Ten Years in the Tub (98 page)

At the end of the last column, I vowed to have read
Our Mutual Friend
on an e-reader, and that didn't happen either. This was partly because of the football, and partly because the experience of reading Dickens in this way was unsatisfactory. It wasn't just that a Victorian novelist clearly doesn't belong on a sleek twenty-first-century machine; I also took the cheapskate route and downloaded the novel from a website that allows you to download out-of-copyright novels for no charge. I helped myself to
Babbitt
and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
at the same time. The edition squirted down to me came without footnotes, however, and I rather like footnotes. More to the point, I
need
footnotes occasionally. (You may well work out for yourself eventually that the “dust” so vital to the plot is household rubbish, rather than fine grains of dirt, but it saves a lot of confusion and doubt to have this explained clearly and plainly right at the beginning of the novel.) The advantage handed the e-reading business by copyright laws hadn't really occurred to me before I helped myself, but it spells
trouble for publishers, of course; Penguin and Co. make a lot of money selling books by people who are long dead, and if we all take the free-downloading route, then there will be less money for the living writers. In a spirit of self-chastisement, I bought a copy of
Our Mutual Friend
immediately, even though I have one somewhere already. It won't do any good, in the long run, because clearly books, publishers, readers, and writers are all doomed. But maybe we should all do what we can to stave off impending disaster just that little bit longer.

I was attempting to read
Our Mutual Friend
for professional reasons: I'm supposed to be writing an introduction for a forthcoming edition. I read Colm Tóibín's
Brooklyn
for work, too: I was asked to consider taking on the job of adapting it for the cinema, and as about a million critics and several real people had told me how good it was, I took the offer seriously. It's not the best circumstance in which to read a novel. Instead of admiring the writing, thinking about the characters, turning the page to discover what happens next, you're thinking, Oh, I dunno, and, Yay, I could chop that, and, Miley Cyrus would be
great
for this, and, Do I really want to spend the next few years of my life wrecking this guy's prose? It is a tribute to Tóibín's novel—its quiet, careful prose, its almost agonizing empathy for its characters, its conviction in its own reality—that pretty soon I forgot why I was reading it, and just read it. And then, after I'd finished it, I decided that I wanted to adapt it—not just because I loved it, but because I could see it. Not the movie, necessarily, but the world of the novel: the third-class cabin in which his protagonist travels from Liverpool to New York in the early 1950s, the department store she works in, the dances she attends. They are portrayed with a director of photography's relish for depth and light and detail.

The laziest, most irritating book-club criticism of a novel is that the reader “just didn't care” about the characters or their predicament, a complaint usually made in a tone suggesting that this banality is the product of deep and original thought. (It never seems to occur to these critics that the deficiency may well lie within themselves, rather than in the pages of the books. Perhaps they feel similarly about their friends, parents, children. “The trouble with my kid is that she doesn't make me
care
enough about her.” Are we all supposed to nod sagely
at that?)

It is not intended to be a backhanded compliment when I say that Tóibín doesn't care whether you care about Eilis, his heroine; it's not that the book is chilly or neutral, or that Tóibín is a disengaged writer. He's not. But he's patient, and nerveless, and unsentimental, and he trusts the story rather than the prose to deliver the emotional payoff. And it does deliver.
Brooklyn
chooses the narrative form of a much cheaper kind of book—“one woman, two countries, two men”—but that isn't what it's about; you're not quite sure what it's about until the last few pages, and then you can see how carefully the trap has been laid for you. I loved it. Will I wreck it? It's perfectly possible, of course. It's a very delicate piece, and Eilis is a watchful, still center. I won't have to hack away at its complicated architecture, though, because it doesn't have one, so maybe I have half a chance. By the time you read this, I should have started in on it; if you have a ten-year-old daughter with ambitions to be an actor, then she might as well start trying to acquire an Irish accent. In my experience of the film business, we'll be shooting sometime in 2020, if it hasn't all collapsed by then.

In a way, I read
Live From New York
, an oral history of
Saturday Night Live
, because of work, too. Earlier in the year I got an American agent, a lovely, smart woman whose every idea, suggestion, and request I've ignored, more or less since the moment we agreed she'd represent me. Anyway, she recommended Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller's book, and my feeling was that if I'm not going to make her a penny, I could at least follow up on her book tips. And I'm pretty sure that if it had to be one or the other, money or successful recommendations, she'd go for the recommendations. That's what makes her special.

I read the book despite never having seen a single minute of
Saturday Night Live
, at least prior to Tina Fey's turn as Sarah Palin in 2008. The show was never shown in the U.K., so I hadn't a clue who any of these people were. Will Ferrell? Bill Murray? Adam Sandler? Eddie Murphy? John Belushi? Chris Rock? Dan Aykroyd? It's sweet that you have your own TV stars over there. You've probably never heard of Pat Phoenix, either.

When it's done well, as it is here, then the oral history is pretty unbeatable as a nonfiction form—engrossing, light on its feet, the constant switching of voices a guarantee against dullness. Legs McNeil's
Please Kill Me: The
Uncensored Oral History of Punk
, George Plimpton's Edie Sedgwick book, Studs Terkel's
Working
… These are books that I hope to return to one day, when I've read everything else.
Live From New York
is probably just a little too long for someone unfamiliar with the show, but if you want to learn something about the crafts of writing and performing, then you'll pick something up every few pages. I am still thinking about these words from Lorne Michaels:

            
The amount of things that have to come together for something to be good is just staggering. And the fact that there's anything good at all is just amazing. When you're young, you assume that just knowing the difference between good and bad is enough: “I'll just do good work, because I prefer it to bad work.”

Michaels's observation contains a terrible truth: you think, at a certain point in your life, that your impeccable taste will save you. As life goes on, you realize it's a bit more complicated than that.

While I was reading
Live From New York
, I realized that G. E. Smith, the show's musical director, was the same G.E. Smith who sat next to me on a plane from New York to London, sometime in 1976 or 1977. I was just returning to college after visiting my dad; Smith was on tour with Daryl Hall and John Oates, who were up in first class. He was the first musician I'd ever met, and he was charming, and generous with his time. And he sold me on
Abandoned Luncheonette
, Hall and Oates's heartstoppingly lovely folk-soul album, recorded well before the disco years (which were pretty good, too, actually). He wouldn't remember a single second of them, but the conversations we had on that flight helped feed the idea, just sprouting then, that I didn't want a proper job. It was a pretty seminal flight, now that I come to think about it. I still love
Abandoned Luncheonette
.

October 2010

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
—Hampton Sides

     
  
The Broken Word
—Adam Foulds

     
  
It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing Up in the Borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s
—Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer

     
  
How to Live: Or, a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
—Sarah Bakewell

     
  
Barney's Version
—Mordecai Richler

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Hard Rain Falling
—Don Carpenter

     
  
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
—Michael Ondaatje