a child’s-eye view, and now he’s writing about adults. All of these criticisms, of course, could have been based on the catalogue copy, rather than on the book itself—a two-line synopsis and information about the number of pages would have received exactly the same treatment. You’re half-expecting someone to point out that back in the day he used to write books that sold for a tenner, and now they’ve gone up to seventeen quid.
What he’s doing, of course, is the only thing a writer can do: he’s writing the books that he wants, in the way he wants to. He wants to write about different things, and to add something to the natural talent that produced those early books. I wouldn’t want to read anyone who did anything else—apart from P. G. Wodehouse, who did exactly the same thing hundreds of times over. So where does that leave us? Pretty much back where we started, I suppose. That’s the beauty of this column, even if I do say it myself.
Nick Hornby’s Preface to the Second Column Collection, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt (2006)
I began writing this column in the summer of 2003. It seemed to me that what I had chosen to read in the preceding few weeks contained a narrative, of sorts—that one book led to another, and thus themes and patterns emerged, patterns that might be worth looking at. And, of course, that was pretty much the last time my reading had any kind of logic or shape to it. Ever since then my choice of books has been haphazard, whimsical, and entirely shapeless.
It still seemed like a fun thing to do, though, writing about reading, as opposed to writing about individual books. At the beginning of my writing career I reviewed a lot of fiction, but I had to pretend, as reviewers do, that I had read the books outside of space, time, and self—in other words, I had to pretend that I hadn’t read them when I was tired and grumpy, or drunk, that I wasn’t envious of the author, that I had no agenda, no personal aesthetic or personal taste or personal problems, that I hadn’t read other reviews of the same book already, that I didn’t know who the author’s friends and enemies were, that I wasn’t trying to place a book with the same publisher, that I hadn’t been bought lunch by the book’s doe-eyed publicist. Most of all I had to pretend that I hadn’t written the review because I was urgently in need of a couple hundred quid. Being paid to read a book and then write about it creates a dynamic which compromises the reviewer in all kinds of ways, very few of them helpful.
So this column was going to be different. Yes, I would be paid for it, but I would be paid to write about what I would have done anyway, which was read the books I wanted to read. And if I felt that mood, morale, concentration levels, weather, or family history had affected my relationship with a book, I could and would say so. Inevitably, however, the knowledge that I had to write something for the Believer at the end of each month changed my reading habits profoundly. For a start, I probably read more books than I might otherwise have done. I suspect that I used to take a longer break between books, a couple of days, maybe, during which time I’d carry a copy of the New Yorker or Mojo around with me, but now I push on with the next book, scared I won’t have enough to write about (or that I’ll look bad, unbookish and unworthy of the space in a publication as smart as the Believer). Magazines have been the real casualties of this regime (although the Economist has survived, partly to replace the newspapers I’m not reading.)
It was the very nature of the Believer itself, however, that really shook up my reading, hopefully forever. The magazine, which is five months older than the column, is a broad church, and all sorts of writers (and artists, and filmmakers, and other creative types) are welcome to stand in the pulpit and preach, but it has one commandment: THOU SHALT NOT SLAG ANYONE OFF. As I understand it, the founders of the magazine wanted one place, one tiny corner of the world, in which writers could be sure that they weren’t going to get a kicking; predictably and depressingly, this ambition was mocked mercilessly, mostly by those critics whose children would go hungry if their parents weren’t able to abuse authors whose books they didn’t much like.
I understood and supported the magazine’s stance, which seemed admirable and entirely unproblematic to me—until I had to write about the books I’d read which I hadn’t much liked. The first couple of times this happened, earnest discussions took place with the magazine’s editors, who felt that I’d crossed a line, and I either rewrote the offending passages so that I struck a more conciliatory tone, or the offending books and writers became anonymous. I didn’t mind in the least, and in any case it gave me the opportunity to mock the Believer’s ambition mercilessly. (For the record: there is no Polysyllabic Spree. I deal with Vendela Vida and Andrew Leland, co-editor and managing editor of the Believer, respectively, and they are neither humorless nor evangelical. They even watch television, I think.)
The Believer’s ethos did, however, make me think about what and why I read. I didn’t want to keep rewriting offending passages in my columns, and I certainly didn’t want to keep using the phrases Anonymous writer or Unnameable novel. So what to do? My solution was to try to choose books I knew I would like. I’m not sure this idea is as blindingly obvious as it seems. We often read books that we think we ought to read, or that we think we ought to have read, or that other people think we should read (I’m always coming across people who have a mental, sometimes even an actual, list of the books they think they should have read by the time they turn forty, fifty, or dead); I’m sure I’m not the only one who harrumphs his way through a highly praised novel, astonished but actually rather pleased that so many people have got it so wrong. As a consequence, the first thing to be cut from my reading diet was contemporary literary fiction. This seems to me to be the highest-risk category—or the highest risk for me, at any rate, given
