Ten Years in the Tub (61 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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Sixty passengers killed in the Lockerbie bombing fell onto the roof and garden of one particular house in the town. (The woman who lived there, perhaps understandably, moved away.) We can't imagine horror on that scale intruding into our domestic lives, but in Doctorow's novel
The March
it happens all the time. A still, hot morning, everything in its place, and then suddenly the sound and soon the sight of an avenging army come to fuck up everything you own and hold dear, and then the flames, and quite often something worse on top. And of course one has every right to be troubled by everything being held dear Down There, but this needn't prevent a sense of wonder at the sheer scale and energy of the devastation. (One of the things I kept thinking as I read the novel was, How on earth did you manage to create a country out of this mess?) In Doctorow's novel, Sherman's march absorbs turncoat soldiers just trying to get through, and freed slaves, and bereft Southern widows, and cold-eyed surgeons; they're all eaten up and digested without a second thought. The violence, and violence of feeling, in this novel is on occasions so intense that it becomes kind of metaphysical, in the way that the violence in
King Lear
is metaphysical; the pitiful soldier with a spike protruding from his skull who has no memory of any kind, who lives every single second in the now, takes on an awful weight of meaning. And he ends up killing himself in the only way he can.

Lincoln turns up at the end of the book, as he has to, and in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I bought a used copy of his letters and speeches. He must have been an annoying person to live with, no? Yes, there's the Gettysburg address. But there's also this letter to a young family friend: “I have scarcely felt greater pain in my life than on learning from Bob's letter, that you had failed to enter Harvard Universityâ¦
I know not how to aid youâ¦
” [itals mine]. Come on, Abe! Is that really true? You couldn't pick up the phone for a pal? You can take this “honest” stuff too far, you know.

It would be easy, if unfair, to parody the post-Gladwell school of essays (and it's not unfair to say that
The Tipping Point
and
Blink
both paved the way for
Freakonomics
). You take two dissimilar things, proveâto your own satisfaction, at leastâthat they are not only not dissimilar but in fact more or less indistinguishable, suddenly cut away to provide some historical context, and then
explain what it all means to us in our daily lives. So it goes something like this:

Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
On the face of it, World War II and Pamela Anderson's breasts would seem to have very little in common. And yet on closer examination, the differences seem actually much less interesting than the similarities. Just as World War II has to be seen in the context of the Great War that preceded it, it's not possible to think about Pammie's left breast without also thinking about her right. Pamela Anderson's breasts, like World War II, have both inspired reams of comment and analysis, and occupied an arguably disproportionate amount of the popular imagination (in a survey conducted by the American Bureau of Statistical Analysis, more than 67 percent of men aged between thirty-five and fifty admitted to thinking about both World War II and what Anderson has under her T-shirt “more than once a year”); both World War II and the Anderson chest are becoming less
au courant
than they were. There are other, newer wars to fight; there are other, younger breasts to look at. What does all this tell us about our status as humans in the early years of the twenty-first century? To find out, we have to go back to the day in 1529 when Sir Thomas More reluctantly replaced Cardinal Wolsey as Lord Chancellor in Henry VIII's courtâ¦

They're always fun to read (the real essays, I mean, not my parody, which was merely fun to write, and a waste of your time). They pep you up, make you feel smart but a little giddy, occasionally make you laugh.
Freakonomics
occasionally hits you a little too hard over the head with a sense of its own ingenuity. “Now for another unlikely question: what did crack cocaine have in common with nylon stockings?” (One of the things they shared, apparently, is that they were both addictive, although silk stockings were only “practically” addictive, which might explain why there are comparatively few silk stockingârelated drive-by shootings.) The answer to the question of whether mankind is innately and universally corrupt “may lie inâ¦ bagels.” (The dots here do not represent an ellipsis, but a kind of trumpeting noise.) Schoolteachers are like sumo wrestlers, real estate agents are like the Ku Klux Klan, and so on. I enjoyed the book, which is really a collection of statistical conjuring tricks, but I wasn't entirely sure of what it was about.

I don't think I have ever had so many books I wanted to read. I picked up a few things in U.S. bookstores; I was given a load of cool-looking books by interesting writers when I was in Mississippi and ordered one or two more (Larry Brown's
On Fire
, for example) when I came home. Meanwhile I still want to go back to L. P. Hartley's
Eustace and Hilda
trilogy, but Hartley seems too English at the moment. And I have a proof copy of the new Anne Tyler, and this young English writer David Peace has written a novel about 1974 as seen through the prism of Brian Clough's disastrous spell in charge at Leeds United. (Brian Clough wasâ¦ Leeds United wereâ¦ Oh, never mind.) So I'd better push on.

Exceptâ¦ a long time ago, I used to mention Arsenal, the football team I have supported for thirty-eight years, in these pages. Arsenal was occasionally called in to provide an excuse for why I hadn't read as much as I wanted to, but up until a month or so ago, they were rubbish, and I couldn't use them as an excuse for anything. They weren't even an excuse for a football team. Anyway, now they'reâ
we're
âgood again. We have the semifinals of the Champions League coming up in a couple of weeks, for the first time in my life, and I can see books being moved onto the bench for the next few weeks. Ah, the old dilemma: books versus rubbish. (Or maybe, books versus stuff that can sometimes seem more fun than books.) It's good to have it back.