Ten Years in the Tub (128 page)

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail—
Cheryl Strayed

     
  
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk—
Ben Fountain

     
  
The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story—
Glenway Wescott

     
  
The Austerity Olympics: When the Games Came to London in 1948—
Janie Hampton

H
ere's the thing: Cheryl Strayed's
Wild
is one of the best books I've read in the last five or ten years, up there with David Kynaston's
Austerity Britain
, and Mark Harris's
Scenes from a Revolution
, and Jess Walter's
The Financial Lives of the Poets
, and Kevin Wilson's
The Family Fang
—or rather
in
there, because whereas the former preposition indicates some kind of indefensibly objective ranking system, the latter more accurately reflects what happens to our favorite books, I think: we separate them from the other books we've read—the ones we liked but didn't love, or admired but didn't connect with, or hated and didn't finish—and we place them on a special and infinitely extendable shelf somewhere within our souls. So
Wild
is now in this personal library, which consists of probably three or four hundred books, a number I intend to add to as often as I can for the rest of my life; it's “mine,” in a way
that
Sullivan's Travels
is mine, and the first Ramones album is mine. In other words, it's not mine at all, but such is my affinity with it that I've somehow ended up embarking on long and expensive legal battles in an attempt to get myself a co-credit. (Preston Sturges, by the way, is not an easy man to deal with, if you're thinking about going down that road yourself with
The Lady Eve
or
The Palm Beach Story
.) Anyway, we're lucky if we find one of these a year; my admiration for
Wild
means that this was a very good reading month, whatever else happened.

I put down Strayed's book and picked up
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
, and suddenly a very good reading month turned into a very difficult one. The problem was this:
I loved Fountain's novel as much as I had loved
Wild. So suddenly, all was chaos. Is it possible to read two modern classics back-to-back, without anyone having mentioned that they're modern classics? Did this mean that my standards were slipping? Did it mean that times are so tough in publishing that
only
modern classics are being published? Had I gone mad? And, more pertinently, what was I going to read next?

This last question became particularly troubling, not only because I was unlikely to be lucky a third time, and would thus end up feeling itchy and dissatisfied by anything that attempted to occupy the time happily devoted to
Wild
and
Billy Lynn
, but because I had this column to write. Younger visitors to this page may not recall the
Believer
's legendary and entirely laudable no-snark rule: the Polysyllabic Spree, the seventy-eight stunningly attractive but dismayingly solemn editors of this magazine, are constantly on the lookout for slighting references to writers and/or works of literature, however carefully encrypted. (Seven of the Spree are employed
full-time
on this task.) And this was why I was so upset by the brilliance of Fountain's novel—how could I avoid incurring their wrath now? Any praise for the next books I read was likely to be faint by comparison, and to the collective mind of the Spree, showering a book with faint praise is like peeing on it. (And just in case this simile leaves any room for confusion in the minds of our more “artistic” subscribers: they're against peeing on books. I'm pretty sure they are, anyway. TBC.) My subsequent fear and indecision resulted in a lot of books being purchased and a lot of books being abandoned after a couple of pages. And we also have a first in
one of the lists that introduce “Stuff I've Been Reading”—an anonymous Book Bought.

Here's how that works. I think carefully about the next novel I'm going to read. One in particular comes highly recommended, by two different friends whose taste I trust. I buy it, and resolve to read it next, and then I walk into a party and a third friend with impeccable taste asks me whether I've read
XX
by YY, the novel in question. I tell her I haven't, and am about to launch into an explanation of its sudden importance in my life, and
she makes a face
. It was a “Meh” face rather than a “Bleeeugh” face, but even so… There was no way I could persist with
XX
after that. I'd be reading it in the wrong spirit, and in any case I needed a cast-iron, superstrength guarantee of brilliance, and I hadn't got it. I still haven't read a word of
XX
. In desperation, I turned to
Persuasion
, but it didn't have the tremendous kinetic energy of the Fountain novel, and its careful moderation wasn't likely to give me the bare-knuckle punch of Strayed's memoir.

In the end, Glenway Wescott and Janie Hampton dug me out of a hole. Wescott's slim novella was published in 1940, and in any case has already had classic status conferred upon it, by both the
New York Review of Books
and Michael Cunningham, who in his introduction calls it “a work of brilliance.” Plus, Wescott died in 1987, and the Spree don't seem to care much what I say about dead authors—I remember being underwhelmed by Voltaire without receiving so much as an admonitory email. Nobody around here cares what I think of
The Pilgrim Hawk
, which is why I bought it in the first place. It's really good, though, odd and shape-shifting and compelling, despite having to labor under that deathly plain title. The narrative is simple: the narrator, Alwyn Tower, is staying with a rich expatriate friend in a French village; one afternoon they are visited by an Irish couple, the Cullens, and Mrs. Cullen's hawk, Lucy, whose eating habits and occasional bates tend to dominate the social occasion. The relationships between the characters are subtle and labyrinthine, however, and Tower is an acute observer, not only of his companions but of himself: one of the joys of
The Pilgrim Hawk
is the way that the bird's moods and appetites provide an opportunity for a dense and surprisingly melancholy internality.
The Pilgrim Hawk
is subtitled
A Love Story
, but there's a lot more about love's
impossibility than its joys.