Ten Years in the Tub (104 page)

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.

February 2011

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
—Carl Wilson

     
  
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
—John Green and David Levithan

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
The Anthologist
—Nicholson Baker

     
  
Brooklyn
—Colm Tóibín

     
  
Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges
—Donald Spoto

     
  
Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
—Carl Wilson

I
t's a wet Sunday morning, and I'm sitting on a sofa reading a book. On one side of me is my eldest son, Danny, who is seventeen and autistic. His feet are in my lap, and he's watching a children's TV program on his iPad. Or rather, he's watching a part of a children's TV program, over and over again: a song from
Postman Pat
entitled “Handyman Song.” Danny is wearing headphones, but I've just noticed that they're not connected properly, so I can hear every word of the song anyway. On my other side is another son, my eight-year-old, Lowell. He's watching the Sunday-morning football-highlights program
Goals on Sunday
. I'm caught between them, trying to finish Nicholson Baker's
The Anthologist
.

“Look at this, Dad,” Lowell says.

He wants me to watch Johan Elmander's goal for Bolton at Wolves, the second in a 3–2 win. It's one of the best goals of the season so far, and at the time of writing has a real chance of winning the BBC's Goal of the Month award, but I only have thirteen pages of the novel to go, so I only glance up for a moment.

“Close the book,” Lowell says.

“I saw the goal. I'm not going to close the book.”

“Close the book. You didn't see the replay.”

He tries to grab the book out of my hand, so we wrestle for a moment while
I turn the corner of the page down. I watch the replay. He's satisfied. I return to
The Anthologist
, football commentary in one ear and the
Postman Pat
song in the other.

Would Nicholson Baker mind? I'm pretty sure he wouldn't choose for me to be reading his work under these circumstances, and I'm with him all the way. I'd rather be somewhere else, too. I'd rather be on a sun-lounger in southern California, in the middle of a necessarily childless reading tour, just for the thirty minutes it's going to take me to get to the end of the novel. I would savor every single minute of the rest of a wet English November Sunday with three sons, just so long as I was given half an hour—not even that!—of sunshine and solitude. I hope Baker would be pleased by my determination and absorption, though. I wasn't throwing his book away by submitting it to the twin assaults of
Postman Pat
and
Goals on Sunday
. I was hanging on to it for dear life.