victory left gaping holes in the book he wanted to write. He was denied permission to quote from letters that are freely available for inspection in various libraries. I’m still glad I read it, though. I learned things—that you could earn $2,000 for a short story in the 1930s, for example. The stories about Salinger hustling for work, and dining gaily with the Oliviers in London, make one feel almost giddy, so unlikely do they sound now; and when the Hamilton mind goes to work on the stories, it’s something to see.
The realization that you could polish off a major author’s entire oeuvre in less than a week was definitely part of the appeal—you won’t catch Dickens being pushed around like that—but it was still tougher work than I thought it would be. Just about every one of Nine Stories is perfect, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is fresh and funny, but Seymour: An Introduction… Man, I really didn’t want to know about Seymour’s ears. Or his eyes. Or whether he could play sports. The very first time I met him he blew his brains out (in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), so to be brutal, I never really developed as much curiosity about him as Salinger seems to want of me. But whereas I was expecting something light and sweet, I ended up with this queasy sense of the psychodramatic: I knew that I wouldn’t be able to separate the stories from the Story, but I hadn’t expected the author to collude in the confusion. Hamilton is especially good on how Buddy Glass, apparently Salinger’s mouthpiece, creates and perpetuates myths about his alter ego.
I read Pompeii in between Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam… It has to be a rule, I think, that when a family member gives you his new book, you stop what you’re doing and read it. Having a writer for a brother-in-law could have turned out really, really badly. He could have been more or less successful than me. Or he could have written books that I hated, or found impossible to get through. (Imagine if your brother-in-law wrote Finnegans Wake, and you were really busy at work. Or you weren’t really a big reader.) Luckily, his books are great, and a pleasure to read, and despite my trepidation—I couldn’t see how he was going to pull off a thriller which ends with the biggest deus ex machina the world has ever known—this is, I reckon, his best one. Oh, and he read just about every book there is on volcanology and Roman water systems, as well as every word Pliny wrote, so my admiration for my sister has increased even further. Has she been sitting there listening to stuff about Roman water systems for the last three years? I now understand why her favorite film of recent years is Legally Blonde. How could it not be?
I read 55 percent of the books I bought this month—five and a half out of ten. Two of the unread books, however, are volumes of poetry, and, to my way of thinking, poetry books work more like books of reference: They go up on the shelves straight away (as opposed to onto the bedside table), to be taken down and dipped into every now and again. (And, before any outraged poets explode, I’d like to point out that I’m one of the seventy-three people in the world who buys poetry.) And anyway, anyone who is even contemplating ploughing straight through over a thousand pages of Lowell’s poetry clearly needs a cable TV subscription, or maybe even some friends, a relationship, and a job. So if it’s OK with you, I’m taking the poetry out, and calling it five and a half out of eight—and the Heller I’ve read before, years ago, so that’s six and a half out of eight. I make that eighty one and a quarter percent! I am both erudite and financially prudent! I admit it: I haven’t read a book about an Australian literary hoax (which, I repeat, I bought for a quid), and a handful of essays about people like James Wright, Robinson Jeffers, and Norman Cameron. Maybe there are slumbering pockets of ignorance best left undisturbed; no one likes a know-all.
BOOKS BOUGHT:
BOOKS READ:
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. You just can’t help yourself, despite the odds: you need to know, straight off, whether anyone is reading one of yours. You imagine spending your days under a parasol watching, transfixed and humbled, as a beautiful and intelligent young man or woman, almost certainly a future best friend, maybe even spouse, weeps and guffaws through three hundred
