Ten Years in the Tub (63 page)

Ali Smith's brilliant
The Accidental
manages to capture more of our lives, including both the humdrum and the uncomfortable, than any novel has any right to do. The central narrative idea (stranger walks into a family holiday home) is basic, and the book is divided into three parts, “The Beginning,” “The Middle,” and “The End.” And yet
The Accidental
is extremely sophisticated, very
wise, wonderfully idiosyncratic, and occasionally very funny. (It says something about Ali Smith's comic powers that she can make you laugh simply by listing the schedule of UK History, a British cable channel.) Here's a little bit from the middle of the book, the section entitled “The Middle”: “The people on the TV talk endlessly… They say the word
middle
a lot. Support among the middle class. No middle ground. Now to other news: more unrest in the Middle East. Magnus thinks about Amber's middle…” I should own up here and tell you that
The Accidental
is a literary novel; there's no point trying to hide this fact. But it's literary not because the author is attempting to be boring in the hope of getting on to the shortlist of a literary prize (and here in the UK, Smith's been on just about every shortlist there is) but because she can't figure out a different way of getting this particular job done, and the novel's experiments, its shifting points of view, and its playfulness with language seem absolutely necessary. I can't think of a single
Believer
reader who wouldn't like this book. And I know you all.

I read
The Shrimp and the Anenome
, the first part of L. P. Hartley's Eustace and Hilda trilogy, bloody ages ago. And then I lost the book, and then I went off on my Southern thing, and then it was way too slow to pick up in a European Cup Final month, and… to get to the point: I've now read
The Sixth Heaven
, the second part, and it was something of a disappointment after the first.
The Shrimp and the Anenome
is an extremely acute book about childhood because, well, it explores the reality of the feelings involved, even though these feelings belong to people not quite into their teens. Hartley (who wrote
The Go-Between
and hung out in country houses with Lady Ottoline Morrell and the like) never patronizes, and the rawness, the fear, and the cruelty of his young central characters chafes against their gentility in a way that stops the novel from being inert. In
The Sixth Heaven
, however, Eustace and Hilda are in their twenties, and inertia has taken hold—there is a lot more hanging out in country houses with posh people than I could stomach.
The Sixth Heaven
, indeed, might have become an Unnamed Literary Novel, as per the diktats of the Polysyllabic Spree, if Hartley didn't write so wonderfully well. I nearly gave up hundreds of times, but just as I was about to do so, along came another brilliant observation. Even so, the third novel,
Eustace and Hilda
, begins with a chapter entitled
“Lady Nelly Expects a Visitor”; the first sentence reads thus: “Lady Nelly came out from the cool, porphyry-tinted twilight of St Marks into the strong white sunshine of the Piazza.” I fear it might be all over for me.

I have just consulted my Amazon Recommends list, just in case anything took my fancy, and the first five books were as follows:

       
1)
  
Fidgety Fish
by Ruth Galloway

       
2)
  
The Suicidal Mind
by Edwin S. Shneidman

       
3)
  
The Very Lazy Ladybird
by Isobel Finn, Jack Tickle (Illustrator)

       
4)
  
Clumsy Crab
by Ruth Galloway

       
5)
  
No Time to Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One
by Carla Fine

It will have to be
The Very Lazy Ladybird
, I think. I haven't got time for books about clumsy crabs in a World Cup month.

September 2006

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Field Notes from a Catastrophe
—Elizabeth Kolbert

     
  
The Case of Mr. Crump
—Ludwig Lewishon

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
None

Y
ou have probably noticed that we don't think much of scientists, here at Believer Towers. The Polysyllabic Spree, the eighty-seven white-robed and intimidatingly effete young men and women who edit this magazine, are convinced that the real work in our society is done by poets, novelists, animators, experimental filmmakers, drone-metal engineers, and the rest of the riff-raff who typically populate the pages of this magazine. I, however, am not so sure, which is why, after a great deal of agonized internal debate, I have decided to introduce a Scientist of the Month Award. As will become clear, this month's winner, Matthias Wittlinger of the University of Ulm, in Germany, is a worthy one, but I am very worried about several, if not all, of the months to come. I don't really know much about science, and my fear is that we'll end up giving the prize to the same old faces, month after month after month. A word in Marie Curie's ear: I hope you have plenty of room on your mantelpiece. Without giving anything away, you're going to need it.

According to the July 1 edition of the
Economist
, Matthias Wittlinger decided to investigate a long-held but never proven suspicion that what enables an ant to find his (or her) way home to the nest is an inbuilt pedometer—in other words, they count their steps. He tested this hypothesis in an ingenious way. First, he made the ants walk through a ten-meter tunnel to get food; he then made them walk back to their nests through a different ten-meter tunnel. But the fun really started once they'd got the hang of this. Wittlinger trimmed the legs of one group of ants, in order to shorten the stride pattern; another
group was put on stilts made out of pig bristle, so that their steps became much bigger. The results were satisfying. The ants with little legs stopped about four meters short of the nest; the ants on stilts, meanwhile, overshot by fifteen feet. Anyone who thinks that someone other than Wittlinger is a more deserving recipient of the inaugural Stuff I've Been Reading Scientist of the Month Award is, to put it bluntly, an idiot. Science doesn't get any better than this.

I'm delighted for Matthias, of course, but I am also feeling a little rueful. For many years now, I've been trimming and lengthening ants' legs, mostly because the concentration and discipline involved has allowed me to forgo all sexual activity. (I have been using pieces of old guitar string for the stilts, and guitar string is funnier than pig bristle, because the ants kind of bounce along.) I wasn't, however, doing it in a particularly purposeful way—I had no idea that I could have been written about in the
Economist
, or that I could win prestigious awards. And anyway, I was making an elementary error: I was trimming and lengthening the legs of
the same ants
—and this, I see now, was completely and utterly pointless: three hours of microsurgery on each ant and they all ended up the same height anyway.

Cynics don't read the
Believer
, which is fortunate, because a cynic might say that the introduction of the Scientist of the Month award is a desperate attempt to draw attention away from the stark, sad entry under Books Read at the top of this page. And a clever cynic might wonder whether the absence of read books, and therefore the appearance of the award, have anything to do with the arrival of the World Cup, a football [
sic
] tournament that every four years consumes the inhabitants of every country in the world bar the U.S. The truth is that the World Cup
allowed
me to introduce the award. I'd been meaning to do it for years, but space had always prevented me from doing so. Now that I have no books to write about, I can fulfill what can be described, without exaggeration, as a lifelong dream.

I wish I had read some books this month, to be honest, and not just because I wouldn't have to drivel on about nothing for a couple of pages. It's not that I believe reading is more important than sport, but there have been moments during this last month when I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I was wasting my time and yet made no effort to turn off the TV and do something
more constructive. Watching Ukraine v. Tunisia can in part be explained by my bet on Andrei Shevchenko to score during the game. (He did, after taking a dive to win a penalty that he himself took.) But I have no way of rationalizing my willingness to stick with Ukraine v. Switzerland, even after it was clear that it was going to be perhaps the most pointless and boring ninety minutes in the history, of not only soccer but of all human activity. Couldn't I have read something at some point during the second half? A couple of Dylan Thomas's letters, say? They were right there, on the bookshelf behind the sofa.

It wasn't a very good World Cup. The star players all underperformed; everybody was too scared of losing; there were too few goals, too many red and yellow cards; and there was way too much cheating and diving and shirtpulling. And yet the rhythm of a World Cup day is unimprovable, if you don't have a proper job. You wake up in the morning, do a little online betting, read the previews of the games in the newspaper, maybe watch the highlights program you recorded the previous night. The first game is at two, so just beforehand you are joined by other friends without proper jobs (some of whom won't leave until eleven that night); it finishes at four, when you repair to the garden, smoke, drink tea, and kick a ball about with any of your children who happen to be there. The second game finishes at seven, just in time for bed, bath, and story time, and I don't know about you, but we used the “live pause” feature on our digital system for the eight o'clock game—there was a heat wave in Europe, and my kids took a while to get to sleep. Food was ordered at halftime and delivered during the second half. Has there ever been a better way to live than this? Friends, football, takeaways, no work… One can only presume that if Robert Owen and those guys had waited a couple of hundred years for the invention of the World Cup, takeaway food, digital TV, and work-shy friends, there was no way any utopian experiment could have failed.

For maybe the first time in my life, however, I have begun to sympathize with Americans who find the game baffling and slow. The lack of goals has never bothered any football [
sic
] fan, but when it becomes clear that a team doesn't even
want
to score one, that they'd rather take their chances in a penalty shoot-out, then the lack of action ceases to become a matter of taste and starts to look like a fatal flaw in the tournament. If you're so scared of losing,
don't enter! Stay home! Let Belgium and Lithuania play instead! Many teams played with one striker, playing all on his own against two or three defenders; England's striker Wayne Rooney became so frustrated by these odds that he attempted to even them out by stamping on the balls of one of the defenders looking after him.

We can be pretty sure that it hurts, having your testicles stamped on, but I understand that Americans have come to refer contemptuously to the more theatrical World Cup injuries as the “flop and bawl”—the implication being, I think, that these players are feigning their distress. First of all, you must understand that the rest of the world is more susceptible to pain than you. Our smoking, our poor diets, and our heightened sensitivities (to both literature and life) mean that even a slight push in the back can send excruciating agony coursing through our bodies. You, however, because of your all-meat diet and your status as a bullying superpower, feel nothing, either emotionally or physically, at any time. So you can sneer at our floppers and bawlers if you want, but what does that say about you? How can you ever understand a novel, if you don't understand pain?

And secondly, these players are terrible, awful cheats. It wasn't always like this. But ten or so years ago, those in charge of the game decided, laudably, that they wanted to encourage the more creative players, which meant penalizing the defenders whose job it was to stifle that creativity. Nobody foresaw what would happen as a result: that these creative players would spend more time trying to land their opponents with a yellow or red card than they would trying to score a goal. (A yellow card means that the recipient is frightened of making a tackle for the rest of the game; a red card means he can't take any further part. Either is useful for the opposing team, which means there's too much of an incentive to fake an injury at the moment.) In my book
Fever Pitch
, which was first published in 1992 (and you can take great literature out of the month, but you can't take it out of the man), I wrote that “for a match to be really, truly memorable… you require as many of the following features as possible,” and the sixth requirement listed was for a member of the opposition to receive a red card. At that time, I'd maybe seen half a dozen sendings-off in my twenty-five-year life as a fan; in the last five years, I've probably seen five times that
many. It's no fun any more, and it kills the game. I withdraw my earlier ruling.