Ten Years in the Tub (78 page)

Like every other paperback, Rash's book comes elaborately decorated with admiring quotes from reviews. Unlike every other paperback, however, his Alex nomination gave me confidence in them. “A beautifully rendered palimpsest,” said
BookPage
, and I'd have to say that this wouldn't entice me, normally. You can see how a book could be a beautifully rendered palimpsest and yet somehow remain on the dull side. But the Alex allowed me to insert the words
and not boring
at the end of the quote. “Graceful, conscientious prose,” said the
Charlotte Observer—and yet not boring
. “Rash writes with beauty and simplicity, understanding his characters with a poet's eye and heart and telling their tales with a poet's tongue,
and not boring people rigid while he does it
,” said William Gay, almost. You see how it works? It's fantastic.

And
The World Made Straight
really is engrossing—indeed, the last devastating fifty-odd pages are almost too compelling. You want to look away, but you can't, and as a consequence you have to watch while some bad men get what was coming to them, and a flawed, likable man gets what you hoped he might avoid. It's a satisfyingly complicated story about second chances and history and education and the relationships between parents and their children; it's violent, real, very well written, and it moves like a train.

When I was reading it, I ended up trying to work out how some complicated novels seem small, claustrophobic, beside the point, sometimes even without a point, while others take off into the fresh air that all the great books seem to
breathe. There would be plenty of ways of turning this book, with its drug deals and its Civil War backstory, into something too knotty to live—sometimes writers are so caught up in being true to the realities of their characters' lives that they seem to forget that they have to be true to ours too, however tangentially. Rash, however, manages to convince you right from the first page that his characters and his story are going to matter to you, even if you live in North London, rather than on a tobacco farm in North Carolina; it's an enviable skill, and it's demonstrated here so confidently, and with such a lack of show, that you almost forget Rash has it until it's too late, and your own sense of well-being is bound up in the fate of the characters. Bad mistake, almost. There is some redemption here, but it's real redemption, hard-won and fragile, rather than sappy redemption.
The World Made Straight
was a fantastic introduction to the Not Boring Awards. I was, I admit, a little concerned that these books might be a little too uplifting, and would wear their lessons and morals on their T-shirts, but this one at least is hard and powerful, and it refuses to judge people that some moral guardians might feel need judging.

Lawrence Weschler's
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences
is never going to be nominated for an Alex, I fear. Not because it's boring—it isn't—but it's dense, and allusive, by definition, and Weschler's thinking is angular, subtle, dizzying. I feel as though I only just recently became old enough to read it, so you lot will have to wait twenty or thirty years.

It's worth it, though. You know you're in for a treat right from the very first essay, in which Weschler interviews the Ground Zero photographer Joel Meyerowitz about the uncanny compositional similarities between his photos and a whole slew of other works of art. How come Meyerowitz's shot of the devastated Winter Garden in the World Trade Center looks exactly like one of Piranesi's imaginary prisons? Is it pure coincidence? Or conscious design? It turns out, of course, to be something in between, something much more interesting than either of these explanations, and in working toward the truth of it, Weschler produces more grounded observations about the production of art than you'd believe possible, given the apparently whimsical nature of the exercise.

And he does this time and time again, with his “convergences.” No, you
think in the first few lines of every one of these essays. Stop it. You are not going to be able to persuade me that Oliver Sacks's
Awakenings
can tell us anything about the recent history of Eastern Europe. Or: no, Newt Gingrich and Slobodan Milosevic have nothing in common, and I won't listen to you trying to argue otherwise. You got away with it last time, but this is too much. And then by the end of the piece, you feel stupid for not noticing it yourself, and you want Gingrich tried for war crimes. It's an incredibly rewarding read, part magic, part solid but inspired close practical criticism, and the best book about (mostly) art I've come across since Dave Hickey's mighty
Air Guitar
. When I'd finished
Everything That Rises
I felt cleverer—not just because I knew more, but because I felt it would help me to think more creatively about other things. In fact, I've just pitched an idea to Weschler's editor about the weird chimes between the departure of Thierry Henry from Arsenal and the last days of Nicolae Ceausescu, but so far, no word. I think I might have blown his mind.

November / December 2007

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
The Pigman
—Paul Zindel

     
  
The Bethlehem Murders
—Matt Rees

     
  
The Dud Avocado
—Elaine Dundy

     
  
Singled Out
—Virginia Nicholson

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Holes
—Louis Sachar

     
  
The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence
—Andrew Anthony

     
  
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
—Ken Kalfus