Authors: Nick Hornby

Ten Years in the Tub (129 page)

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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By the time you read this, the 2012 Olympics will be over, and Londoners will have literally nothing to look forward to ever again. Janie Hampton's
The Austerity Olympics
is a straightforward, cheerful, frequently amazing account of the last time my city hosted the games, in 1948, when food was scarcer than it had been during the war, British athletes were obliged to take a day's unpaid holiday to compete in their events, and, with air travel not yet an option, the New Zealand team took five weeks to get here. (The ship's carpenter built for the one Kiwi swimmer a cabinet that was filled with seawater every day, so that she could train; the cabinet was a foot longer than she was.) The first gold medal of the games was awarded to Micheline Ostermeyer of France, a discus-thrower who had picked up a discus for the first time a few weeks before the eventâbut then again, her day job as a concert pianist had probably taken up a lot of her time and attention. It was the last time medals were awarded for artistic endeavorâStravinsky had judged the music category in the 1924 gamesâalthough most of the competitors had to settle for honorable mentions, due to the dismal standard of their entries. The temperature in London on the day of the ten-thousand-meter final was 94 degrees, the hottest recorded since 1911, and seventeen of the thirty-one runners collapsedâhardly surprising when you learn that the prevailing nutritional wisdom of the time advised athletes not to drink in the twenty-four hours before a race. These events took place nine years before I was born, in a city I live in, and yet they seem to have happened in a parallel, and much less knowing, universe.

So both Hampton and Wescott did a magnificent job for me in very trying circumstances, but at this point I feel I should turn my attention, reluctantly, to the books that gave me all this trouble in the first place. Strayed started it, with
Wild
, and I really didn't think she was going to cause me any grief, despite the inspiring, life-changing review by Dwight Garner in the
New York Times
that made me order the book in the first place; when it arrived I noted darkly that (a) it was a book about hiking, and (b) that it seemed to be a “decide-to” bookâas in, Cheryl Strayed decided to walk the eleven-hundred-mile Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Washington State, and then write a book about it. There are a lot of “decide-to” books: people decide to have sex three
times a day for a decade, or decide to marry the first person they see in the morning, or decide to eat an entire car, and the reason that they decided to do these things can never be articulated in their narrative: it's because they could get an advance from a publisher. Good luck to them and all, but I've never really wanted to read about the car-eating that they're being paid to do.

If this was ever Strayed's intention, she was playing a very long game. She walked the PCT back in the mid-'90s, and, as this extraordinary and unforgettable book makes clear, it was because she had no real choice: she'd been destroyed by the premature death of her beloved mother, but also by a difficult childhood, and by being married too young to a man she loved but didn't know how to be with, and by her subsequent drug abuse and promiscuity. The opening section of
Wild
is harrowing, but it convinces you of its authenticity and its necessity. And in those early pages, you also come to understand that Strayed was no hikerâthat she was as directionless and damaged and unfit as just about anyone who reads this magazine regularly. Her incompetence for the task at hand is one of the themes of this book, in fact, and it gave me a way in. I'm pretty sure I'll never walk my own height on the PCT, and I'm just as sure I wouldn't be able to. But then, that was pretty much Strayed's position before she set off. And as a consequence, a lot of this book is funny, in a way that you wouldn't necessarily expect if you had mis-shelved it in the po-faced “women's inspirational nonfiction” section of your mental bookstore. Strayed's inexperience results in such spectacular overpacking that she literally cannot lift her own backpack; after she has invented a complicated calisthenic system whereby she winches herself onto her feet, she persists with it anyway. Among her vital supplies is a hopeful pack of twelve condoms, which she throws away when a stern old hand at a rest-stop forces her to lighten her load. (While his back is turned, she slips one of the twelve into her back pocket.) I loved
Wild
for its humor, but I loved it for a lot of other reasons, too. I loved the way Strayed conveys the glorious feeling of a shower hitting your body when your body is filthy and sore, for example, and what a drink feels like when you've been wondering where the next one is coming from, and (condom spoiler alert, almost) what sex feels like when you've been lonely.
Wild
is angry, brave, sad, self-knowing, redemptive, raw, compelling, and brilliantly written, and I think
it's destined to be loved by a lot of people, men and women, for a very long time.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
contains pretty much exactly the same tonal palette, and maybe one of the reasons it took me so long to find a book to replace it was that I had no need to read for a while, just as I'm not hungry straight after a big meal. Fountain's novel is about Iraq, really, but despite being populated mostly by men, it's not one of those guys' novels that strains to be definitive about the way we live nowâthis one's got soul, and overwhelming empathy.

In his book about hip-hop,
Where You're At
, Patrick Neate quotes an observation that black kids in the Bronx “have more cultural capital than anybody on earth, and less actual power than anybody on earth too,” and though the observer maybe needs to get out of North America more, you can see what he means. In
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
, the same point could be made about Lynn and his colleagues in Bravo Company, who have been flown back to the U.S. for a triumphant series of meet-and-greets after their part in a firefight. Half of the entire country, it seemsâthe red halfâhas something invested in Bravo's heroism; meanwhile, teenage Billy has nothing, and is a matter of hours away from returning to the front line. There are many judicious decisions that Fountain has made, but one of the best is to write an Iraq novel set entirely in Texas: it's an act of creative genius that enables him to examine both the bewildering set of projections Billy's country shines on him, and his haplessness, his doubt and despair.

This will be sold to you as the
Catch-22
of the Iraq War, and certainly Fountain has the satirical chops not to be flattened by the comparison. His approximation of the language of Texan patriotism post-9/11â
wore on terRr, double y'im dees, dih-mock-cruh-see
, the words and phrases that Billy hears over and over again until they no longer make any sense to himâis funny and pitch-perfect. And there's a very good running gag about Hollywood interest in Bravo, with a scarily credible producer who's sharp, cynical, and defeated, rather than just loud and dumb. (That's the thing about Hollywood that literature rarely gets right. These guys aren't stupid. It's not as simple as that.) But the satire isn't the whole novel, not even half. Billy Lynn broke my heart, and I think about him still.

So. There you go. And as I have said before in these pages, I don't know you, and I can't really tell what books you'll connect with and what you won't, and if what you take from this column is that you really, really want to read a book about the 1948 Olympics, then I'd be delighted, and I'd feel that my time here hasn't been entirely wasted. But I'd probably also end up thinking that you were a little obtuse, too.