Ten Years in the Tub (82 page)

And it's convincing, too, although of course it's hard to talk about generational mores and attitudes without raising all the old questions about when generations begin and end, and how we as a collection of individuals, as opposed to a banner-waving mob, are supposed to fit into it all neatly. As far as I can tell, I'm supposed to be a Boomer, but I was twelve when Woodstock took place, nineteen when
Anarchy in the U.K
. was released, and always felt closer to Johnny Rotten (and hence to everything that came after) than to David Crosby, so where am I supposed to fit into all this? There were Boomers that never sold out, plenty of Xers that did, and lots of lovable Millennials who worry
about global warming and literacy levels. There have always been relentless and empty-headed self-promoters, although in the good old days we used to ignore them, rather than give them their own reality show. Gordinier is right, though, I think, when he argues that Generation X (and I know that even naming you like this makes me sound cheesy and square, but I can't say “so-called” every time, nor can I raise my eyebrows and roll my eyes in print) has found another way of doing things, and that this way may well add up to something significant. This is a generation that not only understands technology but has internalized its capabilities, thus enabling it to think in a different way; this is a generation that knows that it can't change the world, a recognition that enables it to do what it can. Cinema, books, TV, and music have all produced something new as a result, so long as you know where to look.

I suspect that those who write about Gordinier's book will engage him in his argument, and that very few people will point out how much fun this book is to read, but it is; the last chapter, which uses Henry James's novella
The Beast in the Jungle
and the life and work of James Brown as the ingredients for a passionate rallying cry, is particularly fizzy.

In other news: nearly a third of the football season is over, and Arsenal, still undefeated, is sitting at the top of the Premier League, despite having sold Thierry Henry to Barcelona in the summer. These are golden days, my friends, for another couple of weeks at least. This is how to become a better you: choose Arsène Wenger, Arsenal's brilliant manager, as your life coach. I did, and look at me now. If I found myself weeping in an airport, that's the book I'd buy:
Think Offensively, the Arsène Wenger Way
, but he hasn't written it yet. (You'll be reading about it here first if he ever does.) Mind you, even Joel Osteen would be able to see that we need a new goalkeeper urgently.

February 2008

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909–1959
—Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane, eds.

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
What Sport Tells Us About Life
—Ed Smith

     
  
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
—Sherman Alexie

     
  
The Darling
—Russell Banks

     
  
The Rights of the Reader
—Daniel Pennac

T
he best description I know of what it feels like to learn to read comes in Francis Spufford's brilliant memoir
The Child That Books Built:

            
When I caught the mumps, I couldn't read; when I went back to school again, I could. The first page of
The Hobbit
was a thicket of symbols, to be decoded one at a time and joined hesitantly together… By the time I reached
The Hobbit
's last page, though, writing had softened, and lost the outlines of the printed alphabet, and become a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster, until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts. I had undergone the acceleration into the written word that you also experience as a change in the medium. In fact, writing had ceased to be a thing—an object in the world—and
become
a medium, a substance you look through.

Firstly, we should note that the first book Spufford ever read was
The Hobbit
, a book that I still haven't picked up, partly because I am afraid I still won't understand it. Secondly, Spufford caught the mumps just as he turned six—he is one of the cleverest people I have ever come across, and yet some parents
with young children would be freaking out if their kids weren't able to read by then. And lastly, I would just like to point out that you can't fake a memory like this. Learning to read happens once and once only for most of us, and for the vast majority of adults in first-world countries it happened a long time ago. You have to dig deep, deep down into the bog of the almost-lost, and then carry what you have found carefully to the surface, and then you have to find the words and images to describe what you see on your spade. Perhaps Spufford's amazing feat of recollection means nothing to you; but when I first read it, I knew absolutely that this was what happened to me: I too spooned up the jelly of meaning.

I turned back to Spufford's book because my five-year-old is on the verge of reading. (Yeah, you read that right, Spufford. Five! And only just! Francis Spufford was born in 1964 and this book was published in 2003, so by my reckoning my son will have produced something as good as
The Child That Books Built
by the year 2040, or something slightly better by 2041.) Writing hasn't softened for him: three-letter words are as insoluble as granite, and he can no more look through writing than he can look through his bedroom wall. The good news is that he's almost frenetically motivated; the bad news is that he is so eager to learn because he has got it into his head that he will be given a Nintendo DS machine when he can read and write, which he argues that he can do now to his own satisfaction—he can write his own name, and read the words
Mum, Dad, Spider, Man
, and at least eight others. As far as he is concerned, literacy is something that he can dispense with altogether in a couple of months, when the Nintendo turns up. It will have served its purpose.

Daniel Pennac's
The Rights of the Reader
, first published sixteen years ago in France, the author's native country, is a really rather lovely book about all the things parents and teachers do to discourage the art and habit of reading, and all the things we could do to persuade young people that literacy is worth keeping about one's person even after you've got it nailed. According to Pennac, we have spent most of our five-year-old son's life teaching him that reading is something to be endured: we threaten to withdraw stories at bedtime, and then never follow through with the threat (“an unbearable punishment, for them and for us,” Pennac points out, and this is just one of the many moments of wisdom
that will make you want him to be your adoptive dad); we dangle television and computers as rewards; we occasionally try to force him to read when he is demotivated, tired, bolshy. (“The lightness of our sentences stopped them getting bogged down: now having to mumble indecipherable letters stifles even their ability to dream,” says Pennac sadly.) All of these mistakes, it seems to me, are unavoidable at some time in the average parenting week, although Pennac does us a favor by exposing the perverse logic buried in them.