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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
This is important for two reasons. Unlike critics in any other art, it's possible for book reviewers to write piece after piece without talking about what people are actually reading. A book critic free to write about classics, old favorites, new books or whatever stands a better chance of connecting with more readers than someone who's just striving to keep up with what comes down the literary poop-chute.
Second, Hornby is writing about the day-to-day process of being readers as most of us practice it -- not following some neat scheme but reading without premeditation, going higgledy-piggledy from one subject to another, based on whim, recommendation, chance.
The result is less a column to read for insight into any one book (though there is that sometimes) than a column in which to recognize the habits that bind readers together, no matter the differences in what they read.
That recognition starts with the two lists that headline every Hornby column: "Books Bought" and "Books Read." Sometimes entries in the former end up on the latter that month, a few months later or not at all. Anyone who buys more books than he or she can read (i.e., any reader), and who then lets those acquisitions hang around for months or years, will look at those lists and sense a kindred spirit. (The surest way to spot a nonreader: someone who comes into your house, looks at your books and asks, "Have you read all these?")
Hornby is terrific on the haphazard way we're led to books. An example: He's a big fan of the Philadelphia band Marah. (They figured in his wonderful New York Times Op-Ed column last May about what it feels like for a pop fan to fall out of sync with contemporary music.) Marah's latest album, "Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky," takes its name from a trilogy of novels written in the 1930s by English writer Patrick Hamilton. Thus is Hornby led to Hamilton.
For me, it doesn't end there. I had come across Hamilton's name last year, in reading B.R. Myers' "A Reader's Manifesto" (one of the only pieces of cultural criticism of the past few years that really matters), and ordered both "Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky" and Hamilton's later "Hangover Square" from Amazon U.K. When they came, I looked them over, kept them on my night table for a few days, then shelved them and forgot about them. When I came upon Hamilton's name in this book, I got out "Hangover Square" and found, just as my Penguin edition blurbed, "one of the great novels of the 20th century." (Suffice it to say that Hamilton writes about street life with an honesty and lyricism, an absence of sentimentality or fetish for squalor, that should make nearly every hard-boiled writer hang his or her head in shame.)
That is the circuitous process by which we come to books. And with the supermarket nature of the modern book megastores impeding the interaction of customers, and seeming to offer so much that nearly any choice you make is going to feel wrong, we need to value all the quirks of fate and coincidence that lead us to particular books.
Many of Hornby's best insights are tossed off, such as this from his discussion of Pete Dexter's "Train": "It seemed to me as though poor Norah lost her nipple through a worldview rather than through a narrative inevitability." Hornby admires Dexter's novel. But his offhand remark on the grisly fate of Dexter's character is an obituary (and not a loving one) for every novelist who has ever tried to impress us with his or her toughness (what I call the "Jump up and down so we can hear 'em clank together" school of writing).
Hornby isn't always on target. Some of his insights are the sort of silly things we say and later have the good sense to retract, as when Hornby realizes he was foolish to claim that a good literary experience trumps most other good cultural experiences. He does not, sadly, back down from this really dumb statement: "Usually, books have gone out of print for a reason, and that reason is they're no good, or, at least, of very marginal interest. (Yeah, yeah, your favorite book of all time is out of print and it's a scandal. But I'll bet you any money you like it's not as good as 'The Catcher in the Rye,' or 'The Power and the Glory,' or anything else still available that was written in the same year.)"
