BOOKS READ:
If you wanted to draw a family tree of everything I read and bought this month—and you never know, it could be fun, if you’re a writer, say, or a student, and there are several large holes in your day—you’d have to put McSweeney’s 13 and Pete Dexter’s novel Train right at the top.22 They’re the Adam and Eve here, or they would be if Adam and Eve had been hermaphrodites, each able to give birth independently of the other. McSweeney’s 13 and Train never actually mated to produce a beautiful synthesis of the two; and nor did any of the other books actually get together, either. So it would be a pretty linear family tree, to be honest: one straight line coming out of McSweeney’s 13, because McSweeney’s begat a bunch of graphic novels (McSweeney’s 13, edited by Chris Ware, is a comics issue, if you’re not from ’round these parts), and another straight line coming out of Train, which leads to a bunch of nonfiction books, for reasons I will come to later. Train didn’t directly beget anything, although it did plant some seeds. (I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Well, if Train and McSweeney’s 13 never actually mated, and if Train never directly begat anything, then how good is this whole family-tree thing? And my answer is, Oh, it’s good. Trust me. I have a writer’s instinct.) Anyway, if you do decide to draw the family tree, the good news is that it’s easy; the bad news is that it’s boring, pointless, and arguably makes no sense. Up to you.
[We do indeed pay Nick Hornby to write his monthly column, but we didn’t pay him to mention McSweeney’s 13. —Ed.]
Pete Dexter’s Train was carefully chosen to reintroduce me to the world of fiction, a world I have been frightened of visiting ever since I finished David Copperfield a couple of months back. I’ve read Dexter before—The Paperboy is a terrific novel—and the first couple of chapters of Train are engrossing, complicated, fresh, and real, and I really thought I was back on the fictional horse. But then, in the third chapter, there is an episode of horrific violence, graphically rendered, and suddenly I was no longer under the skin of the book, the way I had been; I was on the outside looking in. What happens is that in the process of being raped, the central female character gets her nipple sliced off, and it really upset me. I mean, I know I was supposed to get upset. But I was bothered way beyond function. I was bothered to the extent that I struck up a conversation with the author at periodic intervals thereafter. “Did the nipple really have to go, Pete? Explain to me why. Couldn’t it have just… nearly gone? Or maybe you could have left it alone altogether? I mean, come on, man. Her husband has just been brutally murdered. She’s been raped. We get the picture. Leave the nipple alone.”
I am, I think, a relatively passive reader, when it comes to fiction. If a novelist tells me that something happened, then I tend to believe him, as a rule. In his memoir Experience, Martin Amis recalls his father, Kingsley, saying that he found Virginia Woolf’s fictional world “wholly contrived: when reading her he found that he kept interpolating hostile negatives, murmuring ‘Oh no she didn’t’ or ‘Oh no he hadn’t’ or ‘Oh no it wasn’t’ after each and every authorial proposition”; I only do that when I’m reading something laughably bad (although after reading that passage in Experience, I remember it took me a while to shake off Kingsley’s approach to the novel). But in the nipple-slicing incident in Train, I thought I could detect Dexter’s thumb on the scale, to use a brilliant Martin Amis phrase from elsewhere in Experience. It seemed to me as though poor Norah lost her nipple through a worldview rather than through a narrative inevitability; and despite all the great storytelling and the muscular, grave prose, and the richness and resonance of the setup (Train is a golf caddy in 1950s L.A., and the novel is mostly about race) I just sort of lost my grip on the book. Also, someone gets shot dead at the end, and I wasn’t altogether sure why. That’s a sure sign that you haven’t been paying the right kind of attention. It should always be clear why someone gets shot. If I ever shoot you, I promise you there will be a really good explanation, one you will grasp immediately, should you live.
While I was in the middle of Train, I went browsing in a remainder bookshop, and came across a copy of Frank Kermode’s memoir Not Entitled. I knew of Kermode’s work as a critic, but I didn’t know he’d written a memoir, some of which is about his childhood on the Isle of Man, and when I saw it, I was seized by a need to own it. This need was entirely created by poor Norah in Train. There would be no nipple-slicing in Not Entitled, I was sure of it. I even started to read the thing in a cab on the way home, and although I gave up pretty quickly (it probably went too far the other way—it’s a delicate balance I’m trying to strike here), it was very restorative.
I bought Claire Tomalin’s gripping, informative The Invisible Woman at the Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, London, which is full of all sorts of cool stuff: marked-up reading copies which say things like “SIGH here,” letters, the original partwork editions of the novels, and so on. The thing is, I really want to read a Dickens biography, but they’re all too long: Ackroyd’s is a frankly hilarious 1,140 pages, excluding notes and postscript. (It has a great blurb on the front, the Ackroyd. “An essential book for anyone who has ever loved or read Dickens,” says P. D. James [my italics]. Can you imagine? You flog your way through Great Expectations at school, hate it, and then find you’ve got to read a thousand pages of biography! What a pisser!) So both the museum visit and the Tomalin book—about his affair with the actress Nelly Ternan—were my ways of fulfilling a need to find out more about the great man without killing myself.
Here’s something I found out in The Invisible Woman: the son of Charles Dickens’s mistress died during my lifetime. He wasn’t Dickens’s son, but even so: I could have met a guy who said, “Hey, my mum slept with Dickens.” I wouldn’t have understood what he meant, because I was only two, and as Tomalin makes clear, he wouldn’t have wanted to own up anyway, because he was traumatized by what he found out about his mother’s past. It’s still weird, though, I think, to see how decades—centuries—can be eaten up like that.
Ackroyd, by the way, disputes that Ternan and Dickens ever had an affair. He concedes that Chas set her up in a couple of houses, one in France, and disappeared for long stretches of time in order to visit her, but he won’t accept that Dickens was an adulterer: that sort of explanation might work for an ordinary man, he says, but Dickens “was not ‘ordinary’ in any sense.” The Invisible Woman is such a formidable work of scholarship, however, that it leaves very little room for doubt. Indeed, Claire Tomalin is so consumed by her research, so much the biographer, that she actually takes Dickens to task for destroying evidence of his relationship with Nelly Ternan. “Dickens himself would not have welcomed