Ten Years in the Tub (131 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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There aren't that many people I'd listen to on the subject of God, despite the increasingly pressing need to find out whether He is real, but Francis Spufford is one of the cleverest and most thoughtful nonfiction writers in England, and when he talks, I listen, no matter what the subject. And his subjects have become increasingly perplexing as his career has progressed: before
Unapologetic
, he has written books about ice, childhood reading, boffins, and Soviet five-year plans, so you could hardly claim that he is an evangelical monomaniac. (You couldn't claim that he writes only for the fame and the money, either.)

Unapologetic
is exactly what those who've followed Spufford's career might have suspected it would be: an incredibly smart, challenging, and beautiful book, humming with ideas and arguments. What I wasn't prepared for was its tough-mindedness, its tendency to bleakness: this isn't a woolly book offering the promise of an afterlife so long as you say your prayers and stop watching online porn. As Spufford points out, Christianity is a religion of orthodoxy, “right thinking or teaching,” rather than orthopraxy, like Islam and Judaism, “right doing.” In Spufford's version of Christianity, an afterlife isn't even the point, particularly. In one of scores of asides that wiped the patronizing smile off this particular nonbeliever's face, he refers to the Christians who are banking everything on eternal bliss as the “conjectural idiots of atheist fantasy.” It's all about forgiveness in the here and now, given what he calls “the human propensity to fuck things up,” or, as he refers to sin throughout, HPtFtU. (“I don't need to point out that I am not any kind of spokesman for the Church of England, do I?” he says in his notes at the end of the book.) And note the difference between
potential
and
propensity:
he's sayingâand he's saying that Christianity is sayingâthat we all fuck up, all the time; we can't avoid it. HPtFtU “isn't a
list of prohibited actions you can avoid. Fucking things up is too sensitive to our intentions to be defined that way. The very same action may be a secret kindness, an indifferent bit of trivia, or a royally destructive contribution to the ruination of something delicate and precious, all depending on what we mean by it. (There are remarks that end marriages, and very often what makes them so decisively poisonous is that they're chosen to seem perfectly innocent and ordinary when uttered in public, no big deal, deniable, yet touch deliberately on a pain which only intimacy could know.)”

If I know anything about you, dear reader, then I suspect that your interest will be piqued by that elegant, shrewd, novelistic parenthesis, and there are plenty of purely literary reasons to read
Unapologetic
. The chapter entitled Yeshua is a brilliant, fresh, conversational retelling of the Gospels, which draws attention not only to the power of the story of Christ but to its essential oddness, too, its complications and its refusal to work at the level of myth. But the best reason to read the book is that it enables thought, specifically thought about who we are and what we're doing here and how we intend to negotiate the difficulties and tragedies that are unavoidably a part of being human. And we're all for enabling thought, right? I have not become a Christian as a result of reading this book, but I have a much greater respect for those who are. And I intend to read it again, soon; there was a lot of thought enabledâtoo much, maybe, for a tired man at the end of a hard year.

Cheryl Strayed won't thank me for saying this, I suspect, but there is something Christlike about her alter ego, the advice columnist Sugar, whose columns written for the
Rumpus
have been collected into a book entitled
Tiny Beautiful Things
. I don't want to accuse her of being messianic, although I suppose I must be doing precisely that, etymologically speaking: I'm sure Francis Spufford would have something interesting to say about how atheists have managed to spin a whole sneery complex out of the story of Jesus. I mean only that the people who write to her, all of themâlike all of us, riddled with the HPtFtUâare listened to with tolerance and compassion, and answered with extraordinary wisdom and clarity. Yes, Sugar can be an unlikely Christ, just as Spufford comes across as an unlikely Christian. “The first time Mr. Sugar spanked me we'd been lovers for a week,” one column begins. “The fuck is your
life,” another ends, lovingly but firmly, as a response to the question(s) “Wtf? Wtf? Wtf?” But nevertheless, Sugar is someone whose ability to hear every note of someone's pain and confusion can strike one as almost supernatural on occasion. And, like
Unapologetic, Tiny Beautiful Things
is a book that aids introspection, makes thought about our lives cut a little deeper, stretch us a little further.

There is remarkably little literature that does this satisfactorily, when you think about it. Fiction is supposed to do it, but invented stories so rarely chime with our own, and in any case novelists have so many other jobs to do during the course of a novel that they have very little time or room to spare a thought for our woes. Pyschotherapeutic books have agendas, self-help books are usually cynically conceived and deal with single, usually intractable issuesâ¦ What else is there? Strayed deals with marital dissatisfaction, grief, ambition, self-loathing, sexual disaster, parental cruelty, and just about everything else that can go wrong during the course of our allotted time on this planet, and she simply refuses to accept that any situation is literally hopeless; it's part of her brief to offer hope, even if that hope is a very faint light at the end of a very long tunnel.

Tiny Beautiful Things
hasn't yet been published in the U.K., and in many ways it's a very un-English book. There may be people here who dismiss Sugar's belief in redemption and autonomy as American; we prefer to think that nothing can ever change, so it's best just to shut up and plod on. The second essay in this book, howeverâthough I doubt very much whether the English were on Strayed's mind when she wrote itâis the best, and most careful, dismantling of our philosophy of despair that I have ever read. A woman writes, heartbreakingly, to Sugar about her late-term miscarriage, and her inability to move on from it. Sugar's reply contains a long story about her experience mentoring a group of badly damaged girls at a middle school. Every day these girls talk about their horrendous home lives, and Sugar listens, appalled. She tells them that many of the abuses they are enduring are illegal, intolerable, and she will get something done about them; to her amazement and despair, she finds that the relevant authorities are uninterested and powerless. So now what?

Strayed tells one of the most afflicted girls that “escaping the shit would be
hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother's life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happenâ¦ She had to
reach
. She had to want it more than she'd ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck for every bad thing.” Because, really, what else is there to say, if you have any ambition left for anything or anybody? Sometimes, when reading this book, I was reminded of some of the monologues that Springsteen used to deliver onstage in the late '70s, just before blowing an auditorium up with a “Prove It All Night” or a “Badlands”: there's the same theatricality, the same soul, the same sense that there is a way out, despite all appearances to the contrary, but it will take courage and sometimes just rage to find it. “Write like a motherfucker,” Strayed tells one young literary hopeful at one point, and you'll find yourself wishing that she was talking to you. But then you realize that she is.
Tiny Beautiful Things
will make you want to read like a motherfucker, too, long after you've finished it. And that, I hope, is what I've spent a decade telling you to do, in my own pinched and muted way.