THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE

This piece by Elinore Standard appeared as one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" column in the July 15, 2005 Record Review.

Works mentioned: The Polysyllabic Spree, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem,


THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE



“Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.”

Someone gave me “The Polysyllabic Spree” by Nick Hornby (McSweeney’s, 2004) a quirky chronicle of 14 months of reading from September 2003, to November, 2004, which starts off with two lists: books bought and a shorter one of books read. Hornby’s regular column in “The Believer” magazine is titled “The Stuff I’ve Been Reading” a general subject irresistible to me. Whenever I come across a list from such a fellow reader, I am right in there, poised to glean whatever I can.

In “Spree” Hornby describes “the circuitous process by which we come to books,” and he says “reading begets reading in strange and unscientific ways” as he wanders from book to book. As observed in a little review in the New York “Times”, (December 22, 2004) Hornby likes “The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem and says Kurt Vonnegut is “the greatest living writer in America.”

Not long ago, Hornby had a tiff with editors at “The Believer” and because of it, his column disappeared for a month, the very month that commenced my new subsctiption. Fortunately, he was back the following month (February, 2005) with this explanation: “…they (the editors) have never approved of me reading anything about sport, and nor do they like me referring to books wherein people eat meat or farmed fish… Anyway, I was stupid enough to try to accommodate their whims and you can’t negotiate with moral terrorists. In my last column,” Hornby continues, “I wrote a little about cricket, and I made a slightly off-color joke about Chekhov, and that was it: I was banned from the magazine, sine die, which is why my column was mysteriously absent from the last issue and replaced by a whole load of pictures. Pictures! This is how they announce my death! It’s like a kind of happy-clappy North Korea round here.”

Hornby is mainly a novelist and football fan and seems to do the book reviewing reluctantly or in spite of himself. He wants to read what he wants to read and resents it if compulsory reading is imposed on him. How familiar this sounds.

“About a Boy” (Penguin, 1998) is Nick Hornby’s story of a selfish, lying bachelor, a real skunk, who reluctantly becomes attached to a 12-year old misfit. Will, the bachelor, is not above inventing a fantasy child and declaring himself a lonely, divorced dad in order to pick up bright, attractive, available single moms. Hornby’s writing is hip and funny and his dialogue is so real it is almost as if he took a tape recorder into the playground and the fern bar and simply transcribed conversations between parents and children, single women in groups, and mothers and prospective boyfriends. Funny, yes, but sad. At least Hornby resists any temptation to rehabilitate Will, a man completely blank inside. This novel was made into a movie with Hugh Grant in 2002 and for once, the movie is more entertaining than the book mainly because the acting is so surprisingly good and the directors changed the last third and devised an up-beat, if not happy, ending.

Hornby’s latest novel, “A Long Way Down”, is reviewed in the May 06, 2005
“Times Literary Supplement” by Sean O’Brien. O’Brien says the novel opens “with the meeting of four strangers on the roof of Toppers’ House, a London tower block popular with suicides.” The novel seems to weigh the four characters’ reasons for killing themselves, pro and con, and it’s hard to tell (from this short review) if Hornby is serious or not. Subsequently, the novel has been published in the US (Riverhead) and was reviewed respectfully and uneasily in the New York Times (June 12) by Chris Heath. To me it seems risky (and possibly suicidal) to undertake a novel about suicide but Hornby is inevitably brave and confident.

Hornby went on an author tour throughout the US to promote “A Long Way Down” and called it “the closest thing I’ve ever been to actually not living.” He told the New York Times Book Review that the shift from writing a book to promoting one “…does feel a bit like you’ve come out of some dark place and all these flashbulbs go off. It’s like a hostage being released or something.” (June 26)

In an Internet (www.nickhornby.co.uk) interview, Hornby talked about what kinds of books that are published in the mass market today and what kind of books win literary prizes: “…you’ve got all that Jackie Collins stuff on one side and all this very difficult, dark, inaccessible literature on the other.” The literary novels may get the prizes but guess which kind make money for everybody?

Writing in “The Believer” (April, 2005—yes! In spite of themselves they’ve managed to hang onto him!) he says, “What I’ve always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren’t themselves smart, or at least don’t necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states.” Although he is commenting on Ian McEwan, Hornby cites Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and Roddy Doyle as writers who are able to be smart in this way. “It seems to me to be a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things.” What an interesting and provocative observation. I’d never have thought it up myself. So thanks, Nick, way to go.

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