Ten Years in the Tub (108 page)

Reading time, in other words, has been in short supply, even during the
day, and half the reading that has got done is directly related to the above. H. G. Bissinger's terrific nonfiction book, the source for a movie and then the TV series, is about the Permian Panthers, who represent a high school in Odessa, Texas, and regularly play in front of crowds of twenty thousand—or did, when the book was published in the early '90s. There is no equivalent of high-school or college football in Europe, for several reasons: there are no comparable sports scholarships, for a start, and, in a country the size of England, it's quite hard to live more than fifty miles from a pro team. And in any case, because your major sports have turned out to be so uninteresting to the rest of the world, young talent in the U.S. is governable; the young soccer players of London and Manchester no longer compete with each other for a place in a top professional team, but with kids from Africa and Asia and Spain. Over the last several years, Arsenal has routinely played without a single English player in their starting eleven. Our best player is Spanish; one of our brightest hopes for the future is Japanese and currently on loan to a club in Holland. So the idea of an entire community's aspirations being embodied in local teenage athletes is weird, but not unappealing.

The reality, as Bissinger presents it—and he went to live in Odessa for a year, hung out with players and coaching staff and fans, so he knows what he's talking about—is a lot darker, however. It turns out that there are not as many liberals in small-town Texas as the TV series would have me believe: in Dillon, people are always speaking out against racism, or talking about art, or thinking about great literature. (The adorably nerdy Landry Clarke can quite clearly be seen reading
High Fidelity
, my first novel, in an episode of the third season. This is almost certainly the greatest achievement of my writing career. And I'm sorry to bring it up, but I had to tell somebody.) In Odessa, Dillon's real-life counterpart… not so much racism gets confronted, or towering masterpieces of fiction consumed. Bissinger loves his football, and falls in love with the team, but is powerfully good on what the town's obsession with football costs its kids. It's not just the ones who don't make it, or become damaged along the way, all of whom get chucked away like ribs stripped of their meat (and catastrophically uneducated before they've been rejected); the kids who can't play football are almost worthless. The girls spend half their time cheerleading and cake-baking
for the players, and the students with more cerebral interests are ignored. In the season that Bissinger followed the team, the cost of rush-delivered postgame videotapes that enabled the coaches to analyze what had gone right and wrong was $6,400. The budget for the entire English department was $5,040. And the team used private jets for away games on more than one occasion. Isn't it great how little you need to spend to inculcate a passion for the arts? Perhaps I have drawn the wrong conclusion.

David Almond's
My Name Is Mina
is an extraordinary children's book by the author of
Skellig
, one of the best novels written for anyone published in the last fifteen years. And this new book is a companion piece to
Skellig
, a kind of prequel about the girl who lives next door. It's also, as it turns out, a handbook for anyone who is interested in literacy and education as they have been, or are being, applied to them or their children or anybody else's children:

            
Why should I write something so that somebody could say I was well below average, below average, average, above average, or well above average? What's average? And what about the ones that find out they're well below average? What's the point of that and how's that going to make them feel for the rest of their lives? And did William Blake do writing tasks just because somebody else told him to? And what Level would he have got anyway?

            
“Little Lamb, Who mad'st thee?

            
Dost thou know who mad'st thee?”

            
What level is that?

Almond's wry disdain for the way we sift our children as if they were potatoes killed me, because I was once found to be below average, across the board, at a crucial early stage in my educational career, and I have just about recovered enough confidence to declare that this judgment was, if not wrong, then at least not worth making. I think that, like everybody, I'm above average at some things and well below at others.

My Name Is Mina
is a literary novel for kids, a Blakean mystic's view of
the world, a fun-filled activity book for a rainy day (“EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY—Write a poem that repeats a word and repeats a word and repeats a word and repeats a word until it almost loses its meaning”), a study of loneliness and grief, and it made more sense to me than half the fiction I usually read. This can't be right, and I won't allow it to be right. For literary purposes only, I am off to call my wife obscenities and bounce her up and down on a mattress. As I write, she's upstairs, helping my youngest son with his homework, so she's in for a shock.

June 2011

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
—Lawrence W. Levine

     
  
Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture
—John Seabrook

     
  
The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism
—Thomas W. Evans

     
  
The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America
—James Sullivan

     
  
London Belongs to Me
—Norman Collins

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Unfamiliar Fishes
—Sarah Vowell

     
  
Norwood
—Charles Portis