So, what
makes a great (or even a good) critic?
One would imagine breadth of culture, cultivation of taste, a reverence
for great work from antiquity to the present day, and discrimination.
And
then, you could be novelist/reviewer, Nick
Hornby (born 1957). He has none of
the above, as he writes here:
Something has been happening to me
recently – something which, I suspect, is likely to affect a significant and
important part of the rest of my life.
The grandiose way of describing this shift is to say that I have been
slowly making my peace with antiquity; or, to express it in words that more
accurately describe what’s going on, I have discovered that some old shit isn’t
so bad.
Hitherto, my cultural blind spots
have included the Romantic Poets, every single bar of classical music ever
written, and just about anything produced before the nineteenth century, with
the exception of Shakespeare and a couple of the bloodier, and hence more
Tarantinoesque, revenge tragedies. When
I was young, I didn’t want to listen to or read anything that reminded me of
the brown and deeply depressing furniture in my grandmother’s house. She didn’t have many books, but those she did
own were indeed brown: cheap and old editions of a couple of Sir Walter Scott’s
novels, for example, and maybe a couple of hand-me-down books by somebody like
Frances Hodgson Burnett. When I ran out
of stuff to read during the holidays, I was pointed in the direction of her one
bookcase, but I wanted bright Puffin paperbacks, not mildewed old hardbacks,
which came to represent just about everything I wasn’t interested in.
This unhelpful association, it seems
to me, should have withered with time; instead, it’s been allowed to flourish,
unchecked … I soon found that I didn’t want to read or listen to anything that
anybody in ay position of educational authority told me to. Chaucer was full of woodworm; Wordsworth was
yellow and curling at the edges, whatever edition I was given. I read Graham Greene and John Fowles,
Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe, Chandler and Nathanael West, Greil Marcus and Peter
Guarlnick, and I listened exclusively to popular music. Dickens crept in, eventually, because he was
funny, unlike Sir Walter Scott and Shelley, who weren’t. And, because everything was seen through the
prism of rock and roll, every now and again I would end up finding something I
learned about through the pages of New
Musical Express.
So, for
Your Correspondent, (self-confessed snob, aesthete and reactionary), this is enough
to disregard each and any of Hornby’s critical assessments. To us, his seeing the world through the prism
of rock and roll is especially damming – as that is surely a sign of a severely
arrested development.
And yet…
And yet,
Hornby clearly loves literature and is besotted by books. It’s almost impossible to read his criticism
and not come away with a deep and abiding admiration for Hornby and his own,
peculiar aesthetic. Even more telling,
it’s almost impossible not to like him.
Here is a man of real warmth and charm, with a lively intelligence, a
big heart, and a detestation of cant.
The
reviews collected in Ten Years in the
Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books were written for The Believer magazine between 2003 and 2013; many of then were
collected in two previous books: The
Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping
vs. the Dirt, but the current volume collects everything in one handy book. He brings to his role as critic a lively
intelligence, a sense of what makes fiction work, and great good humor. Here is the opening of a typical column:
The advantages and benefits of
writing a monthly column about reading for the Believer are innumerable, if
predictable: fame, women (it’s amazing what people will do to get early
information about the Books Bought list), international influence, and so
on. But perhaps the biggest perk of all,
one that has only emerged slowly, over the years, is this: you can’t read long
books.
At the
start of each column, Hornby lists the books that he bought (and, at times, it
would seem that he is keeping the publishing industry afloat single-handedly),
and books read. The two don’t always
tally, but he will always tell you what led him to read the chosen books that
month, and if they lived up to expectations.
A
successful novelist (we here at The Jade
Sphinx are especially fond of About
a Boy and The Long Way Down),
Hornby is wise enough to know that different writers with different styles all
bring something to the table, and his indiscriminate taste allows him to find
and recommend many terrific books we would otherwise overlook.
Perhaps
the most significant bow in his quiver is the fact that he does not engage in
critical smackdown. When he doesn’t like
something, he’s more likely to leave the reader chuckling than quaking at the
quality of his venom. Here he is on a
comedic novel that he found decidedly unfunny:
On my copy of Michael Frayn’s The Trick of It, there is a quote from
Anthony Burgess that describes the novel as “one of the few books I have read
in the last year that has provoked laughter.”
Initially, it’s a blurb that works in just the way the publishers
intended. Great, you think. Burgess must have read a lot of books; and
both the quote itself and your knowledge of the great man suggest that he
wouldn’t have chuckled at many of them.
So if The Trick of It wriggled
its way through that forbidding exterior to the Burgess sense of humor, it must
be absolutely hilarious, right? But then
you start to wonder just how trustworthy Burgess would have been on the subject
of comedy. What, for example, would have
been his favorite bit of Jackass: The
Movie? (Burgess died in 1993, so
sadly we will never know.) What was his
most cherished Three Stooges sketch? His
favorite Seinfeld character? His top David Brent moment? And after careful contemplation, your
confidence in his comic judgment stars to feel a little misplaced: there is a
good chance, you suspect, that Anthony Burgess would have steadfastly refused
even to smile at many of the things that have ever made you chortle
uncontrollably.
Sometimes it feels as though we are
being asked to imagine cultural judgments as a whole bunch of concentric
circles. On the outside, we have the
wrong ones, made by people who read The
Da Vinci Code and listen to Celine Dion; right at the center we have the
correct ones, made by the snootier critics, very often people who have vowed
never to laugh again until Aristophanes produces a follow-up to The Frogs … If I had to choose between a
Celine Dion fan and Anthony Burgess for comedy recommendation, I would go with
the person standing on the table singing “the Power of Love” every time. I’ll bet Burgess read Candide – I had a bad experience with Candide only recently – with tears of mirth trickling down his
face.
Despite his
critical liberality, there are some things that still fail to register with
Hornby. He does not understand the
appeal of series characters (why read many James Bond adventures, he wonders,
rather than just his greatest one?), and is immune to most genre fiction. (Given the choice of a terrific science
fiction novel, or a way-we-live now book about divorce, he’ll take the
latter.) But these foibles are few, and
may even be evidence of his aesthetic maturity being great than mine own.
At any
rate – Nick Hornby is a gifted novelist, and perhaps an even more gifted literary
critic. Readers interested in
intelligent, thoughtful and amusing criticism could do no better than Ten Years
in the Tub.
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