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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
I'm not the person to whom you should make an argument using J.D. Salinger as a measure of greatness ("'sincere" in the manner of an advertising man's necktie," said Mary McCarthy of "Franny and Zooey" in 1962). But does Hornby really believe that nothing great goes out of print? The New York Review of Books has established an entire imprint dedicated to books that have gone out of print, and in just the last year they've given us, among others, Rose Macaulay's "The Towers of Trebizond" and John Horne Burns' "The Gallery," great books both. Perhaps, in 20 or 30 years, when Hornby's best novel so far, "How to Be Good," is out of print, it would be worth asking him if he still believes this? (He may be modest enough not to think that prospect is any big deal.)
What's most valuable about this collection, though, is that Hornby, by dint of his sensibility and the variety of his choices, shows that the distinction still made between reading for the sake of "enrichment" (as that gasbag Harold Bloom insists upon) and reading for pleasure is a phony divide. After encountering Dennis Lehane's novels, Hornby wonders why no one has ever recommended the writer to him, and answers, "Because I don't know the right kind of people, that's why. In the last three weeks, about five different people have told me that Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Line of Beauty' is a work of genius" -- he's right, he doesn't know the right kind of people -- "and I'm sure it is ... I'm equally sure, however, that I won't walk into a lamppost while reading it, like I did with 'Presumed Innocent' all those years ago ... I'm happy to have friends who recommend Alan Hollinghurst, really I am. They're all nice, bright people. I just wish I had friends who could recommend books like 'Mystic River,' too. Are you that person? Do you have any vacancies for a pal?" (It's your lucky day, Hornby. Get Denise Mina's "Garnethill" trilogy, Val McDermid's "Killing the Shadows" and "A Place of Execution," Ace Atkins' "Dark End of the Street," Kris Nelscott's Smokey Dalton series and Ruth Rendell's "A Judgement in Stone." Then let's talk.)
What I like about that passage is that it's not an either/or opposition. There's no assuming that someone who walks into a lamppost because of a thriller is not going to have time for a literary novel. And, in my experience, there are very few readers who are either/or sorts of readers. (To be fair to Hollinghurst, I didn't poop out on "The Line of Beauty" halfway through because it's too literary. I quit because there's no payoff to the structure he sets up in the first half of the book. There's just more of Hollinghurst's minor, calibrated observations, and a jump ahead in time that saves him from writing the novel's transition, one that makes no emotional sense anyway. The English novels to read on the Thatcher era remain Jonathan Coe's "The Winshaw Legacy" and Ian McEwan's "The Child in Time.")
In a stroke typical of Hornby's approach, his best insight into the insularity of the literary mindset comes in an aside prompted by a quote from Janet Malcolm's "Reading Chekhov," a book Hornby likes. Malcolm wrote: "Everyone has seen a 'Cherry Orchard' or an 'Uncle Vanya,' while very few have ever heard of 'The Wife,' or 'In the Ravine.'" To which Hornby responds, "Perhaps this isn't the right time to talk about what 'everyone' means here, although one is entitled to stop and wonder at the world in which our men and women of letters live -- not 'everyone' has seen a football match or an episode of 'Seinfeld,' let alone a nineteenth-century Russian play."
Malcolm was, of course, pointing out that Chekhov's plays are better known than his short fiction, and chose a clumsy way of saying that. But the assumption behind that clumsiness deserves comment. Why is it that those who have the most vested in encouraging people to read are often the ones least suited for the job? Saying that "everyone" knows Chekhov is, whether intentionally or not, one of those statements guaranteed to make people feel out of it, to make them feel that culture is a closed circuit to which they can find no point of entry. I'm not advocating the opposite, that idiotic state of affairs where you assume that no one knows anything and even common cultural references have to be identified, for fear of insulting the reader.
What Hornby does so beautifully here is to assume the intelligence of his readers, and to obliterate the literature/pleasure divide by acting, sensibly, as if it didn't exist. The implicit message of these columns is that nothing that is not pleasurable has a right to be considered art. It certainly doesn't have a right to your time.
