Ten Years in the Tub (10 page)

     
  
Moneyball
—Michael Lewis

     
  
George and Sam: Autism in the Family
—Charlotte Moore

     
  
The Sirens of Titan
—Kurt Vonnegut

F
irst, an apology. Last month, I may inadvertently have given the impression that
No Name
by Wilkie Collins was a lost Victorian classic (the misunderstanding may have arisen because of my loose use of the phrase “lost Victorian classic”), and that everyone should rush out and buy it. I had read over two hundred pages when I gave you my considered verdict; in fact, the last four hundred and eighteen pages nearly killed me, and I wish I were speaking figuratively. We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and aeroplanes and by hotel swimming pools. Sometimes—usually late at night, in bed—he could put me out cold with a single paragraph; every time I got through twenty or thirty pages, it felt to me as though I'd socked him good, but it took a lot out of me, and I had to retire to my corner to wipe the blood and sweat off my reading glasses. And still he kept coming back for more. Only in the last fifty-odd pages, after I'd landed several of these blows, did old Wilkie show any signs of buckling under the assault. He was pretty tough for a man
of nearly one hundred and eighty. Hats off to him. Anyway, I'm sorry for the bum steer, and readers of this column insane enough to have run down to their nearest bookstore as a result of my advice should write to the
Believer
, enclosing a receipt, and we will refund your $14. It has to say
No Name
on the ticket, though, because we weren't born yesterday, and we're not stumping up for your Patricia Cornwell novels. You can pay for them yourselves.

In his introduction to my Penguin edition, Mark Ford points out that Collins wrote the closing sections of the novel “in both great pain and desperate anxiety over publishers' deadlines.” (In fact, Dickens, who edited the magazine in which
No Name
was originally published,
All the Year Round
, offered to nip down to London and finish the book off for him: “I could take it up any time and do it… so like you as that no-one should find out the difference.” That's literature for you.) It is not fair to wonder why Collins bothered:
No Name
has lots going for it, including a driven, complicated, and morally ambiguous central female character, and a tremendous first two hundred pages. But it's certainly reasonable to wonder why a sick man should have wanted to overextend a relatively slight melodrama to the extent that people want to fight him.
No Name
is the story of a woman's attempt to reclaim her rightful inheritance from cruel and heartless relatives, and one of the reasons the book didn't work for me is that one has to quiver with outrage throughout at the prospect of this poor girl having to work for a living, as a governess or something equally demeaning.

It could be, of course, that the book seems bloated because Collins simply wasn't as good at handling magazine serialization as Dickens, and that huge chunks of the novel, which originally came in forty-four parts, were written only to keep the end well away from the beginning. I'm only guessing, but I'd imagine that many subscribers to
All the Year Round
between May 1862 and early January 1863 felt exactly the same way. I'm guessing, in fact, that there were a few cancelled subscriptions, and that
No Name
is the chief reason you can no longer find
All the Year Round
alongside the
Believer
at your nearest newsstand.

There are two sides to every fight, though, and Wilkie would point out that I unwisely attempted to read the second half of
No Name
during a trip to Los Angeles. Has anyone ever attempted a Victorian novel in Los Angeles, and if
so, why? In England, we read Victorian novels precisely because they're long, and we have nothing else to do. L.A. is too warm, too bright, there's too much sport on TV, and the sandwiches are too big (and come with chips/“fries”). English people shouldn't attempt to do anything in L.A.; it's all too much. We should just lie in a darkened room with a cold flannel until it's time to come home again.

With the exception of
The Sirens of Titan
, bought secondhand from a Covent Garden market stall, all this month's books were purchased at Book Soup in L.A. (Book Soup and the Tower Records directly opposite have become, in my head, what Los Angeles
is
.) Going to a good U.S. bookshop is still ludicrously exciting (unless I'm on book tour, when the excitement tends to wear off a little): as I don't see American books-pages, I have no idea whether one of my favorite authors—Charles Baxter, for example, on this trip—has a new book out, and there's every chance that it won't be published in the UK for months, if at all. There is enough money in the music and movie industries to ensure that we get to hear about most things that might interest us; books have to remain a secret, to be discovered only when you spend time browsing. This is bad for authors, but good for the assiduous shopper.

Mark Salzman's book about juvenile offenders I read about in the
Believer
. I met Mark after a reading in L.A. some years ago, and one of the many memorable things he told me was that he'd written a large chunk of his last novel almost naked, covered in aluminum foil, with a towel round his head, sitting in a car. His reasons for doing so, which I won't go into here, were sound, and none of them were connected with mental illness, although perhaps inevitably he had caused his wife some embarrassment—especially when she brought friends back to the house. Jincy Willett, whose work I had never heard of, I bought because of her blurbs, which, I'm afraid to say, only goes to show that blurbs do work.

I was in the U.S. for the two epic playoff series, between the Cubs and the Marlins, and the Red Sox and the Yankees, and I became temporarily fixated with baseball. And I'd read something about
Moneyball
somewhere, and it was a staff pick at Book Soup, and when, finally,
No Name
lay vanquished and lifeless at my feet, it was Lewis's book I turned to: it seemed a better fit.
Moneyball
is a rotten title, I think. You expect a subtitle something along the lines of
How Greed Killed America's National Pastime
, but actually the book isn't like that at all—it's the story of how Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A's, worked out how to buck the system and win lots of games despite being hampered by one of the smallest payrolls in baseball. He did this by recognizing (
a
) that the stats traditionally used to judge players are almost entirely worthless, and (
b
) that many good players are being discarded by the major leagues simply because they don't
look
like good players.

The latter discovery in particular struck a chord with me, because my football career has been blighted by exactly this sort of prejudice. English scouts visiting my Friday morning five-a-side game have (presumably) discounted me on peripheral grounds of age, weight, speed, amount of time spent lying on the ground weeping with exhaustion, etc.; what they're not looking at is
performance
, which is of course the only thing that counts. They'd have made a film called
Head It Like Hornby
by now if Billy Beane were working over here. (And if I were any good at heading, another overrated and peripheral skill.) Anyway, I understood about one word in every four of
Moneyball
, and it's still the best and most engrossing sports book I've read for years. If you know anything about baseball, you will enjoy it four times as much as I did, which means that you might explode.

I have an autistic son, but I don't often read any books about autism. Most of the time, publishers seem to want to hear from or about autists with special talents, as in
Rain Man
(my son, like the vast majority of autistic kids, and contrary to public perception, has no special talent, unless you count his remarkable ability to hear the opening of a crisp packet from several streets away), or from parents who believe that they have “rescued” or “cured” their autistic child, and there is no cure for autism, although there are a few weird stories, none of which seem applicable to my son's condition. So most books on the subject tend to make me feel alienated, resentful, cynical, or simply baffled. Granted, pretty much any book on any subject seems to make me feel this way, but I reckon that in this case, my personal experience of the subject means I'm entitled to feel anything I want.