More Baths Less Talking (10 page)

Two-thirds of the way through, I was having such a hard time that I looked up a couple of contemporary reviews. Henry James thought it “the poorest of Mr Dickens's works… poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.” Dickens's loyal friend John Forster admits that it “will never rank with his higher efforts.” In other words, everyone knew it was a clunker except me—and even I knew, deep down, given that my first reading had been so arduous. And now, presumably, I have to write an introduction explaining why it's so great. What's great is the fifth chapter, an extended piece of comic writing that's as good as anything I've ever read by him. (If you have a copy lying about, start it and end it there, as if it were a Wodehouse short story.) What's not so great about it is not so easy to convey, because so much of it relates—yes—to length, to the plot's knotty overcomplications, stretched over hundreds and hundreds of pages. “Although I have not been wanting in industry, I have been wanting in invention,” Dickens wrote to Forster sadly, after the first couple of parts had already been published in magazine form, and, as a summation of what's wrong with the book as a whole, that confession is hard to beat. It's interesting, I think, that nothing in
Our Mutual Friend
has wandered out of the pages of the novel and into our lives. There's no Artful Dodger, Uriah Heep, or Micawber, no Scrooge, no Gradgrind, no “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” no Miss Havisham, no
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce
. The closest we get is a minor character saying, apropos of another character's gift for storytelling, that “he do the Police in different voices”—but Dickens needed a little help from Eliot for that particular stab at immortality. As far as I can tell, the novel has recovered from its poor reception, to the extent that it has become one of Dickens's most studied books, but that, I'm afraid, is no testament to its worth: it has endless themes and images and things to say about greed and poverty and money—in other words, endless material for essays—but none of that makes it any easier to
get through. He'll be back in my life soon enough, but next time I might go for early Dickens, rather than late.

It now seems a very long time ago that I read Meg Wolitzer's forthcoming novel,
The Uncoupling
, and Colum McCann's National Book Award winner,
Let the Great World Spin
, and trying to think about them now is like trying to look over a very high wall into somebody's back garden. I know I enjoyed them, and they both seemed to slip by in a flash, but Dickens stomped his oversize boots all over them. I'm hoping that eventually they will spring back up in my mind, undamaged, like grass. McCann's novel, as many of you probably know, is set in New York City in August 1974, the summer that Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers on a tightrope. Underneath him, and all touched in some way by Petit's act of inspired insanity, lives McCann's cast of priests and lawyers, prostitutes and grieving mothers. It's a rich, warm, deeply felt and imagined book, destined, I think, to be loved for a long time. Regrettably, however, McCann makes a very small mistake relating to popular music toward the beginning, and, as has happened so many times before, I spent way too long muttering at both the novel and the author. I must stress, once again—because this has come up before—that my inability to forgive negligible errors of this kind is a disfiguring disease, and I am determined to find a cure for it; I mention it here merely to explain why a book I liked a lot has not become a book that I have bought over and over again, to press on anybody who happens to be passing by. And it would be unforgivably small-minded to go into it… Ach. Donovan wasn't an Irish folk singer, OK? He was a Scottish hippie, and I hate myself.

Meg Wolitzer, like Tom Perrotta, is an author who makes you wonder why more people don't write perceptive, entertaining, unassuming novels about how and why ordinary people choose to make decisions about their lives. Take away the historical fiction, and the genre fiction, and the postmodern fiction, and the self-important attention-seeking fiction, and there really isn't an awful lot left;
the recent success, on both sides of the Atlantic, of David Nicholls's lovely
One Day
demonstrates what an appetite there is for that rare combination of intelligence and recognizability.
The Uncoupling
is about what happens when all the couples in a New Jersey town stop having sex. (A magical wind, which springs up, not coincidentally, during rehearsals for a high-school production of Aristophanes's sex-strike comedy,
Lysistrata
, freezes the loins of all the postpubescent women.) It's a novel that can't help but make you think about your own relationship—about what it consists of, what would be left if sex were taken away, how far you'd be prepared to go in order to keep it in your life somewhere, and so on. I have written all the answers to these questions down on a piece of paper, but I have locked the paper away in a drawer, and I'm not showing it to you lot. You know how much I get paid for this column? Not enough, that's how much.

The only thing I have read since Mr. and Mrs. John Harmon moved into Boffin the Golden Dustman's splendid house—that's an
Our Mutual Friend
spoiler, by the way, but I'm hoping I've spoiled it for you already—is Darin Strauss's
Half a Life
, a book that, as far as I'm concerned, could easily be republished under the title
The Opposite of Our Mutual Friend
. It's a short, simple piece of contemporary nonfiction, which in itself would be enough to make it look pretty good to me; it also happens to be precise, elegantly written, fresh, wise, and very sad. Strauss was still in high school when he killed a girl in an accident: Celine Zilke, then aged sixteen, and a student at the same high school, inexplicably veered across two lanes before riding her bike right across his Oldsmobile. She died later, in the hospital. Strauss was completely exonerated by everybody concerned, but, for obvious human reasons, the accident came to define him, and
Half a Life
is a riveting attempt to articulate the definition.

Any moral or ethical objection you might have to
Half a Life
—what right has he got to produce a book out of this when that poor
girl was the victim?—is dealt with very quickly, because, in part,
Half a Life
deals with the question of what right Strauss had to do anything at all. Was it OK to go back to school, laugh, go to the movies, look at anyone, feel sorry for himself, go to Celine's funeral, avoid her friends, talk to her parents, leave his bedroom? The author, a teenage boy, didn't have the answers to any of these questions, and they continued to elude him until well into adulthood. You could describe
Half a Life
as an elevated study of self-consciousness, in all senses of the compound noun—a book about a man watching his younger self watching his own every move, thought, feeling, checking and rechecking them before allowing them to escape into a place where they can be watched by other people—at which point the checking and rechecking start all over again. It's easy enough for us to say that what happened to Darin Strauss was a tragedy—not, of course, as big a tragedy as the one that befell Celine Zilke and her family, but a tragedy nonetheless. Easy enough for us to say, impossible for him to say—and therein lies Strauss's rich and meaningful material, material he works into a memorable essay. “Whatever you do in your life, you have to do it twice as well now,” Celine Zilke's mother told him at the funeral. “Because you are living it for two people.” Most of us can't live our lives well enough for one, but the care and thought that have gone into every line of
Half a Life
are indicative not only of a very talented writer, but of a proper human being.

And now Strauss has got me at it. I was going to end with a very good, if overcomplicated, joke about Dickens and a pair of broken Bose headphones, but I'm no longer sure it's appropriate. So I'll stop here.