Ten Years in the Tub (65 page)

     
  
Jimi Hendrix Turns 80
—Tim Sandlin

     
  
The Zero
—Jess Walter

     
  
Fun Home
—Alison Bechdel

“W
hat we need,” one of those scary critics who write for the serious magazines said recently, “is more straight talking about bad books.” Well, of course we do. It's hard to think of anything we need more, in fact. Because then, surely, people would stop reading bad books, and writers would stop writing them, and the only books that anyone read or wrote would be the ones that the scary critics in the serious magazines liked, and the world would be a happier place, unless you happen to enjoy reading the books that the scary critics don't like—in which case the world would be an unhappier place for you. Tough.

Weirdly, the scary critic was attempting to review a book she did like at the time, so you might have thought that she could have forgotten about bad books for a moment; these people, however, are so cross about everything that they can't ever forget about bad books, even when they're supposed to be thinking about good ones. They believe that if you stop thinking about bad books even for one second, they'll take over your house, like cockroaches. She
got distracted mid-review by the
Believer
, and its decision—which was taken over three years ago—to try and play nice when talking about the arts; some people are beginning to come to terms with it now, not least because they can see that very few pages of the magazine are given over to reviews. (Do we have to do the straight talking even if we're interviewing someone? Wouldn't that be rude? And pointless, given that presumably we'd be interviewing someone whose work we didn't like?)

The scary woman is not a big fan of this column, which is sad, of course, but hardly a surprise. What's more disappointing to me is that she and I go way back, right to the time when we used to bump into each other on the North of England stand-up comedy circuit, and now we seem to have fallen out. People in Bootle still talk about her impression of the Fonz. Why did she want to throw all that merriment away and become a literary editor? To borrow an old line from the late, great Tommy Cooper: we used to laugh when she said she wanted to be a comedian. We're not laughing now.

I am unable, unfortunately, to do any straight talking about the books I've been reading, because they were all great. The one I enjoyed the least was Elizabeth Kolbert's
Field Notes From a Catastrophe
, and that's because she makes a very convincing argument that our planet will soon be uninhabitable. Usually, devastatingly depressing nonfiction gives you some kind of get-out: it couldn't happen here, it won't happen to me, it won't happen again. But this one really doesn't allow for much of that. Kolbert travels to Alaskan villages with permafrost experts to see how the permafrost is melting. (Hey, W. It's called
perma
frost. It's melting. Tell us again why there's nothing to worry about.) She visits Greenland with NASA scientists to watch the ice sheets disintegrating, listens to biologists describe how English butterflies are moving their natural habitats northwards, goes to Holland to look at the amphibious houses being built in preparation for the coming deluge. You couldn't wish for a cleaner or more concise explanation of the science—Kolbert's research is woven into her text like clues in the scariest thriller you'll ever read. There is no real debate about any of this in the scientific community, by the way. Oil companies and other interested parties occasionally try to start a debate by making claims that are clearly and criminally fallacious, on the grounds that we might believe
there's an element of doubt, or that the truth lies somewhere in between, but really there's nothing to argue about. Climate change is happening now, and it will be devastating, unless unimaginably enormous steps are taken by everyone, immediately.

There is, I need hardly tell you, very little evidence that anyone in any position of authority in the U.S. is prepared to do what is desperately needed. Senator James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, believes that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”; White House official Philip Cooney “repeatedly edited government reports on climate change in order to make their findings seem less alarming,” before quitting his job and going off to work for Exxon-Mobil.

I don't often have the urge to interview authors of nonfiction, because the book should, and invariably does, answer any questions I might have had on the subject. But I noticed in the author bio on the dust-jacket that Elizabeth Kolbert, like me, has three sons. Has she talked to them about this stuff? How does it affect her morale, her ability to provide the kind of positivity and sense of security that children need? The evidence suggests that our children will be living very different, and much less comfortable, lives than our own; they may well decide that there's not much point in having children themselves. You may not want to read a book as lowering as this one, but maybe that's one of the problems anyway, that we don't want to know. If you don't want to know, then you need to take your head out of your ass and read
Field Notes From a Catastrophe
. It's short, and it's rational and calm, and it's terrifying.

I picked up a manuscript of Tim Sandlin's novel
Jimi Hendrix Turns 80
just at the right time: not only is it funny, but it imagines a future, because that's where it's set. Sandlin's characters all live or work in Mission Pescadero, a retirement community in California, in the year 2023; almost all the old folk are pot-smoking, sexually incontinent hippies who have been sleeping with each other, and arguing with each other (quite often about the original line-up of Blue Cheer) for decades. The in-house band that plays covers at the Friday night sock hop is called Acid Reflux, which may well be the most perfect fictional band name I've ever come across.

The residents of Mission Pescadero, sick of being tranquillized and denied privileges by the authoritarian staff, stage a revolution and seize control, but
Jimi Hendrix Turns 80
is not the sort of satire that loses its soul in an attempt to crank up the pace, and nor does it waste its characters while wrapping up its narrative. And, of course, it would have been unreadable if it had attempted to patronize or poke fun at the old, or the ageing process, but it never does that. Sandlin can see that there is a kind of gruesome comedy in what happens to us, but the humor is never mean, and he loves his people too much not to understand that their grief and nostalgia and frustration is real. This clever novel slipped down easily, and provided real refreshment in this vicious, stupefying (and, Elizabeth Kolbert has taught me, probably sinister) London summer.

Imperium
is the first novel in my brother-in-law's projected trilogy about Cicero. I wrote about his last novel,
Pompeii
, in this column, and was positive that I'd have been sacked by the time his next one came out, but here we are. I won't say too much about it, other than that I have the cleverest brother-in-law a man could wish for, and that having a clever brother-in-law is enormously and gratifyingly educative. He doesn't need any help from me, anyway.

OK, I will say this: Robert's Cicero is a proper, living, breathing politician, and therefore perhaps the best fictional portrayal of the breed I've come across. Usually, the narrative in novels about politics goes like this: earnest, committed and naïve young politician is made older and more cynical by the real world. Anyone who was ever at school or college with a politician, however, knows that this narrative only works as metaphor, because people who want to be politicians are never naïve. Those little bastards are sneaky and ambitious even when attempting to be elected as entertainments secretary. (We need our representatives in our respective parliaments, of course we do, but they are the least representative people you could ever come across.) Robert understands this, although he's a former political reporter, so he likes politicians more than I do, and as a result, Cicero is properly complicated: attractive, devious, passionate, ferociously energetic, pragmatic. This, surely, is how he was, and I suspect our own Prime Minister must have been very similar. Your President, however, is sui generis.